Here's a longish excerpt of a review of Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 {The University of North Carolina Press} Joshua D. Rothman:

"Rothman examines another aspect of slavery and segregation, namely interracial unions and relationships, to arrive at the conclusion that many whites in the South engaged in liaisons with blacks regardless of their social standing or class. The author focuses on Virginia because that region often personified the opinions and stature of the South as a whole....

Rothman's sources-including the requisite court records, divorce filings, newspapers, government records, and narratives that are the bread and butter of the social historian-easily bolster his thesis. The author argues that during the early national and antebellum period, relationships between the races flourished as long as the people involved followed an important caveat. His first example is the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings entanglement. Rothman argues that nearly everyone in Albemarle County, Virginia, where the founding father resided, knew about his relationship with one of his slaves. The white population tacitly accepted this technically illegal union because such relationships were frequent but kept under wraps. In other words, as long as those involved remained quiet about their sexual activities with slaves, no one called them on it. The author claims that the attempt to expose Jefferson's relationship for political gain actually had the reverse effect: white southerners resented having their double standard exposed to the light of day. The other example Rothman cites, the David Isaacs/Nancy West attachment, provides reinforces the author's conclusions about the Jefferson/Hemings acquaintance while also providing a counterpoint. In this case, whites brought charges against the two because they openly flaunted their illicit liaison. Again, as long as people involved in an interracial affair kept the matter close to the vest, little usually came of it....

Repeatedly, the book uncovers evidence that race was not intractable but rather a nebulous conception upon which generations of whites erected increasingly baroque legal, political, and economic policies...

"Notorious in the Neighborhood" excels in providing yet further proof that race is a socially constructed notion owing more to ideology than biology. The author proves that race, at least in Virginia during the period in question, meant different things to different people at different times. The legal codes defining race changed several times, something that could never happen if race was a fixed category. Rothman discovers that efforts to tighten up racial categories, to institute a precursor to the notorious "one-drop" rule of the later Jim Crow era, deeply concerned many lawmakers who believed that meddling with blood quotients could redefine many white people as black. If race never changes, how could someone suddenly become black or white with the flick of a pen? The racial policies of the South assumed idiotic heights as judges, politicians, and other civil authorities navigated through the strange new world created by the increasing mixed blood population. When confronted with the reality of interracial offspring, laws defining racial separation and identification hiccupped. The best example Rothman gives of the ambiguity of the race system sits at the beginning of chapter six where he spells out sixty-one different racial categories recognized in Virginia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries."

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