ed because the husband successfully claimed that his marriage was contracted with a nonwhite woman in violation of Arizona's laws against interracial marriage, the significance of the case was that it supported the view that white (or presumably white, since the race of Kirby was doubtfully established) men could avoid the obligations of alimony and child support for women with whom they had a conjugal liaison if they could, as Kirby did, show that the woman in question was Negro. The effect, explains Pascoe, was to refuse to "recognize the rights of African American women" (165). So much, indeed, was basically written into the laws prohibiting legal marriages between members of what were considered to be different races. However, Kirby was a turning point because it was during the 1920s that the courts first began to involve social-science discourse of race.
In Kirby, the decision turned on the court's view that race was biologically determined, and the tenor of much social-science discourse was that race did not involve culture, customs, etc. Nature, not nurture, was decisive. However, the so-called Monks case involved money claims on her husband's estate by a woman who was held to be biologically Negro based on physical characteristics, despite testimony by "culturalists" who claimed her white-culture affinity while acknowledging her "mixed-blood" background (168-9). This was the period of eugenics advocacy, Pascoe says, in which questions of mixed blood were considered decisive for determining race. The trouble was that the categories could not easily be pinned down.
Enter Perez v. Lippold, which in 1948 declared California's miscegenation laws unconstitutional by reason of the biological indeterminacy of race. However, in 1967, a white man and black woman were convicted of violating Virgina's miscegenation laws, in Loving v. Virginia (1967). Pascoe points out the illogic of advocates, such as the NAACP, in arguing the legalit...