Is Love Color-blind? Racial Blind Spots and Latinas’ Romantic Relationships

Abstract

The racial stratification literature is rife with examples of how color-blindness has become a dominant ideology among Whites to deny the continuing significance of race at work, school, and in everyday life. Less understood are the racial ideologies deployed by people of color. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews, we examine how college-educated Latinas acknowledge or deny the significance of race and racial hierarchies in decisions about whom to date. We find Latinas who stated an openness to dating men of all racial/ethnic backgrounds both acknowledged racism and its impact on their own lives and also held clear racial preferences. Additionally, participants used negative racial tropes about Black and Asian men to exclude them as romantic partners while also self-racializing to explain White men’s seeming reluctance to date them. To explain our findings, we apply the concept racial blind spots to show how participants simultaneously dismissed and drew upon color-blind ideology to justify patterns of racial exclusion. As we argue, racial blind spots explain how members of minoritized groups internalize aspects of the dominant racial ideology, involuntarily upholding the very system that oppresses them.