Boundaries of Love

Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race

Chinyere K. Osuji

• Editore: NYU Press
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479857289
• Argomento: Social Sciences
• Categoria: Marriage & Family Sociology

How interracial couples in Brazil and the US navigate racial boundaries How do people understand and navigate being married to a person of a different race? Based on individual interviews with forty-seven black-white couples in two large, multicultural cities—Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro— Boundaries of Love explores how partners in these relationships ultimately reproduce, negotiate, and challenge the “us” versus “them” mentality of ethno-racial boundaries. By centering marriage, Chinyere Osuji reveals the family as a primary site for understanding the social construction of race. She challenges the naive but widespread belief that interracial couples and their children provide an antidote to racism in the twenty-first century, instead highlighting the complexities and contradictions of these relationships. Featuring black husbands with white wives as well as black wives with white husbands, Boundaries of Love sheds light on the role of gender in navigating life married to a person of a different color. Osuji compares black-white couples in Brazil and the United States, the two most populous post–slavery societies in the Western hemisphere. These settings, she argues, reveal the impact of contemporary race mixture on racial hierarchies and racial ideologies, both old and new.

1

Preferences and the Romantic Career

Charlotte is a black woman who lives with her husband, Vincent, in a black working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles. During her individual interview, she shared how her husband was not the first white man whom she had ever dated. She recalled her first relationship, when she studied at an Ivy League college on the East Coast. Vladimir was from Russia and had a cute accent. Although he did not understand American cultural references or her need for connection with other black people, they got along well, writing bad poetry together and sharing their mutual homesickness.

However, Charlotte’s father was angry about her relationship with Vladimir. She laughed about it as she said, “It was like something coming out of a movie, like an after-school special. ‘Blacks should stay with blacks, and whites should stay with whites.’” Charlotte offered his being born and raised in the South as the main reason for his animosity toward her boyfriend. Her father’s reaction was similar to previous research showing that black men found black men–white women couples more palatable than the reverse.1 While Charlotte’s father took no issue with black men being involved with white women, he was from Alabama, where he thought it was common for white men to see black women solely as sexual objects—a common occurrence in Southern history.

Charlotte learned many things from her relationship with Vladimir, including that she liked men who were artistic, did not have big tempers, and were informed about the world. In addition, she said, “Dating white men wouldn’t give me the heebie-jeebies, like you weren’t going to drop dead.” Charlotte’s recognition that there were no serious casualties from her dating a white man led her to date other white men, including her now-husband, Vincent. Charlotte’s father passed away before she got married to her husband, but her friends and family were happy that she had met someone in Los Angeles, so far from home, to keep her from being lonely. For Charlotte, her first experience crossing racial boundaries informed her later experiences with dating and eventually led to her marriage to a white man.

Similar to breaking other social norms, crossing racial lines in marriage does not usually occur in one fell swoop. Prior interracial dating often leads to interracial marriage.2 In addition, there are a number of predictors for interracial dating, including living in multiracial neighborhoods, attending schools with a large variety of racial and ethnic communities,3 and being a member of a small population within a school or geographic area.4

People who intermarry can undergo a process of understanding their romantic desires for people who do not share their phenotype, cultural background, or experiences of racialization. Deviance scholars have examined the process of how people conceptualize breaking social norms. For example, Howard Becker wrote a classic account of the process by which a person becomes a marijuana user.5 Before becoming marijuana users, people have to learn how to smoke a joint, learn how to understand the feelings of the effect of the marijuana on their bodies, and decide whether it is worth their while to do so again in the future. Becker’s work shows that there are processes by which people not only learn how to break social norms but also come to understand their nonconformity. As seen in Charlotte’s case earlier, breaking the social norm of intraracial dating was a process that included learning that although dating a white man was taboo (as seen in her father’s reaction), it was certainly still possible.

People draw on prior romantic and dating experiences to understand their preferences for romantic partnership and marriage. In an “identity career,” a person has critical moments in their life that lead to transformations in their self, the way they understand their social world, and their behavior.6 Applying this perspective to dating and family formation, I call this process the romantic career. This includes how people come to understand their individual personality traits, physical characteristics, and ethnoracial preferences. In the romantic careers of people who interracially marry, interracial dating is often a precursor, and many spouses have had “practice” negotiating ethnic and racial boundaries in romantic relationships. This chapter goes beyond previous studies of interracial couples that describe the ethnoracial preferences for dating and marriage by examining the ways that respondents arrive at using these distinctions, if they do at all.

In this chapter, I examine the romantic careers of black-white couples in the two research sites. I discuss the narratives and accounts that respondents use to make sense of the trajectory toward marrying a person of a different color. I draw on responses to questions about their first and last serious relationships, dating experiences, and “hookups.”

What Is a Relationship? Intersections of Gender and Race

When interviewing spouses about their prior serious relationships, I asked, “Tell me about your first/last serious relationship: Who was this person? How did you meet?” A gendered pattern emerged in which many of the men whom I interviewed in both sites first wanted me to define a “serious relationship.” Given the types of questions men asked afterwards, it seemed that they were often thinking about their prior “sexual experiences” or crushes that they had in the past. None of the women that I interviewed asked me to clarify this term. My working definition during those interviews was that a relationship involved a reciprocation of emotional or romantic attachment with another person. After clarifying the question, male respondents proceeded to discuss their prior girlfriends and wives, with many having their first romantic relationships in high school. It was not uncommon for male respondents with prior dating experience to tell me that their first serious relationship was their current one with their wives. Strikingly, several black husbands, but not white husbands, revealed that they had been involved as teenagers with much older women, often women who were not black. While it was a badge of honor for many of them, the racial differences among these husbands suggested a hypersexualization of black male youth by older women.

Overall, I found that Carioca spouses were overt about placing boundaries front and center in their desires for an ethnoracial other for romantic partnership. In Los Angeles, there was more silence surrounding ethnoracial preferences across the boundary. However, in both sites, whites enjoyed a “privilege of preference” that their black partners did not.

Ethnoracial Preferences in Rio de Janeiro

Of Blondes and Black Men

While looking for couples to interview in Rio de Janeiro, the phrase that I heard over and over was: Toda loirinha gosta de um negão (Every [little] white woman loves a [big] black man). In Portuguese, the term loira literally means blonde but is often a generic term for white people, especially those with light-colored hair. By US standards, a person with light skin who is a natural blonde, is a redhead, or even has light-brown hair would be collapsed into a loira or loiro category, although it is most often used in the feminine form directed at women. Loirinha is a diminutive of loira and can be a more affectionate term for loira, denote smallness, or involve both connotations.

The term negão can refer to the supposed large penis size of black men. (This stereotype is not specific to Cariocas. On a trip to Salvador, the third largest city in Brazil, a white taxi driver told me about his mulata wife. He then explained, “Many people think that negros are like this.” He took both of his hands off of the steering wheel and placed his palms parallel to one another, about a foot apart.) This stereotype is similar to how black men are often reduced to their body parts, including penis size, in the United States.7 In the United States, white women who date blacks8 and Latinxs9 can suffer the stigma of being labeled a slut. However, in Colombia, romantic partnering with black men was a sign of sexual liberation for white women.10 It was unclear to me whether the white women who had preferences for black men suffered the same stigma of being labeled as sluts. While white wives in Rio de Janeiro were often proud of their desire for black men, it was never clear whether it was due to sexual liberation, appreciation for blackness, some combination of the two, or another factor altogether.

The racialized nature of these white wives’ desire was reminiscent of white sex tourists, both male and female, who pursue ethnoracial preferences for experiences abroad with “exotic” nonwhites.11 However, unlike white female sex tourists, these white wives did not commodify these preferences or understand their relationships with negão as a form of leisure, nor did they discuss being in systems of exchange with their black partners, past or present. White wives saw their relationships with black men as integral parts of their lives and as sources for potential long-term companionship, unlike white sex tourists. As will be seen in chapter 4, these relationships were a part of their racial project of pushing against their own white identity.

Several white wives that I interviewed admitted that many people, including other blacks, joked with them about their love for black men. Although this specific saying was not uttered by the white wives whom I interviewed, the sentiment behind the words was alive and well among them. For example, Brígida is a white woman married to Caetano, a black man. They are both in their sixties, and of their three children, two of them, a son and a daughter, are blacks married to whites. When I asked Brígida if there were a type of man that she liked the most, she said, “I have always liked the brown color [da cor morena]! My first hookup back when I was in school . . . he was a ticketer. He was brown [moreninho], very dark [escurinho]. [laughs] And then I ended up marrying a black man too.”

Brígida saw her first experience with a black man as coloring her romantic career. In her interview, Brígida also spontaneously mentioned how white women understand dating and having relationships with black men.

BRÍGIDA: [White women] even boast about it, about whites being with blacks [morenos]. They boast about it.

ME: Really? Why?

BRÍGIDA: I don’t know why! It’s something that attracts, you know? It’s an innate attraction, really, that we do not understand. Every time you see a white woman [loira], you ask her which color she likes the most, and it is the dark color [cor escura] of the really black man [preto mesmo]! [laughs]

Brígida associates blackness with desirability that draws in white women in general. This was similar of other white wives in Rio de Janeiro who often said that they were unable to resist the magnetism and sensuality of black men, repeating age-old stereotypes of black hypersexuality and their irresistibility to other Brazilians, particularly whites.12 In their understanding, black maleness had essential characteristics that were magnetic for white women. This was not the case for any of the Los Angeles white wives whom I interviewed. None of them revealed uncontrollable desires for black men. In fact, most of the white Angelino wives had only dated white men before they married their black husbands.

This was not the case for Ana María, a white woman who lives with her husband, César, a black activist, in a working-class shantytown near the center of Rio de Janeiro. Ana María grew up poor in a large city in the predominantly white south of Brazil. The first man that Ana María had a serious relationship with was Gonçalo, a taxi driver whom she described as being very dark, almost black (muito moreno, quase negro). Ana María overlooked Gonçalo’s sexual overtures, which she found too eager; his unappealing manner of speaking; and his laughing too much—as well as the fact that he was married. He increasingly treated her with more respect, divorced his wife, and moved in with her and her child from a white man. Eight years later, they married formally, but their relationship ended when he became involved with another woman and started to abuse drugs.

After Gonçalo, Ana María dated several black men, which she described as only flings (flertes). Another casual encounter, with a white man, led to the conception of a son. Before the birth of her second child, she began to date another man. She said that this man was brown but, like Gonçalo, “closer to black.” Ana María described her romantic career as one in which her preference for black men was not necessarily apparent in the colors of her partners:

“[There was] always that attraction, you know, for the black man: knowing about his life, about his culture. I also wanted to become involved with black men because of this. . . . I was raised like this: ‘The black man is different; he has different ways of acting, of religion, of everything.’ Despite having lived with it all and already knowing this, I still wanted to know more.”

Ana María met César, her current husband, at a dance. She recalled, “Suddenly, I saw everything that I wanted in a man, in a black man, you know?” They began dating and moved together to Rio de Janeiro. Although they were not legally married, when I spoke with them, they had been living together for ten years.

Many white Carioca wives that I interviewed were like Brígida and Ana María, who experienced critical junctures that led to racial and color preferences in their romantic careers. Although scholars have uncovered racial preferences among Asian-white couples13 and same-sex couples14 in the United States, these white Brazilian wives were different in key ways: the women experienced affiliative ethnicities15 in which they felt close to and sought out relationships and cultural practices of Afro-Brazilian men. Many of them referred to themselves as having a black soul (alma de preto), in addition to referring to how much they adored negão. For these white women, dating and marrying black men was a form of self-actualization in which they became more of who they really were. Like Ana María, these white women placed “difference” at the center and drew on essential characteristics to understand a preference for black men throughout their romantic careers. They reproduced ethnoracial boundaries by seeing these men as racially distinct and pursuing them because of those distinctions. At the risk of fetishizing blackness, these women inverted norms of black inferiority in their pursuit of blackness. This was not a pattern among any of the black-white couples whom I interviewed in Los Angeles.

Accepting the Chase

Sérgio is a black postal worker who lives in a racially mixed, working-class suburb of Rio de Janeiro with his white wife, Hilda. When I asked him about his experi...