Interracial Relationships Research Articles

The Hill of Love Is Different From the Hill of Marriage: Re-Reading Mariama Ba’s Scarlet Song

The task of this paper is to discover the wisdom behind this Wolof proverb: “When one abandons one’s own hill, the next hill which one climbs will crumble”. This paper has shown that the hill is the environment, race, cultural precepts, maternal bond, and values of the characters themselves that inhibit intercultural marriage. The theoretical framework used in this article is mainly deconstructionist theory, nonetheless eclectic approach is accommodated because of the interpretation of the concept hill. The interpretations of what constitutes a hill affected some characters negatively so that they did not achieve their goals fully. Other characters did not allow cultural pull and family ties to overwhelm them. Cultural precepts like the formidable power wielded by mother in-laws, maternal bond, mother’s culinary art, polygamy overwhelmed the protagonist to insanity. This paper recommends that mothers in-law should relax their maternal hold on their sons when they are married. The men who are not emotionally strong to withstand cultural pull should marry their own kinswomen.

Un-dainty fat Jewish daughter: Jewish mothers’ racialized disgust, and embodied recognition across racial difference

ABSTRACT This analytical and exo-autoethnography begins with a depiction of how my Jewish family wished to control my fat body to fit into whiteness. I close with a narrative about an interracial and transnational relationship in which I experienced embodied recognition across racial difference. The purpose is to illustrate the broader intersections between Jewish women’s fatness, associations with blackness, internalized antisemitism, assimilation into whiteness, and the links between the African and Jewish diasporas. Jewish mothers frequently critique their daughters’ bodies to try to assimilate into white femininity. Internalized gendered antisemitism creates disgust for one’s own body that is passed down to daughters. My mom wanted me to have a private pride in being Jewish that she could not access because of her gender, but did not want my Jewishness to physically mark me. Historically Jewish women have been associated with fatness, blackness, vulgarity, and lack of femininity. Collective recognition and acceptance of fat bodies across racial difference is possible through the connections between the Jewish and African diasporas and the challenge to white-centric beauty norms within Black communities.

Evolution of a sundown town and racial caste system: Norman, Oklahoma from 1889 to 1967

Sundown regions were post-Reconstruction localities that deliberately excluded African Americans, often well into the 20th century. While former states of the Confederacy instituted state-wide racial caste systems denying African Americans basic political and economic privileges and opportunities, what of localities outside the Deep South? This case study concludes that Norman, Oklahoma, located outside of the Deep South, was a sundown town from 1889 to 1967 or for 78 years. Sundown implementation practices resulting in ongoing racial cleansing and exclusion include a variety of extra-legal actions including violent racial expulsion in the beginning; Ku Klux Klan terror in the 1920s; ongoing freeze-out of local services such as hotel services; denial of home ownership; denial of employment; curtailment of political rights including voting and freedom of movement; an ominous reputation as a sundown town; continuing violence; and threats. The widespread act of systematically excluding African Americans after dark from Norman, in tandem with state legislation that outlawed interracial marriage and intimate relationships until 1967 and maintaining all white public colleges until 1948, contributed to a racial caste system based on unequal opportunities and privileges afforded to whites. Sundown practices were not only ongoing geographic and racist Jim Crow segregation issues as is sometimes stated, but also, a key approach to enforce a rigid racial caste system in the midst of a society with democratic ideals.

Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Second Language Spanish: Case Study of an Interracial Couple

Abstract The theoretical framework of raciolinguistics examines connections between language ideologies and racialization, but few studies have analyzed the adult learning of languages other than English. This case study is based on life history interviews with a married couple, a Black male journalist and a White female nurse, who learned Spanish as adults. Both grew up as monolingual English speakers, in multilingual US communities where Spanish was widely spoken, and both studied the language in school, but only began using it in US settings as adults in professional contexts. Their Spanish use expanded during three years of volunteer service in Bolivia, where I interviewed them twice, a year apart, as part of a larger interview study on bilingual identities. In this article, I employ a Bakhtinian lens to explore this couple’s perspectives on their encounters with raciolinguistic ideologies; the contexts in which their Spanish use was ratified or not; and their eventual establishment of (somewhat limited) Spanish-speaking voices through the affordances of their intersectional identities.

Toward A Typology of Identity Gaps in "Non-Normative" Sexual Partner Communication.

The present study presents a typology of identity gaps (Hecht, 1993), or cognitive, affective, and behavioral discrepancies between and among different parts of the self, that emerge in sexual partner communication. A total of 504 individuals in relationships they identified as or others ascribed as less common or less accepted than other kinds of relationships, including LGBQ, transgender and non-binary, BDSM, polyamorous, and interracial relationships, described instances in which parts of the self were in tension amid their intimate partner communication. These identity gaps occurred in tension with personal identity, or sense of self, or communal identity as a member of particular sexual and gender minority groups. Implications and areas for future research are discussed.

Race talk: How racial worldview impacts discussions in interracial relationships

Using a mixed-method approach, this study investigates how individuals believe race impacts their interracial relationship. Two-hundred and three individuals representing diverse racial-gender compositions of relationships responded to a series of measures to assess their Racial Worldview—a collective of notions about racial/ethnic identity, intergroup relations, and recognition of racist hegemony—before indicating the ways in which race or racial issues affect their romantic partnership. Results revealed four distinct types of Racial Worldview through K-means cluster and four broad themes of influences on relationship communication and functioning. Cross-tabs analyses indicated that Racial Worldview and participants perceptions of the impact of race were related with statistically significant differences between those who acknowledge racism and valued group differences reaching different conclusions than those who do not. The results add to existing research by drawing attention to the heterogeneity of thought and understanding within interracial relationships. The promise of using Racial Worldview in future research is discussed.

The Confucian Strategy in African Americans’ Racial Equality Discourse

From the 1870s to the 1950s, African Americans frequently referred to the Chinese sage Confucius when demanding justice from American white society. This hitherto unnoticed strategy emphasized Confucian morality to undermine the theoretical basis of American racism. It exposed the hypocrisy of white society on racial relations and illuminated a different path for blacks’ racial advancement. In the process, blacks added an American racial color to Confucius’ image while portraying themselves as cosmopolitan and rational fighters for racial fairness. Chinese culture is therefore not only widely known in America but has an important role to play in its interracial relations.

Defying Stereotyping Hutu People in The Rwandan Genocide in The Film, Kinyarwanda (2012)

Summary Certain academic works and film productions on the Rwandan genocide appear to authorise a new canonicity that simplifies interracial relations between the Tutsi and Hutu people before and during the genocidal war. Kinyarwanda is a film that revises the depiction of Hutus as violent people, all eager to kill Tutsis. The film refuses to endorse this mythology and one-sided characterisations of Hutu/Tutsi relations. It shows that there were many Hutu people who perished because they had assisted Tutsi people. It is implied in the film that for film critics to label this category of selfless people Hutu moderates would be a misnomer. Hutus who assisted Tutsis are simply the heroes in the film. Mamdani has convincingly argued that, within the theatre of death in the Rwandan genocide, there were Hutu zealots, along with Hutus who were reluctant, those who we coerced and, most importantly, those who chose to hide Tutsis. The film Kinyarwanda defies the official Rwandese ideologies that stereotype Hutu people as guilty by association in respect of the Rwandan genocide. In this respect, the film’s authorial ideology is revisionist.

The Coffee Set

This video essay focuses on the representation of a black and white coffee set in four sequences of Que horas ela volta (Anna Muylaert, 2015). While throughout the film the mismatched colors seem to celebrate the possibility of class mobility and interracial relations, the unexpected final rearrangement—white cups with white saucers and black cups with black saucers—alludes to the persistence of the status quo in Brazil despite the individual success of the two protagonists.

Uncoupled: American Widows in Times of Uncertainty and Ambiguous Norms

This study uses the concept of uncertainty in general, and specifically objective and subjective uncertainty, as a framework for understanding how a widow experiences grief and attempts to reestablish her sense of self. It investigates how widows understand, internalize, and act on objective and subjective uncertainty and the interplay between them. Objective uncertainty usually refers to more concrete situations or conditions, for example, health and finances, and there is more consensus regarding them, whereas subjective uncertainty is more individual and volatile, and refers to relationships or interpretation of the objective conditions. The researcher used a combination of participant observation and semistructured interviews. of widows from different socioeconomic classes and ethnic groups. The research revealed that uncertainty plays a large role in the widows’ attempt to live new “suddenly single” lives and that they experience both subjective and objective uncertainty, with subjective uncertainty playing a greater role. Further research is needed to understand the effect of different familial and societal “uncertainty avoidance cultures” on widows experiencing multi-ethnic or multinational identities either by descent of intercultural marriage.

Racial Pairings and Fertility: Do Interracial Couples Have Fewer Children?

Our overall goal is largely descriptive-to compare recent fertility patterns between racially endogamous and exogamous couples in the United States. Evidence of lower fertility among exogamous or interracial couples arguably provides indirect evidence of social distance and cultural and economic integration. The growth of interracial marriage and cohabitation has fueled the rise in biracial or mixed-race children. Fertility rates are uneven among racial and ethnic groups, seemingly rooted in stigma and cultural differences (e.g., fertility norms). Whether fertility is different among interracial couples is unclear: Fertility rates that largely conform to the population of racially endogamous White couples provide evidence of social integration whereas differential fertility may reveal gender dynamics in fertility decision-making, including power relationships that depend on the race of male and female partners. We pool data from the 2008 to 2017 American Community Survey to compare past-year fertility patterns among endogamously and interracially married and cohabiting couples. Fertility is generally lower among racially exogamous than endogamous unions, especially among Asian American-White couples. Fertility among American Indian-White couples is much closer to patterns of White couples than of American Indian couples. Fertility among other interracial couples nevertheless varies by the race of male partners. That is, fertility of the Black male/White female and the Hispanic male/White female couples is similar to patterns found among endogamous Black and Hispanic couples, respectively. The White male/Black female and the White male/Hispanic female couples follow the fertility patterns of White couples. In general, the fertility levels of interracial couples are intermediate between those of endogamous White couples and their endogamous Black, Hispanic, or American Indian counterparts, but vary significantly by the race-gender mix of partners.

The Company We Keep: Interracial Friendships and Romantic Relationships from Adolescence to Adulthood

The Company We Keep: Interracial Friendships and Romantic Relationships from Adolescence to Adulthood

Post-World War II Interracial Relationships, Mothers of Black Occupation Children, and Prejudices in White Societies: Austria in Comparative Perspective

Post-World War II Interracial Relationships, Mothers of Black Occupation Children, and Prejudices in White Societies: Austria in Comparative Perspective

When Color‐conscious Meets Color‐blind: Millennials of Color and Color‐blind Racism

Most contemporary research suggests that white Americans overwhelmingly subscribe to color‐blind racial ideology; however, comparatively little is known about people of color. What is less known, however, is how color‐blindness is used by nonwhites: most existing work on color‐blindness and people of color (POC) focuses exclusively on African Americans, or investigates specific circumstances like interracial relationships. This current project helps to fill some of the gaps in current knowledge regarding nonwhites and color‐blindness by investigating how nonwhites utilize or reject color‐blind racial ideology. To this end, I analyze personal journals and interviews with 48 Latinx, Asian, black (including ethnically black), and multiracial college Millennials in order to understand how their racial and ethnic identities impact their ideological beliefs. Findings suggest that Millennials of color use color‐blindness infrequently as compared to their white peers, and their usage is very nuanced, inconsistent, and often contradictory. I discuss how POC are often bound by the dominant racial ideology of the U.S., such that it colors their perceptions largely through indirect means.

235 Temporal association between interracial couples and odds of low birth weight infants

Women coded as being in interracial relationships have altered odds of low birthweight (LBW). This is likely secondary to societal stressors rather than a biologic basis. Thus, the association should vary over time with sociocultural changes as the proportion of couples coded as interracial has increased. Our aim was to evaluate the association between the odds of LBW in couples coded as interracial and their population incidence over time. Our hypothesis was that the odds of LBW would decrease as the population incidence increased. National Center for Health Statistics Natality data for 1971-2016 was analyzed. LBW was defined as less than 2500 grams. We restricted our analyses to singleton births by White and Black mothers with reported White or Black fathers of the neonate. Logistic regression was used to calculate the odds ratios (OR) of LBW adjusted for maternal education and parental ages and unadjusted. The association between the OR of LWB within a given year and that year’s prevalence of interracial couples was evaluated via meta-regression with random effects. The proportion of couples coded as interracial increased annually from 0.36% in 1971 to 3.86% for White mothers and 0.59% to 8.63% for Black mothers. In each year the OR of LBW was significant. Figures 1 and 2 show each individual year’s OR with a circle proportional to the standard error as well as the metaregression trend line. As the proportion of White mothers with Black partners increased, their OR of LBW declined (1.75 to 1.30, p<0.001). The OR of LBW among Black mothers with White partners, however, did not change (p=0.22). As the annual proportion of White mothers with Black partners increased, their odds of LBW decreased, though was always lower than Black mothers. Black mothers with White partners did not exhibit a similar change. Though causation cannot be established, changes in the proportion of interracial couples over decades is associated with decreasing odds of LBW amongst White women but not Black women.View Large Image Figure ViewerDownload Hi-res image Download (PPT)

PROTOCOL: Online interventions for reducing hate speech and cyberhate: A systematic review.

PROTOCOL: Online interventions for reducing hate speech and cyberhate: A systematic review.

Narrative Inheritance

Narrative Inheritance

Colorblind and Colorbound: Everyday Neoliberalism in the Discourses on Romantic Interracial Relationships

ABSTRACT This study examines the construction of racial ideology in the discourses on romantic interracial relationships. Through a critical discourse analysis of online comments, I show how neoliberalism is adopted in ordinary sense-making about racialized dating practices, and how it motivates boundary work at the public-private divide. Boundary work defines the acceptable values and practices within dating life and correspondingly gives rise to colorboundness, an explicit defense of race as an acceptable category for exclusion. Colorboundness prompts a deeper understanding of how colorblind ideology accommodates tensions and contradictions and yet remains the dominant form of racial ideology.

Entry into intercultural marriage: factors of spouse choice

Background. Intercultural marriages are micro-level models of intercultural relations and can help to understand the changing society of the globalization era. The objective. Revealing attitudes towards entry into intercultural marriage and factors influencing the choice of a foreign cultural marriage partner among Russians and Buryats in the Republic of Buryatia. Design. The study was conducted in 2020 in the Republic of Buryatia using a socio-psychological survey on online platform. The convenience sample was used (the “snowball” method). The sample included representatives of 2 groups: Russians (N = 111) and Buryats (N = 102). Results. The analysis showed that the attitude towards entry into intercultural marriage in these groups is above average, while no significant differences were found between the groups. The negative attitude towards intercultural marriages among Buryats to a greater extent than among Russians was determined by factors reflecting the acceptance of intercultural marriages by relatives, loved ones and society in general, which was more significant for the Buryats. Among the Russians, more than among the Buryats, negative attitudes were interconnected with factors reflecting personal characteristics of the future spouse (values, norms of behavior) and interpersonal communication. For both the Russians and the Buryats, negative attitude towards entering into intercultural marriages is associated with the importance of proximity of cooking traditions, naming, raising children and their identity, as well as religious beliefs. Conclusion. The general favorable “Zeitgeist” in Buryatia towards intercultural marriages contributes to the tolerant attitude towards the creation of such married couples among both the Russians and the Buryats.

Home-Based Acculturation and Chinese Attitude Toward Intercultural Marriage: A Cross-Generational Comparison

This paper explores factors associated with intergenerational differences in home-based acculturation (HBA) and the attitude of Chinese college students and their parents toward intercultural marriage with a focus on China’s cultural context where parents have a strong influence on child’s decisions. In two related studies, we recruited a total of 749 Chinese college students and parents (387 in Study 1 and 362 in Study 2; all are living in China) to participate in the survey. The results indicate that (a) online intercultural contact is positively associated with HBA; (b) HBA is a strong predictor of attitude of intercultural marriages by Chinese parents and college students and the socioeconomic status has a divergent effect on the two groups; and (c) Chinese college students and parents differ in terms of their HBA and online intercultural contact. Findings from the research add knowledge to our understanding of the impact of globalization and digitalization on acculturation and Chinese residents’ perspectives on intercultural marriage.