Holy and Helping: The Role of Sanctification in the Communal Coping of Older African American Couples

Disproportionately affected by numerous relational stressors (e.g., financial strain, morbidity), older African American couples frequently find solace in religion and each other. Research notes that both married and cohabiting couples effectively respond to difficult situations by sharing the ownership of a stressor and organizing a collaborative, collective response. However, little is known about the influence of religion on shared coping experiences, particularly among older African American couples. This study examined dyadic data from the Strong African American Couples Project to capture the influence of relational sanctification on the communal coping practices of married and cohabiting older African American couples. The sample included 194 African American couples (146 married and 48 cohabiting) between the ages of 50 and 86 years. With the use of Actor Partner Independence Models, this study found that men’s sanctification predicted both their own communal coping and their partner’s communal coping. However, there were no significant effects when women’s sanctification was used as a predictor of communal coping among older African American couples. These findings are both important and novel, because these relationships had never before been examined within the United States, much less among older African American couples. Similar to existing research among majority White couples, this research finds that men’s religiosity may be a more influential predictor of relational outcomes than women’s religiosity. Such findings offer a valuable foundation for future studies seeking to consider how relational sanctification and communal coping may impact other outcomes associated with the romantic relationships of older African Americans.

The Neighborhood Attainment of Mixed-Race Couples across the Black/White Spectrum

With the removal of legal barriers to mixed-race marriage, there has been a consistent increase in the number of Black-White couples. This has coincided with growth in the number of Black-White individuals who have formed couples with a Black or White partner. Little is known, however, about how these couples function within a key area of stratification—neighborhood attainment. We use data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the U.S. Census to investigate the percentage of Whites and the average income in the neighborhoods of home-purchasing couples defined by their levels of Black and White representation. These couples being White couples, Black-White individuals with White partners, Black-White couples, Black-White individuals with Black partners, and Black couples. Findings reveal that the percentage of Whites and average income in the neighborhoods of couples decrease as couples increase in Black representation. These results have implications for our understanding of the contemporary color line.

Little things mean a lot: Using the biopsychosocial model for daily reports of sexual intimacy

Objectives: In the current study we used an integrated approach to late midlife sexuality. Using a biopsychosocial approach combined with spillover/crossover theory, we examined various common biological (feeling rested and physical intimacy), psychological (positive and negative mood), and social (giving and receiving support) daily processes linked with actor and partner daily physical intimacy. Methods: Data from 191 late midlife, heterosexual, White, couples (97% married, 3% cohabiting) across 14 days were used to examine our hypotheses. Participants had attended some college and about half lived in an urban area. Results: Results from dyadic logistic multilevel models suggest that even when accounting for all covariates, physical activity, positive mood, and both giving and receiving partner support were associated with an increased likelihood of daily physical intimacy. Differences in these associations were found for women compared to men. Discussion: Physical intimacy in late midlife is likely encouraged from a number of factors. Using simplistic designs may inhibit our understanding of important sexual interactions. When compared to health factors, relational factors appear to be more connected to physical intimacy. Physicians, therapists, and community educators can encourage late midlife couples to pay attention to the support they give and receive which may provide an important environment for sexual interactions.

Alternative Families and White Fragility

This chapter zeroes in on Horrible White People shows’ generic structures, aesthetic innovations, and relationship to sitcom history, focusing particularly on how the sitcom has historically perpetuated an idealized form of aspirational white domesticity and contained, incorporated, or appropriated racial and ethnic diversity. This chapter traces the significant ways Horrible White People shows break from sitcom conventions and highlight how rather than celebrate or romanticize kinship and solidarity as the genre’s traditional focus on idealized nuclear families does, this cycle of bleakly comic, white-cast rom-com sitcoms wallows in the anxieties and neuroses of contemporary alternative family structures and relationships. These failed white subjects disrupt the utopic family sitcom and romantic comedy’s generic structures with serialized plots and replace the fantasy of familial unity and heterosexual coupling with self-destructive narcissism. The darker lighting, isolating single-camera cinematography, and grimmer aesthetics of these shows centralize families that are unable to protect members from the outside world. So, by delving into the high-production-value aesthetics and the usually bleak affects of the cycle, the focus is on the ways in which these dystopian white couples and families function to either justify or come to grips with the failures of contemporary white political and social liberalism. Horrible White People shows challenge the conventions and histories of the sitcom genre to appear progressive, self-critical, antiracist, inclusive, and feminist, but they ultimately recentralize white suffering under the seemingly protective guise of liberal social critique. The disillusion with family and lack of narrative closure in these shows leaves the white protagonists suspended in a space of precarity, unable to fulfill their neoliberal capacity without the safety of family, jobs, or often even ambition.

Disgust Toward Interracial Couples: Mixed Feelings About Black–White Race Mixing

Three studies further explored Skinner and Hudac's (2017) hypothesis that interracial couples elicit disgust. Using verbal and face emotion measures (Study 1), some participants reported more disgust toward interracial couples than same-race White and Black couples. In Study 2, only people higher in disgust sensitivity tended to “guess” that rapidly presented images of interracial (vs. White) couples were disgusting. Study 3 used a novel image classification paradigm that presented couples side-by-side with neutral or disgusting images. Participants took longer to decide whether target images were disgusting only when interracial (vs. White) couples appeared next to neutral images. Greater sexual disgust heightened this difference. Mixed evidence suggesting an association of disgust with Black couples also emerged in Studies 2 and 3. Thus, the disgust–interracial romance association may only emerge under certain conditions, and the current research offers limited support for the hypothesis that disgust response is exclusively linked to interracial unions.

“Hannah Elias Talks Freely”

The image of the buck or Mandingo, which has historically found expression in advertising, popular culture, science, news, law, and policy, effects a powerful purchase on our national psyche. The Mandingo’s figurative though sustained life illuminates the ways in which myths about black men’s bodies incite particular kinds of fantasies and instantiate specific relationships of power. Perhaps the most insistent archetype of black masculinity, the Mandingo has been mobilized by a number of actors, including black men who have sought to defy, appropriate, or reinvent the image. Framing black men as possessing a primitive, unquenchable, and even dangerous sexuality –a sexuality that thwarts prohibitions and demands containment– the Mandingo is an ideological construction invented by white heteropatriarchy to effectively police the racial-sexual border. Embedded in the Mandingo construct are potent opposing energies: racial hatred and racialized desire. How then does the mobilization of the Mandingo in contemporary cuckold pornography speak to the desire for and fear of black men as objects for pornographic consumption by white men and women? This chapter investigates the sexual economy of sub-cultural, amateur pornography in which black men are figured as BBC (big black cock) studs central to the fetishistic fantasies of white couples. Highlighting the multiple and mobile desires, relations, and labors evident in “cuckolding socialities”, this chapter looks at pornography as a market for black men’s sex work, and as a space of discipline and containment as well as of queer possibility.

“A Fly in the Buttermilk”

This chapter compares the discursive strategies that black-white couples and their families drew on to navigate the integration of black spouses into white extended families. White Carioca families engaged in more openly racist opposition, racist humor, and/or indirect insults to express discomfort with blacks marrying into the family. In an “irony of opposition,” past race-mixing in Carioca white families did not shield black spouses from these sentiments. This countered the myth of racial democracy in which color is not an impediment to interpersonal relationships. Nevertheless, Carioca respondents were less likely to report resistance in white families than Angelino couples. U.S. couples' higher rates of domestic migration resulted in less integration of black spouses into white family life than among Brazilian couples, whose tight-knit family relationships led to black spouses' greater incorporation. Los Angeles couples understood white family members as using the discourse of “expressing concerns” about the relationship, then moving to more overt discouragement of marrying black partners. Couples understood this “expressing concern” discourse as an attempt at social desirability on the part of white family members, emblematic of U.S. “color-blind” racism.This chapter shows how intermarriage can leave white supremacy, anti-blackness, and racial boundaries intact within the family.