“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.

Preferences and the Romantic Career

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.

Conclusion

Boundaries of Love overtly challenges the sanguine picture of interracial marriage being the solution to racism and white supremacy. Adopting a “critical constructivist” perspective, this book reveals how black-white couples - whether in a society where they are flexible or one in which they are more rigid - often reproduced ethnoracial boundaries. Race mixture as a solution to racism has been a potent racial ideology both Brazil and the United States. The ideology of Brazil as a “racial democracy” has characterized it as having harmonious race relations, integration, and high proportions of interracial mating. This ideology obscured how centuries of race-mixing have co-existed alongside a white socioeconomic and political elite disenfranchising non-white Brazilians. The notion that “interracial love saves America” can gloss over ethnoracial preferences based in anti-blackness for both white and black partners. Of course, not all of the couples that I interviewed subscribed to these notions. However, enough did in both societies to call into question the blanket statement that all interracial love is anti-racist. More importantly, none of the couples in either society revealed a disintegration or blurring of racial boundaries that many, including academics, have come to expect.

Black, White, Mixed or Biracial

This chapter focuses on the subset of black-white couples who were parents to examine: expectations of their child's racial classification; how parents categorized their children after birth; and the implications for eligibility for university affirmative action. Carioca parents often expected to have black children due to mixture with a black parent. However, after birth, a child's phenotype determined the category they fit into, such that a child could be white, black, or less commonly, “mixed." Affirmative action did not cause Carioca parents to waver in their assessments of their children's race; white children were ineligible. Angelino parents described their child's race as additive: both black and white. They maintained the biracial categorization before and after their child's birth, regardless of the child's appearance. In light of affirmative action eligibility, Angelino parents became more flexible in their assessment, emphasizing blackness if they considered it advantageous. Sometimes they understood “biracial” as a unique minority status adding to institutional diversity. This chapter demonstrates parents' part in the social construction of new ethnoracial boundaries, strengthening of pre-existing ones, and the effect of public policy on understandings of ethnoracial boundaries.

Introduction

The Introduction defines the concept of “ethnoracial boundaries” and introduces the concept of “groupness” to the reader. It discusses how scholars of ethnicity and nationalism have neglected how non-elites negotiate ethnoracial boundaries through non-state social interaction. It also critiques race and ethnicity scholars for essentializing ethnoracial categories and focusing exclusively on the United States. This chapter advocates a “critical constructivist” approach to race and ethnicity that focuses on how non-elite social actors negotiate ethnoracial boundaries and incorporates critical race theory's concept of intersectionality. Following this discussion, the chapter explains the history of race-mixing between blacks and whites in the United States and Brazil. It also outlines: the methodology of the book; the categorization of respondents; the sampling strategy; the meaning of marriage in the two societies; a statement on researcher reflexivity; and an overview of the remaining book chapters. It ends with a summary of the book's conclusion, that race mixture is no replacement for public policy and can coexist with white supremacy.

Policing the Boundary

This chapter examines how interracial couples negotiate “racial boundary-policing” in which outsiders sanction them and redraw ethnoracial understandings of “us” versus “them.” Albeit rare, boundary-policing was more common in Los Angeles with couples pointing to blacks as perpetrators. White wives perceived black women as their main harassers. Black husbands' masculinity protected them from seeing black women as a threat. On the other hand, couples with black wives and white husbands reported incidents involving black men, but did not see them as an ongoing threat. Some black women were not perceived as black in public, lessening experiences of hostility. Particularly for black husbands and white wives, Los Angeles remained a diverse place where hostility was not a concern as long as they avoided black communities. Carioca couples demonstrated a regionalized understanding of boundary-policing occurring outside of the city in the country's southern region and within the city in the wealthy, predominantly white, South Zone. Intersections of race and gender mattered for understandings of racial boundary-policing with the South Zone becoming a site of hyper-sexualization for black women married to white men. This chapter shows how social actors-whether in interracial marriages or outsiders who harass them-reproduce these boundaries through their social interactions.

Boundaries of Whiteness

Chapter 3 examines how white spouses understand their own whiteness in these relationships as well as how their black partners see them as white. In Rio de Janeiro, white spouses redrew, pushed against, and bridged over ethnoracial boundaries through emphasizing race mixture in their ancestry. In Los Angeles, whites had less flexibility in navigating ethnoracial boundaries, yet bridged over class differences. They also completely changed the meaning of the boundary by converting it from a racial one to an ethnic one full of many “ethnic options.” In both sites, there were whites with an affiliative ethnicity for blackness, but this was more prevalent among white Carioca wives who understood themselves as negra frustradas or frustrated black women-frustrated because of their whiteness. Black partners in both research sites largely considered their white spouses unquestionably white. As a consequence, this chapter reveals that ethnoracial boundaries were more flexible and permeable for white spouses than black spouses in both societies.

Boundaries of Blackness

Chapter 2 shows how blacks in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro understand their position within the boundaries of black racial categorization. I analyze how and why they consider themselves black and examine ethnoracial congruency between their black identity and their white partners' assessment of their blackness. I find more ethnoracial congruency between black-white couples in Los Angeles than in Rio de Janeiro. Contrary to many scholars of Brazil, I find that black spouses have a sense of group identity in which they understand blacks as part of their imagined community; this, along with ancestry, physical appearance, and official documentation comprise their black identity. In Los Angeles, black respondents articulated a stronger sense of groupness and perceived history and resistance as elements tying them to other blacks. However, they saw class distinctions, immigrant ancestry, and less fluency in black culture as putting them on the margins of blackness. White husbands and wives understood their black husbands and wives as existing at the margins of what it means to be black in both Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles. However, they failed to recognize the importance of groupness to their black spouses.