Colonial rape law punished Black men’s unions but rewarded White men’s with enslaved offspring

Evidence

With this law in place, White enslavers could now reap financial reward from relations “upon a negro woman.” But they wanted to prevent the limited number of White women from engaging in similar interracial relations (as their biracial babies would become free). In 1664, Maryland legislators declared it a “disgrace to our Nation” when “English women … intermarry with Negro slaves.” By the end of the century, Maryland and Virginia legislators had enacted severe penalties for White women in relationships with non-White men. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 98

Categorization

• XREF: Carries forward the book’s core inversion — racist policy (who can rape whom without penalty) produces racialized moral ideas, the exact mechanism the reader is tracking.