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This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s leadership in creating a black feminist movement to challenge the critical linkages between all forms of oppression, especially racism and sexism. By 1972, while she was excited about the growth of the predominantly white feminist movement, she was also profoundly disappointed that the struggle still did not fully embrace a black feminist position and make challenging racism as well as sexism central to its political agenda. Thus, Kennedy worked to create interracial feminist organizations that emphasized a black feminist praxis. Her activism during this period was central to building a women’s movement that included women of all races as well as an independent black feminist movement. To Kennedy’s thinking, Shirley Chisholm’s quest for the presidential nomination was the perfect opportunity for white feminists to build an alliance and support a black feminist politics. In 1971 she created the Feminist Party in hopes of bringing together an inclusive group of feminists to support not simply the candidacy of the black congresswoman but black feminism more generally. Equally interested in advancing black feminist praxis, she worked to create the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973 and pushed black women to form their own autonomous black feminist movement.

Examines the Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s short story, ‘Le Mulâtre’ (1837), as a primary example of the ways in which debates over the effects of “racial mixing” were mediated simultaneously through the image of the tragic “mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution. Rather than celebrating the desire of the slaves to achieve freedom at any cost, Séjour’s narrative laments the psychosocial consequences of such a parricidal revolution, suggesting that slavery and “miscegenation” were ultimately responsible for the corruption, degradation, and eventual destruction of the family.

This chapter considers the French abolitionist Alphonse de Lamartine’s verse drama, Toussaint Louverture (1850), showing how writing that narrates the life of Louverture as not simply a ‘colonial family romance,’ but as an “interracial” family romance further demonstrates anxieties about the psychological effects of the plantation system. Attempts to explain Louverture’s life using a grammar beholden to the “mulatto/a” vengeance narrative, and especially that of the tragic “mulatto/a,” suggests that the epistemological problems created by slavery and revolution engendered an Oedipal tendency in people of color who, in the revolutionary hour, might either symbolically or literally occasion the death of their parents and vice versa when faced with a choice between their family and the nation.

The emergence of Blasians is historically, politically, intimately, and juridically contextualized through examination of national and transnational connections between Blacks and Asian/Americans. Analyses of these connections underscore tensions and anxieties especially around interracial mixing and U.S. military imperialism. Sociohistorical contextualization is necessary to demonstrate how Blasian media figures have become visible and how their bodies act as racial scripts used to demarcate, sometimes poorly, racial divisions and hierarchies. Through explorations of moments of Blasian illegibility and Black and Asian/American solidarity, this chapter ends on how these connections have offered potential areas for rethinking race and culture.

Chapter 3 analyzes the adult entertainment industry niche of interracial pornography focusing on performances of (inter)racial aggression. I argue that BDSM becomes a critical lens for elucidating the dynamics of racialized shame, humiliation, and pleasure that undergird interracial pornography, a profitable genre of commercial American pornography that is deeply invested in the miscegenation taboo. The lens of BDSM enacts a critical queering of interracial “heterosexual” pornography in order to read across the gendered and racialized subject positions of pleasure, power, and desire and to analyze homoerotic desire, pleasure, and anxiety as working in tandem with the genre’s eroticization of racial-sexual alterity. I discuss pornography as a historic site of racial-sexual revenge—a contemporary staging of racialized sexualized violence in which the retaliatory rhetoric of interracial aggression is enacted. Though I focus on contemporary Internet pornography, this chapter reads across the convergent pornography landscape—the stag genre, the golden age, and the video age—to provide a contextual frame for reading performances of black-white interracial intimacy in pornography and tracing the black female body as an ambivalent site of absence and presence in the genre.

The essay written by Paula Moya offers the reader two possible strategies for decolonial action: interracial friendships and multicultural literature. Moya's argument is grounded in an exposition of the role of emotions in cognition. Emotions have “crucial epistemic value,” for they make it possible to discern “larger social meanings and entrenched social arrangements.” The essay explains how interracial friendships involve a sharing of experiences about race and racism that can lead to moral growth and to the increased knowledge for the interracial friends of how race functions in society. In the last part of the chapter, the author shows how literature written by racial and cultural minorities can “expand a reader's horizon of possibility for experiential encounters,” because of the intellectual and emotional engagement involved in reading a novel. The aim of the chapter is to demonstrate how both interracial friendships and multicultural novels can be effective antiracist projects.

This chapter introduces the concept of “romantic career:” how people draw on prior romantic and dating experiences to understand their ethnoracial preferences or (lack thereof) for romantic partnership and marriage. This chapter reveals the narratives and accounts that respondents use to make sense of their trajectories towards marrying a person of a different color. This chapter draws on responses to questions about their first and last serious relationships, dating experiences, and “hook-ups.” I found that Carioca spouses were often placed ethnoracial boundaries at the center of desires 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. For Cariocas, it meant white women's desires for nego, or “big” black men. In Los Angeles, it was revealed in white men's penchant for “exotic” women across racial categories.

Offering a narrative case study of two families in colonial Jamaica, the Taylors/Tailyours and the Johnstons, chapter 4 shows how customary practice and personal whim regulated the illicit unions between white men and enslaved women. White men’s personal desires and circumstances, rather than the law, shaped the treatment and future prospects of illegitimate mixed offspring born of slavery’s sexual economy—at the individual level and beyond. The descendants of enslaved African women and British men, even those elite few who achieved freedom and white male patronage, held little control over their lives, professional prospects, or racial identities.

Chapter 5 shifts focus to metropolitan Britain and the popular imaginary. Through analysis of satirical prints, plays, songs, novels, and poems, it shows how visual and literary representations of interracial sexual encounters between women of African ancestry and British men shaped public perceptions of colonial slavery, West Indian Creoles, and the abolition movement. Interpreting comic depictions of enslaved black women from the abolition era in light of growing public concerns about slave trading, slavery, interracial sexuality, and the integrity of British bloodlines, this chapter highlights the perceived vulnerability of both whiteness and British national identity.

Through close examination of six texts, this essay traces the use of interracial friendship as a key trope in Young Adult literature about Japanese American incarceration during WWII. It argues that some texts focus on friendship between Japanese American and Caucasian girls to depict interpersonal loyalty while subordinating issues of state power; Florence Crannell Means’ The Moved-Outers and Yoshiko Uchida’s work Journey to Topaz and Journey Home subtly critique the failure of the United States to live up to its declared ideals; recent texts, such as Marcia Savin’s The Moonbridge, Cynthia Kadohata’s Weedflower, and Winifred Conkling’s Sylvia and Aki, feature interracial friendships between young people of color, overtly critiquing the racialization of communities of color and the differential effects of state power, racism and nationalism.

This chapter examines the American Interracial Peace Committee (AIPC), a determined effort to link interracial work with the peace activism. Created in early 1927 and almost wholly subsidized by the American Friends Service Committee's (AFSC) money, personnel, and ideas, the AIPC built on the efforts of the Interracial Section in directly addressing racism through the education of individuals. Even more ambitiously, it hoped to combine race activism and peace work into a seamless effort. Run on a shoestring budget during trying financial times and constantly plagued by interpersonal strife, the short-lived AIPC carried the Service Committee's race work for four tumultuous years. Indeed, after the demise of the Interracial Section, the AIPC became the Service Committee's primary means of interracial activism.

This chapter discusses the story of the Interracial Hospital Movement (IHM) which contains many of the elements characteristic of the early civil rights movement in postwar Louisville. It provides that as in the IHM, a variety of black, white, and biracial worker, religious, youth, and civic organizations came together in ad hoc interracial coalitions to target specific problems, developing a tradition in the city of white and black cooperation in equal rights campaigns. It notes that in this period, Louisville activists argued that African Americans as citizens had the right to equal access to tax-supported jobs and facilities, identifying them as two linked manifestations of government-enforced Jim Crow. It emphasizes that piecemeal success in these areas laid the groundwork for the city's progressive self-image as a leader for the South in race relations, an image that played a significant role in struggles throughout the movement era.

This chapter examines Obama’s performance as a father and its role in his political career. His public interactions with children are part of his own self-representation and the political image-making of his campaigns and White House press. Although little academic attention has been paid to this aspect of his presidency, media coverage and popular interest place great emphasis on his role as “Father-in-Chief.” Obama’s ability to embody the nurturing father is particularly significant; visual and textual representations of Obama depict a modern father with a deep connection to his own family and a genuine ease with children. These images also resonate against a complicated pattern of expectations for fatherhood, for black men and their families, and for dual career couples and parenting.