Up until only fifty years ago mixed race marriages were banned in much of the South and within the lifetime of many alive to-day blacks were often lynched only for looking at white women. But then how come the first Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker not only became US citizens but accepted by the Southern planter class and married white women? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang_and_Eng_Bunker
Wikipedia has an article on anti-miscegenation laws, the careful reading of which suggests that, wrt the antebellum South, at least, they were written to apply to marriages between whites and blacks. ISTM that, as Asians, the Bunker twins were not targeted by the laws.
Note that their lives predated the passage of the Asian Exclusion Act (1924), which would have prevented naturalization. Plus, they were financially prosperous celebrities.
Nothing to add, other than that I always wondered what Chang did while Eng got bizzay with his wife, and vice-versa.
Between them, they had 21 kids, so they seem to have worked it out somehow.
Race relations in the south were of a binary nature. Certainly southerners knew or even had some contact Chinese, Mexicans, Native Americans, etc., but they built a society predicated on the supremacy of whites over blacks. There wasn’t a big concern about the Chinese or Mexicans (not counting Texas) so you don’t see as many social or legal conventions against them in the south. Of course it does depend on what you mean by “accept.” Legally white and black individuals could marry one another in other states but that doesn’t mean it’ll be socially acceptable. Martin Luther King, Jr. thought about marrying a white woman at one point in his life but decided that just wouldn’t work well with his plans on becoming a preacher in an African American church. I wouldn’t doubt if there were people in the south that didn’t particularly care for the marriage of Chang and Eng. Of course Cheng and Eng were fairly wealthy and I imagine that goes a long way towards gaining acceptance.
Odesio
Todd Browning’s Freaks, featuring the Hilton sisters, touched on this. While one of them was making out with a beau, the other would read a book–but still be aware of every sensation the other was feeling.
“Dan Brown is really really difficult to take seriously,… damn this guys good”.
Really? Cite? I’d never heard this before.
How could this question possibly have a factual answer?
No cite, but in Japanese-American culture there’s a story about a Japanese family that somehow made it to the old South. The daughters married successful white men and became pillars of their local society. Of course, that wouldn’t have happened if they were black.
Accepted is probably a relative term. In his book on Charlie Chan, really more of a history of attitudes toward the Chinese in American culture, Yunte Huang has this side note.
The quote is footnoted to Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture.
Huang also leans heavily on the work of Ronald Takaki, an expert on immigration, especially Asian immigration, to America. I have his A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, which is excellent but so depressing in its hundreds of pages of injustices that it’s hard to read.
Huang points out that the number of Chinese in America was extremely low, mostly less than a tenth of a percent in the 19th century, and the majority of these were in California. While they were discriminated against, they were also so few in number and so invisible to almost everyone, that laws simply weren’t even bothered with outside of California. Blacks were everywhere, they were in peoples’ houses, and they competed directly for jobs. They were a visible “threat.” They were also a moral threat because their every moment as slaves reminded everyone of the moral horror of slavery, no matter how much it was defended. They had to be thought of as barely more than animals. The Chinese didn’t need to be thought of much at all. They also had a “real” kingdom behind them which the Americans did business with and didn’t want to offend more than necessary. Blacks didn’t.
We find it almost inconceivable today that the Irish were considered a lesser, different race of humans. The attitudes in the 19th century about race and the other were similar to ours in some ways and wildly different in others. It may seem odd to us that the Chinese and Africans were discriminated against in different ways, but it made perfect sense to them given their everyday realities.
Didn’t you read the thread? It’s been answered. The factual answer is that anti-miscegenation laws and taboos were targeted at black people, so the men in question were not affected.
The question, as I understood it, was a request for info on how the Siamese twins were able to be accepted by the Southern landed gentry. The OP seemed to be asking how the Siamese Twins managed to overcome the general prejudice against marriage between whites and “other races.” I don’t believe there is a single answer to this question, other than to say “it was not an illegal marriage” since the miscegenation laws dealt with marriage between blacks and whites. How they overcame, if they did, the general prejudice concerning non-whites in that time and place is unanswerable in my opinion. My question had nothing to do with the illegality of their marriage but more with the social customs in that location. To my mind, the local people might have acknowledged that they had the right to marry but probably many of them thought it wasn’t right, even if they had the right. I should have taken the time to expand my question a bit.
I’ve wondered more about how they did it, considering how they were attached.
How hard was it to get ahold of the Kama Sutra back then? Their wives were probably fairly limber.