Virginia punished interracial sex asymmetrically by race from 1630 onward

Evidence

The first officially recorded condemnation of interracial sex was the public whipping of Hugh Davis, a white man, ordered by the Virginia General Assembly in 1630 for “abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a Negress.” A decade later, when another white man, Robert Sweet, impregnated a Black woman, the Black woman was flogged, while Sweet was ordered to do penance in church. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 206

Categorization

• SHARE: The specific asymmetry — Black woman flogged while her white partner only did church penance — is the sort of precise detail worth sending to someone interested in early American legal history.