Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds

CHAPTER 1 Loving across the Border: Through the Lens of Black-White Couples

Loving Across the Border 19 19 CHAPTER 1 Loving across the Border THROUGH THE LENS OF BLACK-WHITE COUPLES , A black person and a white person coming together has been given many names—miscegenation, amalgamation, race mixing, and jungle fever—conjuring up multiple images of sex, race, and taboo. Black-white relationships and marriages have long been viewed as a sign of improving race relations and assimilation, yet these unions have also been met with opposition from both white and black communities. Overall , there is an inherent assumption that interracial couples are somehow different from same-race couples. Within the United States, the responses to black-white couplings have ranged from disgust to curiosity to endorsement, with the couples being portrayed as many things—among them, deviant, unnatural , pathological, exotic, but always sexual. Even the way that couples are labeled or defined as “interracial” tells us something about societal expectations . We name what is different. For example, a male couple is more likely to be called a “gay couple” than a gender-mixed couple is to be called a “heterosexual couple.” Encompassed by the history of race relations and existing interracial images, how do black-white couples view themselves, their relationships, and the responses of their families and communities? And how do they interpret these familial and community responses? Black-white couples, like all of us, make meaning out of their experiences in the available interpretive frameworks and often inescapable rules of race relations in this country.1 Individuals have the ability to construct multiple identities and views, yet we still operate 20 Navigating Interracial Borders within social groups and a social structure that provide available “scripts” to follow.2 Though the fifteen couples I interviewed for this study varied in many aspects—education, income, religion, geographical location—there were similarities in the discussions of their experiences.3 Despite these similarities, the couples’ narratives were often divided between those couples who minimized the racial aspects of their identities, their experiences, and others’ responses, and those couples who emphasized race and the role it played in their experiences and the ways others treated them. The different discursive strategies that the couples used mirror the competing discourses of color-blindness and race consciousness that are found in society. Using this framework of competing discursive strategies, I will explore the couples’ experiences and the ways in which they describe them. Black, White, and Interracial The framework of this study is based on the concept of looking at how groups in society construct certain ideas about black and white individuals who come together, in essence creating “interracial couples” since only in a society that invests meaning in race is the term (or practice) even significant.4 I gave couples an opportunity to define who they are and how they see themselves by beginning each interview with questions about identity, being that racial identity is central to the construction of interracial couples (without the use of race as an identity we would not have “interracial” couples). Certain patterns emerged in the individuals’ identification choices and in the way they discussed their experiences. Racial identity is a complex issue within society, and not surprisingly those in interracial relationships often struggle with their racial identity. The ways couples articulated their racial identities differed. They either emphasized or deemphasized their racial identity and continued to do so while discussing their relationships and societal responses. Among the black partners, ten individuals clearly stated that they were black or African American. They emphasized that their racial identity, affiliation , and “blackness” was integral to how they saw themselves and how others viewed them. Lee, a thirty-three-year-old retail salesperson living in Massachusetts with his white partner, Jill, a twenty-eight-year-old office manager, and their three-year-old daughter, India, described his identity in a typical way: LEE: I just call myself black. I’m just a black man. That’s it. And I am a black man before anything else. Before my relationship I was a black man and by myself I still get treated the same way. Loving Across the Border 21 Lee described his racial identity as something that is always there and inescapable . The way others treat him is based on his race, according to his statements. In contrast, the five other black individuals (Victor, David, Frank, Sharon, and Nancy) were more ambivalent, acknowledging that they were black but that they preferred...