Race Sex and Hollywood: The Illicit Representation of the Black Man White Woman Pair
From 1927-1956 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) declared: “Miscegenation (sex relationship between the white and black races) is forbidden.”1 Although the Production Code Administration (PCA) used the miscegenation clause to censor scripts that portrayed a variety of interracial relationships beyond black and white, my archival research has revealed that the only “sex relationship” consistently enforced under the PCA was black men and white women. The PCA repeatedly banned these films and permitted scripts that featured other race-andgender combinations. My dissertation project provides the untold story of the rise and fall of Hollywood’s historical prohibitions against miscegenation and analyzes the impact of this censorship on the plot points and illicit character traits that continue to define black man-white woman relationships in American cinema.