ABSTRACT
Very few of my respondents had other examples of interracial couples in their families prior to dating out of their racial groups. Part of my fieldwork consisted in gaining insights into the strategies they implement to protect each other from both systemic racism in a White-dominated society and the pitfalls of cross-cultural communication. In both societies, female partners of either race have to adopt a “front” (Erving Goffman) in order not to be framed as “easy women”—a stereotype inherited from the histories of both countries, and shared by both racial groups. Under such circumstances, gender solidarity plays an important role in both Alabama and France, which tends to show that traditional models of couples are deconstructed by the respondents with the help of peer groups, including, but not only, other interracial couples, and redefined to fit the core ethical values on which the pairs were initially formed. One African American respondent explained how he could not imagine sharing with his mother his frustration about incidents with his partner, and how he had to rely on close friends to vent and ask for advice. Paradoxically, interracial couples appear to be fusional to the extent that they have to cope with race fatigue at a macro level, but the fusion dissolves along gender lines when the “racework” (Steinbugler) needs to be pursued at a micro level.
