ABSTRACT
As recently as 2010, the argument of preventing an interracial marriage “for the sake of the children” was put forward by a Louisiana justice of the peace. The trope of the “tragic mulatto/a” in U.S. literature served as both a denunciation of race as a social construct and a warning to interracial couples not to have any offspring. Today, both in the U.S.A. and in France, the reactions of families and strangers (including doctors and nurses) to mixed-race children remain ambivalent, focusing on the social implications of skin tones and hair textures, to such a point that young couples often hesitate to consider having children at all. The fear of (further) antagonizing the White mothers-in-law was a particularly striking finding in both fieldworks, with anguish focusing on prevailing stereotypes on Black males as pathological and kinky hair as untamable. In this chapter, I analyze how the partners make space for the other culture in their educational choices and practices, and what specific aspects of ethnic identity are reproduced or rejected in an effort to shape the children’s future while taking into account the gendered representations of young and adult biracial men and women in each of the two countries, with a more or less consciousness of the weight of history and the cultural specificity of their environment. The respondents’ children are not interviewed in this chapter, because I wanted the study to remain centered on the couples’ self-perceptions, fears, contradictions, and hopes.
