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• • Article
  • Health
  • Science Health
  • By Keith E. Sealing
  • Volume 5, Issue 2
  • January, 2000

  Blood Will Tell: Scientific Racism and the Legal Prohibitions Against Miscegenation

  This article first examines the miscegenation paradigm in terms of a seven-point conceptual framework that not merely allowed but practically demanded anti-miscegenation laws, then looks at the legal arguments state courts used to justify the constitutionality of such laws through 1967. Next, it analyzes the Biblical argument, which in its own right justified miscegenation, but also had a major influence on the development of the three major strands of scientific racism: monogenism, polygenism and Darwinian theory. It then probes the concept upon which the entire edifice is constructed-race--and discusses the continuing vitality of this construct. Next, this article turns to the three major strands of scientific racism and briefly develops more modem theories that continued the racist tradition well into the Twentieth Century. The article then looks at the effects of scientific racism on the thoughts and actions of the founding fathers and the Reconstruction-era Congress before turning to the long line of state cases upholding miscegenation statutes, in part by relying on scientific racism. Finally, it discusses the handful of cases that question the constitutionality of antimiscegenation statutes, including Perez v. Lippold and Loving v. Virginia.