The essays in your book suggest that fear of miscegenation was the driving force behind all racial classifications and, eventually, segregation. It's really interesting how much effort had to be undertaken by lawmakers in so many states in order to prohibit something that clearly was going on. A whole apparatus of legislation arose to prohibit it, and in a way that runs so much against the grain of the democratic ethos. The free choice of the person you want to marry seems to be a pretty basic human right. President Truman famously asked that of a reporter.
Women are white women.
Which is something the last three decades of scholarship about black women has somewhat corrected and challenged. Even in South Africa, the legal prohibition on interracial marriage was short-lived. Only after World War II was interracial marriage prohibited in South Africa, and that lasted 40 years. Whereas prohibition of interracial marriage in the United States is pretty much the whole history of the country until 1967. That's a very dramatic difference.