Search Results

This chapter begins to examine the practice of racework by considering a type of racework used by interracial couples in many public places—navigating racial homogeneity. It distinguishes between the racial segregation of neighborhoods, which is the result of almost a century of discriminatory housing and lending practices imposed by White-controlled institutions, and the racial separation of particular social spaces, which stems from some Blacks’ preference for all-Black environments as a response to Whites’ exclusion and as settings where people find safety and community. Although racial residential segregation affects innumerable communities in the United States, it is particularly onerous for interracial partners and families because of the strain of frequently being the only person of one’s race in a social setting. This strain creates race fatigue among both Blacks and Whites.

This chapter analyzes another form of racework that interracial partners use in public spaces—visibility management. By managing their visibility, interracial couples anticipate and protect themselves against racial prejudice and homophobia. In discussing these practices, this chapter draws on Erving Goffman’s notions of stigma and stigma management. It first examines the public experiences of interracial partners specifically in light of their sexuality, a perspective absent in past research. Heterosexual couples report feeling their racial difference as particularly salient in social spaces, though they intermittently experience moments when their racial difference makes them less, not more, visible. When the couple includes a Black man and a White woman, partners often experience hypervisibility. For same-sex partners, especially lesbians, racial difference increases the experience of invisibility. There is also evidence in these narratives that racial difference may sharpen the homophobia directed at couples when they are recognized as intimate partners. The second half of the chapter examines the racework that interracial partners use to manage visibility and discusses why same-sex interracial partners engage in these social practices more often than heterosexual partners.

This chapter turns the lens from public spaces to the inner workings of relationships in order to look more closely at how interracial partners interpret and negotiate racial difference in everyday life. It introduces the concept of racial habitus, developed by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, to explain how racial differences emerge in routine interactions. It then identifies “emotional labor” as the form of racework that individuals use to manage race and racism. It shows how this type of racework permits interracial partners to negotiate differences in racial habitus. One crucial difference is that White partners have not needed to develop the double-consciousness that characterizes a Black racial habitus. The chapter then discusses the minority of partners whose racework is best characterized as racial silence. In sum, the chapter has two main goals: to make clear the ways in which racial difference infiltrates intimate relationships and to show how interracial partners go about directly and indirectly managing this difference.

This chapter moves the focus from the internal dynamics of the relationship into the realm of identity. It introduces the fourth and final type of racework: boundary work. Boundary work helps individuals reshape the meanings of social identities, especially when these identities are subordinated. The chapter begins by examining the exclusionary and inclusionary boundary work that interracial partners use to separate themselves as individuals from particular interracial stereotypes. It then shifts the analysis to “couple identity” to explore how partners construct interracial intimacy more broadly. It explains how study participants frame the significance of race in their own relationships. Their perspectives range from colorblind to race-conscious, with an intermediate stance that incorporates elements of each. The last section of the chapter considers how sexuality affects interpretations of interracial intimacy. It discusses how heterosexuality functions as a symbolic resource for straight couples, allowing them to deflect stereotypes of deviance and to practice boundary work by blurring distinctions between themselves and same-race couples, whose relationships are generally regarded as positive, healthy, and legitimate. Lesbian and gay Black/White couples, on the other hand, experience sexuality not as a resource, but rather as an identity that intersects with interraciality in multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways.