In California, a long and pivotal history of...

PAGE 1 Gold Rush prompted expansions of anti-miscegenation laws that affected other racialized groups.

marriage in the US. Understanding these historical dynamics provides crucial context behind today’s data on interracial marriage in the state.

Immigration and interracial marriage Anti-miscegenation laws have existed in California since statehood in 1850. Though the state’s Civil Code initially only restricted whites from marrying “negroes or mulattoes,” the wave of Chinese immigration during the

Following German race theorist Johann Frederich Blumenbach’s widely accepted racial classification scheme, Chinese immigrants were classified as “Mongolians.” They were explicitly treated as a threat which demanded policy intervention. Delegates to California’s 1878 Constitutional Convention, for instance, pushed for restrictions on Chinese people’s rights over fears that they would “overrun us” or “Mongolize this land.”

Since most Chinese immigrants were men, interracial marriage was viewed as especially threatening to the white population. During the Convention, the chair of the Committee on Chinese explicitly contrasted the “Chinaman” with the “prudent, intelligent, sympathetic white man” who would “not marry unless he can see a reasonable chance of maintaining wife as well as  PAGE 5