Interracial marriage bans protected white male sexual monopoly, not racial purity per se

Evidence

Virginia’s racialized legal regime also included a 1691 criminal law prohibiting Negro, mulatto, and Indian men from marrying or “accompanying” a white woman. By requiring that white women gave birth only to white children, the law preserved white men’s exclusive sexual access to white women, as well as white racial purity. Mulatto children born to white women were not subject to the 1662 statute, which applied only to enslaved Black women, and therefore were born free—posing a threat to white male dominance. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 212

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth exploring: the asymmetry — children follow the mother’s status, so white mothers’ mixed children were free, which is why the colony criminalized white women’s interracial relationships specifically.
• XREF: connects to: Legal prohibitions on disclosure punish sexuality without appearing to ban it outright. — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 1244