White Women Mothering Mixed-Race Children in a Black-White Interracial Relationship

It is over five decades since ‘River of Blood,’ the speech about race in Britain, has been acknowledged as the symbol of discrimination towards immigration and minorities like Black British. Meanwhile, America, as another traditional western cultural center, has faced more serious issues during the process of human equality. Loving. V. Virginia, as a legal milestone of Civil Rights in the US, has influenced the public attitude of the majority towards interracial union; however, the discrimination and prejudice have become more invisible via the changing of societal environment. Although the anti-miscegenation movement has been treated as the big step of human rights, the union between black and white faces misunderstanding, even stigmas in their daily lives. Hence, taking black-white interracial relationships as examples, from white women’s perspective, this essay will examine the dilemma between their own cognition of cultural identities and being partially embedded into a different culture when ‘marrying-out’ and raising mixed-race children.

The influence of perspective-taking on stress during discrimination in interracial relationships

Interracial couples experience stressors that can negatively impact their relationship quality, such as racial discrimination. In dyads in which one partner identifies as White and the other identifies as Black or Hispanic, the stress due to racial discrimination is associated with differential alternatives: The White partner can end the relationship to stop their experience with the stress of racial discrimination, but Black or Hispanic partners cannot. As such, the White partner is a “weak link” in such relationships, and understanding processes that can mitigate discrimination-induced stress for White partners could be beneficial for interracial relationship longevity. In this study, we examined perspective-taking as a process to reduce momentary, discrimination-based stress. White partners in interracial relationships ( N = 292) were randomly assigned to engage in perspective-taking (or remain objective) when imagining their partner experiencing discrimination (or a common aversive situation). We predicted, and found, that momentary stress was lower for White partners who took their partners’ perspectives while thinking about them experiencing racial discrimination than for those who objectively recounted the details of their partners’ experiencing racial discrimination. In turn, lower momentary stress predicted greater commitment and relationship satisfaction. This indicates that perspective-taking can reduce the momentary stress a White partner experiences during an event of racial discrimination, which may strengthen interracial relationships.

Race and Imaginary Intimacy in Jack

Through its focus on an interracial relationship in St. Louis after the Second World War, Jack interrogates the imaginative privilege of a white character whose seeming transcendence of the ordinary occurs at the expense of the black woman he romances. Jack’s aesthetic sensibility immobilizes and isolates him in an imaginative landscape; his desire to have Della, a black woman, accompany him there, however, implicates him in the literal destruction of her everyday world. This chapter uses phenomenological race theory and everyday life studies to highlight the way that the historical, material, and political pressures of the period, including the threat of eminent domain that looms over the abstracted landscape of the novel, disrupt Jack’s literary and symbolic rendering of this love story. By inviting the reader to pursue Jack’s imaginative interests, the novel constructs an uncomfortable romance troubled by the encroachments of the wider world it would exclude.

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.

Common Ingroup Identity, Perceived Similarity, and Communal Interracial Relationships

Integrating theory on interpersonal relationships and intergroup relations, this research examined the role of common ingroup recategorization (i.e., perceiving outgroup members as belonging to the same superordinate group as oneself) in fostering communal interracial relationships. A cross-sectional study (Study 1) and a short-term intensive longitudinal study (Study 2) involving Black and White friendship and romantic dyads suggested that recategorization predicted greater communal motivation and security via perceived similarity. These effects were found in terms of both enduring characteristics and changes over time. In turn, communal motivation and security predicted greater self-reported prosocial behavior and relationship satisfaction, suggesting that they are beneficial to interracial relationship quality. Communal motivation also predicted increases over time in recategorization and perceived similarity, suggesting bidirectional effects. Taken together, these results suggest a reciprocal process in which common ingroup recategorization and perceptions of similarity promote and derive from the communal nature of interracial relationships.

Remaking national identity: Postcolonial discourses at the intersection of gender and race in Tutto può succedere

In the context of global migrations, ‘new Italians’ have emerged in a group of mainstream TV series, among which Tutto può succedere (‘Anything can happen’) (RAI 1, 2015–18) stands out as the remake of the American Parenthood. This article argues that this process of cultural translation reveals tensions over the negotiation of national identity in Italian society, due to recent migrations and the submerged colonial past. Through the adoption of an intersectional approach, the analysis of the interracial relationship between Feven, an Eritrean-born woman, and Carlo will highlight that the postracial discourses underlying Parenthood are superseded by postcolonial ones in the remake. I demonstrate that the Othering of Feven through sexualization and exoticization exposes the persistence of colonial stereotypes. However, the displacement of race onto gender preoccupations through the prism of postfeminism highlights the attempted ‘normalization’ of the Other, further engaging with the specificities of the Italian context through its association with religion.

‘I don’t want to have a separated home’: Reckoning family and return migration among married Nigerians in China

The growing ‘Africans in China’ literature has documented the extent and extensiveness of flows from Africa to Chinese cities. However, return migration has not received much attention, and even less is known about the role of the family in return consideration. The article focuses on how married Nigerians reckon return and family in Guangzhou city using data from ethnographic observations and interviews with 25 participants. While the family is central to how married migrants think about return, the dynamics vary among the participants. Migrants whose spouses/children reside in Nigeria complain about being distant from their families and the challenge of unification and ‘absentee fatherhood’. Nigerian couples that live in Guangzhou as a family consider the high cost of raising children and the future competitiveness of their children as ‘China-educated’ as factors in return calculations. Moreover, despite living with their husbands in China, some Nigerian women desire to return to Nigeria to improve their lives, but they did not embark on a return journey to avoid family separation. Among Nigerians in an interracial relationship with Chinese women, the feeling of (un)belongingness resonates in their return consideration owing to poor experiences with access to residence permit and social welfare. While integration issues impact on return migration of married Nigerians in Guangzhou, the transnational practices of the men suggest that a return behaviour would probably accompany return consideration.

On the Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism in Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced: Analysis on the Dynamics of Amir and Emily’s Relationship

This study analyses the three essential elements of the interracial relationship between Amir and Emily in Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Disgraced. They are: Emily’s painting of Amir, her husband, in the style of Portrait of Juan de Pareja by Diego Velázquez; Emily’s White Saviour Complex; and the violence she suffered in the hands of Amir. The first two parts of the analysis will utilise the combination of Identity Construction theory by Stuart Hall, Edward Said’s Orientalism, and the post 9/11 discourse of neo-Orientalism. The last part of the analysis will foreground the entire elements by utilising Stuart Hall’s theory of Articulation. It will be proved that Amir’s violence is an act of retaliation towards Emily’s domination over the production of his identity through representation and her influence in his crucial decisions concerning his relationship with his family. Emily’s victimisation and the emphasis on Amir’s ‘tribalistic bond’ risk a reductionist neo-Orientalist reading of the text. By acknowledging Emily’s White Saviour Complex, the text can be read as a re-articulation of the neo-Orientalist stereotypes of ‘barbaric brown man’ and ‘free white woman.’

“HEY, I LIKE YOUR VIDEOS. RELATE MUCH!”LOCATING SISTERHOOD IN A POSTCOLONIAL PUBLIC ON YOUTUBE

As part of a broader project that seeks to investigate the brokering of digitally-mediated intimacies through matchmaking platforms and social media channels, this paper unpacks the formation of ‘online sisterhood’ in a postcolonial intimate public, as evinced in the comments of viewers on selected YouTube videos of Rhaze, a Filipina YouTuber who is married to an Australian man. With a massive following of over 450 thousand followers, Rhaze’s videos typically receive diverse comments from her viewers and subscribers. This exposition is facilitated by collecting, categorising and analysing selected comments from Rhaze’s top videos. The comments were analysed through discourse analysis, paying special attention to the factors that influence digital media practices. The findings reveal that competing comments are shaped by postcolonial views on a gendered, racialized and class-based body in an interracial relationship. We then coin the term ‘online sisterhood’, reflecting the shared support that women nurture with other women through online practices. Ultimately, online sisterhood displays how Filipino women married to a white foreign national generate and negotiate spaces of mutual support in a neoliberal state. Paradoxically, a neoliberal government benefits from such cross-border and mediated mobility of Filipina migrants through the commodification of their everyday life. It is through this point that we argue for a closer evaluation of the role of ‘online sisterhoods’ in the construction of female subjectivity and imaginaries of mobility in the Global South.

Rethinking the nation: Intersections of race, desire, and love in Irene Sabatini’s The Boy Next Door

This article examines the interplay of race, desire, and love in Irene Sabatini’s novel The Boy Next Door by focusing on an interracial relationship that develops in a newly independent, yet still fraught, Zimbabwe. I argue that as a narrative strategy Sabatini uses two major historical periods in the history of independent Zimbabwe as the backdrop of a complicated and controversial relationship in order to offer critical commentary on the constructs of, and attitudes towards, interracial sexual unions in a country emerging from decades of systematic segregation where panics about sex and race were identified as social problems threatening the fundamental moral fibre and social order of colonial society. Drawing ideas from Dobrota Pucherova, the article highlights the way in which sexuality is used as a site to regulate and mark national belonging and further argues that Sabatini points to the apparent dissidence of such desires and relationships, and at the same time signals towards a racial utopia that can culminate from the realization of such desires.