Abstract
This research presents data from in-depth interviews of sixty adults in Southern California who have formed families across the black/white color line. In a societal context where normative family formation remains mono-racial, many adults in multiracial families manage their social performances to mitigate the stigma associated with their unusual family pattern or to challenge social expectations associated with race, class, and gender. Their stories reveal how they deploy strategic exaggerations of gender and stereotypes of social class in their day to day lives. These deployments operate to manage social interactions when confronting commonsense expectations about what it means to be a man or woman who trespasses the color line in family formation.
Highlights
As an institution, remains a bastion of racial segregation for whites and blacks in this century in the United States (Fu, 2001; Qian, 1997; Fields & Casper, 2001)
The interview excerpts illustrate that ideas of race, gender and social class are inextricably entangled with understandings of both the color line and racial ideologies
Especially true in the social construction of white femininity, with its emphasis on purity and racial purity that forms the ideological linchpin for white supremacy, ideations of femininity/masculinity and respectability/class operate as powerful social constraints on many of the men and women who have formed families across the color line
Summary
As an institution, remains a bastion of racial segregation for whites and blacks in this century in the United States (Fu, 2001; Qian, 1997; Fields & Casper, 2001). White women report a sense of loss of their femininity and their whiteness and Black men report a loss of their racial authenticity by marriages across the color line (Dalmage, 2000; Reddy, 1994; Rosenblatt et al, 1995). This research examines those experiences to shed light on how these gender challenges operate as social control mechanisms to maintain racial boundaries
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