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This essay surveys the history of racial mixing and its (counter) discourses in modern America. The creation of American modernity was a highly racialized project. Since the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, white mainstream society’s efforts to build and maintain a “modern” America determined by race were diverse, tenacious, and pernicious. The legal, extralegal and discursive devices that white supremacists invoked in order to police racial boundaries are easily enumerated: lynching, the miscegenation taboo, anti-miscegenation laws, anti-immigration laws, the one-drop rule, and so on. Exploring the combined sexualization and racialization of African American people in American modern history, this essay first considers the “miscegenation taboo” as a major ideological vehicle in establishing and enhancing the white male privilege. I also examine its counter discourse advanced by W. E. B. Du Bois and address his masculinist bias. No writer has explored the complicity of racism and American modernity as clearly as Du Bois. Focusing on the short story, “Of the Coming of John,” Du Bois’s first “martyr tale,” this essay interrogates his desire for male privilege embedded in the story’s anti-racist politics. In doing so, my essay concludes that both “miscegenation taboo” and its counter discourse enact traditional gender hierarchy.