Miscegenation and the Racial State

Abstract

were specifically designed to enable return ing service men to marry women they met in Japan and Korea. Civil rights organiza tions and their lawyers recognized this shift in the racial thinking, and at times, explicitly sought white and Asian American couples as test cases to challenge miscegenation laws because they knew these kinds of interracial couples would be more acceptable to state and federal courts. Within this broader his torical view, Pascoe's research highlights not only the raced and gendered logics deployed in legal strategy, but ways the color line had shifted before the twenty-first centu ry. Indeed, What Comes Naturally persuasive ly documents the role of the state and other actors in adjudicating the shape-shifting meanings of race, sex, and marriage from Reconstruction to the present—social and political processes that were anything but natural.