Anti-miscegenation laws made child enslavement profitable, incentivizing rape of enslaved women

Evidence

The bedrock of this statutory scheme was a network of laws passed in the colonial era governing sex and race. These laws, which created the racial-classification systems we still live with today, were primarily concerned with policing interracial sex. They maintained a clear line between who was Black and who was white, who was enslaved and who was free, by banning interracial intercourse and enforcing a rule of matrilineal descent: if a mother was Black and enslaved, so was her child. Though these laws were partly aimed at preventing miscegenation, they also incentivized the rape of Black women by their white enslavers, who could profit from their sexual assaults by enslaving any resulting children. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 203

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adrienne Davis’s ‘race-as-property’ scholarship and the legal-incentive analysis of slave breeding; also reinforces the reader’s existing interest in how legal regimes create perverse behavioral incentives.
• DEFINE: Defines the matrilineal descent rule (partus sequitur ventrem) as the legal mechanism that made child enslavement possible.
• DEEPTHINKING: The counterintuitive causal claim — that anti-miscegenation laws functionally licensed rape by making it profitable — is a dense, paradigm-shifting insight about how ostensible moral regulation produced the opposite outcome.