ABSTRACT
Interracial sexual relationships have been and remain a controversial terrain in the United States. This chapter and the next focus on interracial primary relationships as idea and as material reality. Examining the discourse on interracial relationships or, as one might more accurately state it, against interracial relationships (since it seems to me that there is at this time no popular discourse specifically for them) brings into sharp relief a range of issues key to comprehending the impact of racism both on white women’s experience and worldview and on social organization more broadly. The racialness of constructions of masculinity and femininity are apparent in this discourse, as are the construction of race difference as “real,” “essential,” and based on “biology” and the construction of racial and cultural groups as entirely and appropriately separate from one another. Examining these issues provides an opportunity to examine the relationships between individual subjects and discourse. In the same way that, as I argued in chapter 3, there is no way for white women to step outside the reach of racism’s impact on the material environment, here I show that, while white women can
and do challenge racist discourses, engagement with them is inevitable, in the literal sense of that term. In this chapter I will analyze white women’s words about masculinity, femininity, and the discourse against interracial relationships. In chapter 5 I will reread the discourse in relation to the narratives of white women who were actually in interracial relationships. This provides a second opportunity to think more generally about discourses, for it shows how the discourse against interracial relationships, while certainly affecting these women’s lives and those of their partners and children, neither adequately described nor fully contained them.
