ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that laws have restricted the private, intimate choices of whom to marry across racial lines, they have outlawed certain types of sexual activity among consenting adults, and laws have authorized the sterilization of poor women of color without their knowledge and consent and jailed pregnant women for drug abuse. It shows a relationship between power inequities and bodily self-determination. By the late 1600s, colonial America had enacted the first slave codes and anti-amalgamation statutes regulating interracial sexual activity and marriage between whites, African slaves and former slaves. In 1863, the term amalgamation was replaced by miscegenation—an invented term used in a pamphlet to describe the blending of the races that was distributed as a political hoax to defeat Republicans in an upcoming election by portraying them as proponents of racial mixing. Pace did not address whether statutes that prohibited racial intermarriage violated the Constitution.
