y of the marriage. First, the NAACP argued, the biological explanation of race was "abandoned by modern biological and social sciences" (175). Then, the NAACP argued, race referred only to biogenetic attributes, not to cultural ones. The fact of the contradiction may have influenced the Virginia judiciary in striking down Virginia's miscegenation laws, but the court relied on the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
By no means did this settle racial discourse. The effect of striking down miscegenation laws, in Pascoe's view, was that white supremacists reformulated their "racialism" as an assertion that if they did not view race as biologically determined, then they were not racists. But that did not prevent them from advancing arguments about the cultural inferiority of nonwhites. The one constant in all of this is that race as a category of legal and social status has always been culturally and socially constructed, which is to say that race is an artificial designation. It remains only for various generations to acknowledge the extent of such
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