“There are plenty of WM/BW marriages like mine out there. So why aren’t the white men in those marriages writing about them?”
Because it has become ordinary to people. Most don’t care what other people do as long as it doesn’t affect them. The question suggests that the author is fighting for a cause that’s already been won.
I would love to believe that you're right about this! The whole thrust of my memoir is that my family and I simply want to pursue our American happiness as per the Declaration of Independence. But we find ourselves outflanked by "America is incurably racist!" doomers on the intersectional left and White Replacement theorists on the right. So the cause hasn't been quite as completely won as you believe. Stories remain to be told. Many authors through the years, from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to Endesha Ida Mae Holland and Jesmyn Ward, have presumed that when white men and black women come into contact, very bad things are in store. But things have changed, yes, and Tracey Livesay and the flourishing category of so-called BW/WM romance is a sign of that. (I was unfamiliar with the category until a few months ago. It's quite a thing.)
Thanks for bringing awareness to this issue. It seems the dominant narrative (at least in my circles) since 2020 has been that anytime there’s a mixed race couple the white partner is subjugating the black partner and this is further evidence of racism and white supremacy in our country. WW who “take” BM are destroying black communities by taking the good ones. WM who share their lives with BW are really just living out a fantasy. I always felt both of these views dehumanize the individual experiences of people who, by and large, just want to be happy and share their lives with a good person.
If winning means that you have to convert or vanquish everyone who opposes you, then there's a cause. But that means that everything's a cause that has to be fought. I don't buy that. If the overwhelming majority--and for practical purposes, 94% = overwhelming majority--believes as you do, you've won. There will always be naysayers for anything, and I mean ANYthing. That doesn't mean you haven't won, only that some people are unconvinceable.
Most Americans believe that free elections are the essence of our form of government. There are some who disagree. Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me an email that showed an ad in a newspaper advertising for the flat earth society. In it, they said that people from around the globe would be attending. I'll let you think soon that for a whole microsecond....
I've been married to my black wife for over 36 years; we have two children and one grandchild. While the only people I encounter who bring up our different races are liberals, I have learned over the years to never discuss race (in the context of our marriage) with anyone.
Our relationship has nothing to do with politics, and never will.
My wife indulges my politics-junkie side: CNN, Fox, News Nation, MSNBC. But we have more fun just turning the news off and kibbitzing "The Voice." I appreciate your comment. Couples like us, I've discovered, have many different ways of making things works. Diversity is good.
Btw my family has black russian indian mexican and vietnamese besides irish. My dad would say, “no one can say we arent an equal opportunity family!” 😂 but other than that race and color dont seem relevant to us and its unusual to discuss unless re ethnic celebration.
Good point. One reason why nobody's going on about the fact that they are a mixed couple, as it were, is probably because the couple they'll soon be supplanting, Harris and Emhoff, are that. So they don't represent a first, in that sense.
White dudes for Harris were incredibly cringy. Look at us, we are SO open-minded, liberal and non-racist that we support a black woman! Us, the white dudes! Did they want a medal for supporting her? Did they think that her sex and skin color were essential ? Most of us were just trying to figure out what she stands for.
Maybe they aren't there because it is not a situation people find unusual and therefor interesting. Race is not necessarily an indicator of huge cultural divid. Every couple comes from their own familial cultural background, and every (successful) couple creates a new familial culture in which their newly created family lives.
Just speculating based on numbers and years as a (formerly) hyper-progressive, identitarian, "antiracist" WW:
1. Among B/W interracial couples, the predominant pairing is BM/WW: last I remember seeing the data (granted was a long while now, and in the Tupelo, MS newspaper, coincidentally!), the split is 75%/25% . So among the certainly small universe of B/W hetero couple memoirs, your configuration is even smaller. (Loving notwithstanding, and maybe it should count more since it changed so much!)
2. I do think that "wokeness" is bereft and toxic and am glad that I finally woke (haha) up from it. But even without the overt politics of it, the general sense of it has filtered down to an almost cellular level in culture, even among not especially political and conservative people. WHITE MAN BAD is deep, and for the more progressive-minded white guys, it's been pretty heavily programmed that they *can't* speak about race at all, unless it's to spout the dogma and pass the mic to a POC.
Trying to write about your relationship as memoir is a daunting task (something most folks are too busy living life to even contemplate) and then to have to add the fraught lens of race on top of it, through the voice of the one who's (allegedly) in the unavoidable power/oppressor role... The cultural headwinds (including the publishing ones) seem strong against this one*, unless the WM checks all the hyper-"woke" boxes in how he talks about race and racism and BW.
*The increasingly multi-racial/ethnic/cultural Trump and Republican mandate may change this, but it will take multiple election cycles and sustained commitment for it to really move the cultural institutions.
Great reply. Thanks. Both your numbered bullet-points are spot-on. I consider myself an old-school liberal with progressive inclinations, but the 2010's were a long slow wakeup call about the creeping illiberalism of the left, and progressive overreach during and after the summer of 2020 finally forced my hand. My memoir blends the story of true love, marriage, and the raising of a kid with an accounting of the way in which a desire to see clearly--for my son's well-being, in particular--forced me towards the center. And your hunch in point #2 was certainly true in my case: I got zero traction among major publishers. But I found the right editor, an old college friend who happens to be an unrepentatnt neocon, and we worked beautifully together. My book is about a lifelong hunger to find beloved community--which is to say, to let race go and just be human. In this essay, of course, I was trying to make an argument about the lack of a particular literary tradition where one might have expected to find it, and so, for the purposes of analysis, I used race-based analytic terms that clearly annoy some people. You got where I'm coming from, and I thank you for that. [Edited to add: brooding on your comment about WHITE MAN BAD, I just realized that I'd completely forgotten about one important white-guy-authored interracial family memoir: Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family" (1998). It's not about interracial marriage, at all, but about the fact that the author was descended from one of South Carolina's most notorious slaveholding families. Ball makes an uncomfortable quest to figure out the full story of his family, broadly conceived, a quest that leads him to track down the descendants of some of the people his ancestors owned. Not all of them were happy to be found! It stands askew from the post-Loving tradition I'm investigating, but it definitely deserves a footnote, maybe even two asterisks.]
Maybe the memoirs have been written, but the editors haven't taken them. Publishing is an odd game and gives a skewed idea of what people are actually writing.
Racialization of everything is at its best fatiguing for everyone, the targets of racialization first and foremost. My wife and I often joke that "the master race that white supremacists seek is in reality inter-racial" just to poke fun of the remnant white supremacists. If people can stay together in family with embodied love, that's all the world needs.
I also recall a lyric from a local radical activist / rapper in one of his songs, where a fellow rapper encourages him to "stay black" and he tells him instead "stay radical." As in, look beyond race at the power dynamics (which may be racialized...and if and when so...WHY?).
Really encouraged to see the shift of 4% - 94% acceptance of interracial unions over the past 80 years (am I the only one that bristles at calling it "approval?" Mutual love needs no "approval" but acceptance is nice). Americans tend to be conservative with a small c. As in private. As in, as long as what's happening is between consenting adults free of coercion, let's keep the government out of it, because what matters is love, not demographics.
But there's still an organized right wing movement to use government to interfere with people's personal lives and bodies that's anything but "conservative" in the above sense. The radical left that many say are fixated on race (actually, I think more establishment leftists are fixated on race) seem to be more of a byproduct of the marginal right that has very strong and often violent opinions. My parent's good friends and neighbors are a bi-racial couple and their son (also in a "mixed race" marriage w/his wife and kids) was targeted by the Proud Boys a few years ago in a terrible incident that forced him to quit his job and move to a secure location to protect his family. Proud Boys may be part of that 4%, but they are a very vocal and violent 4%. Politics and policy aside, we MUST NOT BE PASSIVE BYSTANDERS TO THAT CRAP. As fellow citizens, let alone as friends, neighbors, family.
At the same time, you have a bunch of other folks who haven't dealt with -- let alone acknowledged -- that they have unresolved internalized issues around race, and they continue to racialize things in denial of their inability to see and treat people as people.
As long as there are people forcefully making race an issue, it'll be an issue. Groups like the Proud Boys are more marginal but more violent, whereas the ubiquitous racialization of dominant culture is more like a long slow burn. These require different responses, but they both require responses. In every "ally space" I've been in, the first message was always the same: if you wan to be an "ally" then acknowledge and deal with your own shit, first and foremost. Are you here for the ego trip, to feel better about yourself? For affirmation, approval, a pat on the head? To hate on others? It's still unfortunately common, and counterproductive.
I agree with pretty much every point you make. Very interesting thoughts about the Proud Boys and their old-school white identitarian rejection of my transracialist ideal. Yes, those folks still exist--although, as I note in my book, my family and I haven't encountered any of them in Mississippi over the past 20 years. But I'm sure they're out there, and we should reject their fear-based thinking. You're making me aware of a paradox that lies at the heart of my project, which is that in speaking and writing about these issues, I find myself enmeshed in precisely the sort of racialized vocabulary that I reject as a world view. In my book, for example, I begin with a preface in which I explain why I'm using the lower-case "black" and "white" rather than aligning with contemporary usage everywhere left of center, which capitalizes Black and sometimes capitalizes White. I think there's no need to raise the walls between people that extra notch, hardening each individual into their own racialized bunker. My family doesn't function like that; it feels pointless to me, that extra tick of the dial. By the same token, my wife and I DO chatter briefly when a couple "like us" comes on the TV. We're aware that we dwell in a racialized world that is slowly but decidedly overcoming the stigma that once attached to "our" kind of coupledom. It's hard explicitly to acknowledge that sort of change, however, without running the risk I've run in this article, which is misleading some readers into believing that I'm that tiresome sort of nattering, scolding, ally-demanding leftist (think Tim Wise) whose entire stock and trade is hard-edged racialization, the reduction of our humanity to the collective histories and presumptive characteristics of the "races" we of needs should be sorted into. I am not Tim Wise! I disagree with his approach, his hectoring, know-it-all tone. In any case, thanks for your post, which inspired these thoughts.
IMO it is important in this context, ie the North has always played itself as the Good Guy and never owned nor grappled with its own sordid history and involvement in racism and slavery. I'd love to read your take on it sometime as a professor of Southern studies (north vs south is another festering division).
Oregon was explicitly founded as a white ethnostate. By abolishing slavery, but explicitly excluding black people from living there under threat of legal corporal punishment, Oregonians effectively racialized solidarity in the class struggle against slavery. Oregonians didn't vote to abolish slavery. They voted to abolish white slavery, specifically. Oregonians repealed these racial "black exclusion" laws only very recently, in 2002, but nearly 30% of Oregonians voted to keep them, actively supporting the legal basis of Oregon as a white segregationist ethnostate in modern times. Perhaps this helps explain why so many white supremacist groups and movements have opportunistically felt it served as a welcoming home base for their operations. In my perspective, the greatest purpose of racism is to undermine the struggle for class justice and accountability by pitting different "groups" against one another based on arbitrary characteristics (skin color, religion, gender, etc). If we allow people to continue asserting these arbitrary demographic characteristics as a basis for division and conflict, then we will continue to be ruled by unaccountable oligarchs and other modern robber barrons and their entitled nepo babies, and we'll start to look a lot like the sort of dysfunctional neo-feudal revanchist mafia empire that Ruzzia exemplifies.
Well-written, thank you for this! I've often wondered about interracial couples. I've been one half of many interracial couplings, so I have some experience in this. I remember back in the mid '80s when I had gone to a downtown Philadelphia restaurant with my Black girlfriend and the Black server truly made her disapproval known.
And then during the George Floyd riots I was invited to join a Facebook group, the name of which escapes me now, but it was supposedly all about acknowledging and healing the divisions between us. I had been a member of this group for only a week or two when a White lady posted a photo of two interracial toddlers holding hands and smiling. The reaction to this posting was devastatingly alarming.
Many people commented that this was unreal and deeply hurtful, because it was unreal. Many Black commentators opined that it reminded them of discrimination and the brutality of life in America. Many White commentators agreed and apologized to the Black commentators for being, I don't know, I guess complicit in this brutality.
The lady who posted this deleted the post. I contacted her via Facebook Messenger and had even called her, offering support and my understanding of how cultural relations had vastly improved in America throughout my years. She had been very grateful to speak to me, but it wasn't long before she dropped out of sight and refused to answer my messages. One of the last things I remember her telling me was that she and her husband had recently joined a group designed to teach all White people of how unredeemeably bad they were!
Since then, and since the riots, I have been wondering how interracial couples have been navigating this morass. And here of course I'm speaking of interracial couplings of one Black, one White... Were the White halves eternally damned?
In Matt Walsh's "Am I Racist?" a White woman admits to the cameras that she is eternally and unavoidably disparaging to her Black husband. This, a full four years after those deeply deceitful Floyd riots.
Perhaps I'm deeply cynical by sentiment, but still I have this unquenchable optimism in the human spirit. We are created for greater things! Surely most interracial couples understand and celebrate this. Sadly some interracial couples don't, and not only will one half exploit the other, Progressive in groups like Black Lives Matter exploit these couples to their profound detriment.
... Well, this is just me expressing my thoughts. For what they're worth. Allow me to conclude by repeating myself: we are created for greater things! There is a Divine purpose to life, and we get so caught up in our own little dramas we forget this. Some of us even deliberately push that Divine purpose aside. I recently heard a definition of sin as this: believing that we are better than God. That we know better than God. It is a humbling definition.
You need to read my book. Since I'm looking to assemble some sort of tour, hitting up as many bookstores as I canplease give me a sense of where you live--county and state, if you'd prefer not to give the town. Or just a plausible local bookstore or two. Have car, will travel.....
I guess I'm wondering why you are continuing to divide American's into categories because of who they vote for? Did you look to see if there were any WM-for-BW or BM-for-WW couple's in the people who voted for Trump. By continuing to only look at one side as virtuous you are missing all those people who just want to be accepted as an individual and that's why Trump won. Not because of his personality but because the establishment continues to divide us into groups. Groups are made of individuals and those are the people that matter in America based on our founding documents and how they saw that every man or woman had potential to do great things.
I think you've missed the point of my essay, or one key point, which is its critique of precisely the intersectional politics that you, like me, intensely dislike. That's why I celebrate Obama's 2004 speech, which resonated with a broad swath of Americans and got him elected twice, and why I critique Hillary's rhetoric, which sought to divide us in order to conquer. That didn't work--and I'm glad, even though I did, albeit without enthusiasm, vote for her. I'm a big fan of Erec Smith's work and his underlying focus on individual identity, not group identity. I think that you and I agree on more than you realize.
I wasn't familiar with "Complicity," just the concept of northern slavery, but I've just ordered it and thank you for the recommendation. I've long known and taught that Perth Amboy NJ and Newport RI were slavetrading ports; those remarkable mansions in Newport were, I believe, built with slavetrading profits. There's been a lot of work done over the past 15 years--i.e., since "Complicity" was published--about the participation of elite northern universities (Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, among others) in the slavery racket. It's good that all this history is finally getting out. Yes, in part because of the persistence of Jim Crow in the South until the mid-1960s, it's been easy for northerners to project all the sins of the slavery era onto the South; that projection is something I help my Southern Studies students appreciate. It's equally true that the romanticized image of the South as a sweet dreamy land of moonlight and Magnolias is a joint-stock creation in which northern Tin Pan Alley songwriters played a huge role; my research into pop music makes this clear and I could cite dozens of songs to back this up. (See Karen Cox's book, "Dreaming of Dixie.") I also knew that Oregon had a long history of white supremacist stuff going on. But most of the western states had stuff like that going on. My maternal grandparents homesteaded in Apple Valley, California from the 1950s through the 1970s, back when it was empty desert. (It was like that in 1965 when we visited.) Now it's all built up. It's like that opening scene in the short-film version of "Old Town Road": it's gone from empty desert to the 'burbs. What I didn't know is that Apple Valley had restrictive covenants: "no blacks allowed." I can't find the video or article that hipped me to this, but I found one about Sacramento: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W9TbfdVr18
I still have a bunch of liberal leaning friends and any time a white man starts dating or expressing appreciation for any woman who isn’t white they immediately accuse him of fetishizing her. There is definitely a strain of feminist that holds the view that men cannot be genuinely attracted to a black or Asian woman without some type of sexual fetish being involved.
I’m no longer friends with this woman, but we were talking about Halle Berry and I mentioned how my husband had had a huge crush on her for decades. (Which I totally understand since she’s one of the most beautiful women on the planet!) My former friend immediately asked if he had a ‘thing’ for black women and was I ok with that? I was like, “no, he just has a ‘thing’ for stunning movie stars like most men.” The entire hyper-race-conscious conversation the last decade is so poisonous and regressive.
Emhoff is Jewish, not White. I am Gay and Jewish (and old 80) and I never ever thought of myself as White. From the outset of the Affirmation Action's racialization of America, I never put myself down as White. I checked "other." We Jews are a People who are already thoroughly "intergrated."
I felt no inclination to vote for Kamala because she had married a Jewish guy. Nor, did the fact that Emhoff is Jewish tone down Biden's anti-Semitism nor stop Kamala from saying that we Jews were committing genocide in Gaza. Identity Politics in all shades is narshkeit.
I'm half-Jewish, Rick, and I don't spend much time thinking of myself as white. (I certainly don't capitalize the word and empower it in that way, as you have.) Certainly I didn't think of myelf as white growing up. I was the product of a mixed marriage--an interfaith marriage, they'd now call it--and, quite conscious and proud of how mixed I was, regularly described myself as a half Russian-Lithuanian Jewish, half Scotch-Irish-Dutch mutt. I would never have used the acronym BW/WM or WM-for-BW to describe my memoir, for example, until I searched Amazon books and discovered that there was a whole retail category of BW/WM romance novels. Let's just say that I wear my whiteness lightly, engaging it only when I have to and for strategic and/or analytic purposes. My wife similarly wears her race lightly, and we are playful about such things. "Look, honey, there's a couple like us!" I used to say when certain ads came on TV, and she'd look in from the kitchen and go "Hey now." But that was 15 years ago, when such ads were rare; now they're part of the everyday. (It's somewhat more common these days to see IR couples like us smooching in ads than to see gay men smooching, much less gay women smooching, but that, too, is changing.) Similarly, neither my wife or I has tried to impose a racial identity on our son. We just told him to be proud of who he is and of the rich stew of familial relations that lie behind and around who he is. That policy has worked out well, I think, but only time will tell. For the record, I did NOT vote for Harris because she is a "woman of color," or because I wanted to see a black/Jewish couple in the White House. But I do know the meaning of "lagniappe," and if she'd won, that--her and Doug in the Big House--would have been a lagniappe. Similarly, I'm sure you wouldn't vote for a politician just because he's gay. But I suspect that if a gay president were elected whose policies you broadly agreed with, you might feel just the slightest pleasure, when he took office, at the establishing of a new benchmark for a more accepting and tolerant USA. That's how I would have felt. No more, no less.
I started capitalizing White because everyone was capitalizing Black. White is not actually a bona fide group just as Hispanic and Latinix are not a bona fide groups, but people treat them all as such. Armenians and Jews, in contrast, are groups even if they are sometimes fuzzy around the edges due to intermarriage. Thus, I was merely following what seemed to be accepted convention with no implication beyond grammar.
“There are plenty of WM/BW marriages like mine out there. So why aren’t the white men in those marriages writing about them?”
Because it has become ordinary to people. Most don’t care what other people do as long as it doesn’t affect them. The question suggests that the author is fighting for a cause that’s already been won.
I would love to believe that you're right about this! The whole thrust of my memoir is that my family and I simply want to pursue our American happiness as per the Declaration of Independence. But we find ourselves outflanked by "America is incurably racist!" doomers on the intersectional left and White Replacement theorists on the right. So the cause hasn't been quite as completely won as you believe. Stories remain to be told. Many authors through the years, from Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs to Endesha Ida Mae Holland and Jesmyn Ward, have presumed that when white men and black women come into contact, very bad things are in store. But things have changed, yes, and Tracey Livesay and the flourishing category of so-called BW/WM romance is a sign of that. (I was unfamiliar with the category until a few months ago. It's quite a thing.)
Thanks for bringing awareness to this issue. It seems the dominant narrative (at least in my circles) since 2020 has been that anytime there’s a mixed race couple the white partner is subjugating the black partner and this is further evidence of racism and white supremacy in our country. WW who “take” BM are destroying black communities by taking the good ones. WM who share their lives with BW are really just living out a fantasy. I always felt both of these views dehumanize the individual experiences of people who, by and large, just want to be happy and share their lives with a good person.
If winning means that you have to convert or vanquish everyone who opposes you, then there's a cause. But that means that everything's a cause that has to be fought. I don't buy that. If the overwhelming majority--and for practical purposes, 94% = overwhelming majority--believes as you do, you've won. There will always be naysayers for anything, and I mean ANYthing. That doesn't mean you haven't won, only that some people are unconvinceable.
Most Americans believe that free elections are the essence of our form of government. There are some who disagree. Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me an email that showed an ad in a newspaper advertising for the flat earth society. In it, they said that people from around the globe would be attending. I'll let you think soon that for a whole microsecond....
I've been married to my black wife for over 36 years; we have two children and one grandchild. While the only people I encounter who bring up our different races are liberals, I have learned over the years to never discuss race (in the context of our marriage) with anyone.
Our relationship has nothing to do with politics, and never will.
My wife indulges my politics-junkie side: CNN, Fox, News Nation, MSNBC. But we have more fun just turning the news off and kibbitzing "The Voice." I appreciate your comment. Couples like us, I've discovered, have many different ways of making things works. Diversity is good.
If we are going on about race im surprised no mention of white vp vance and brown wife. Or maybe shes considered black too with kamala harris?
Btw my family has black russian indian mexican and vietnamese besides irish. My dad would say, “no one can say we arent an equal opportunity family!” 😂 but other than that race and color dont seem relevant to us and its unusual to discuss unless re ethnic celebration.
Good point. One reason why nobody's going on about the fact that they are a mixed couple, as it were, is probably because the couple they'll soon be supplanting, Harris and Emhoff, are that. So they don't represent a first, in that sense.
White dudes for Harris were incredibly cringy. Look at us, we are SO open-minded, liberal and non-racist that we support a black woman! Us, the white dudes! Did they want a medal for supporting her? Did they think that her sex and skin color were essential ? Most of us were just trying to figure out what she stands for.
Maybe they aren't there because it is not a situation people find unusual and therefor interesting. Race is not necessarily an indicator of huge cultural divid. Every couple comes from their own familial cultural background, and every (successful) couple creates a new familial culture in which their newly created family lives.
As the song says.. Love is all around. Radical left only looks for perceived hate and their voice is way too loud. That is the problem.
Just speculating based on numbers and years as a (formerly) hyper-progressive, identitarian, "antiracist" WW:
1. Among B/W interracial couples, the predominant pairing is BM/WW: last I remember seeing the data (granted was a long while now, and in the Tupelo, MS newspaper, coincidentally!), the split is 75%/25% . So among the certainly small universe of B/W hetero couple memoirs, your configuration is even smaller. (Loving notwithstanding, and maybe it should count more since it changed so much!)
2. I do think that "wokeness" is bereft and toxic and am glad that I finally woke (haha) up from it. But even without the overt politics of it, the general sense of it has filtered down to an almost cellular level in culture, even among not especially political and conservative people. WHITE MAN BAD is deep, and for the more progressive-minded white guys, it's been pretty heavily programmed that they *can't* speak about race at all, unless it's to spout the dogma and pass the mic to a POC.
Trying to write about your relationship as memoir is a daunting task (something most folks are too busy living life to even contemplate) and then to have to add the fraught lens of race on top of it, through the voice of the one who's (allegedly) in the unavoidable power/oppressor role... The cultural headwinds (including the publishing ones) seem strong against this one*, unless the WM checks all the hyper-"woke" boxes in how he talks about race and racism and BW.
*The increasingly multi-racial/ethnic/cultural Trump and Republican mandate may change this, but it will take multiple election cycles and sustained commitment for it to really move the cultural institutions.
Great reply. Thanks. Both your numbered bullet-points are spot-on. I consider myself an old-school liberal with progressive inclinations, but the 2010's were a long slow wakeup call about the creeping illiberalism of the left, and progressive overreach during and after the summer of 2020 finally forced my hand. My memoir blends the story of true love, marriage, and the raising of a kid with an accounting of the way in which a desire to see clearly--for my son's well-being, in particular--forced me towards the center. And your hunch in point #2 was certainly true in my case: I got zero traction among major publishers. But I found the right editor, an old college friend who happens to be an unrepentatnt neocon, and we worked beautifully together. My book is about a lifelong hunger to find beloved community--which is to say, to let race go and just be human. In this essay, of course, I was trying to make an argument about the lack of a particular literary tradition where one might have expected to find it, and so, for the purposes of analysis, I used race-based analytic terms that clearly annoy some people. You got where I'm coming from, and I thank you for that. [Edited to add: brooding on your comment about WHITE MAN BAD, I just realized that I'd completely forgotten about one important white-guy-authored interracial family memoir: Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family" (1998). It's not about interracial marriage, at all, but about the fact that the author was descended from one of South Carolina's most notorious slaveholding families. Ball makes an uncomfortable quest to figure out the full story of his family, broadly conceived, a quest that leads him to track down the descendants of some of the people his ancestors owned. Not all of them were happy to be found! It stands askew from the post-Loving tradition I'm investigating, but it definitely deserves a footnote, maybe even two asterisks.]
Maybe the memoirs have been written, but the editors haven't taken them. Publishing is an odd game and gives a skewed idea of what people are actually writing.
Racialization of everything is at its best fatiguing for everyone, the targets of racialization first and foremost. My wife and I often joke that "the master race that white supremacists seek is in reality inter-racial" just to poke fun of the remnant white supremacists. If people can stay together in family with embodied love, that's all the world needs.
I also recall a lyric from a local radical activist / rapper in one of his songs, where a fellow rapper encourages him to "stay black" and he tells him instead "stay radical." As in, look beyond race at the power dynamics (which may be racialized...and if and when so...WHY?).
Really encouraged to see the shift of 4% - 94% acceptance of interracial unions over the past 80 years (am I the only one that bristles at calling it "approval?" Mutual love needs no "approval" but acceptance is nice). Americans tend to be conservative with a small c. As in private. As in, as long as what's happening is between consenting adults free of coercion, let's keep the government out of it, because what matters is love, not demographics.
But there's still an organized right wing movement to use government to interfere with people's personal lives and bodies that's anything but "conservative" in the above sense. The radical left that many say are fixated on race (actually, I think more establishment leftists are fixated on race) seem to be more of a byproduct of the marginal right that has very strong and often violent opinions. My parent's good friends and neighbors are a bi-racial couple and their son (also in a "mixed race" marriage w/his wife and kids) was targeted by the Proud Boys a few years ago in a terrible incident that forced him to quit his job and move to a secure location to protect his family. Proud Boys may be part of that 4%, but they are a very vocal and violent 4%. Politics and policy aside, we MUST NOT BE PASSIVE BYSTANDERS TO THAT CRAP. As fellow citizens, let alone as friends, neighbors, family.
At the same time, you have a bunch of other folks who haven't dealt with -- let alone acknowledged -- that they have unresolved internalized issues around race, and they continue to racialize things in denial of their inability to see and treat people as people.
As long as there are people forcefully making race an issue, it'll be an issue. Groups like the Proud Boys are more marginal but more violent, whereas the ubiquitous racialization of dominant culture is more like a long slow burn. These require different responses, but they both require responses. In every "ally space" I've been in, the first message was always the same: if you wan to be an "ally" then acknowledge and deal with your own shit, first and foremost. Are you here for the ego trip, to feel better about yourself? For affirmation, approval, a pat on the head? To hate on others? It's still unfortunately common, and counterproductive.
I agree with pretty much every point you make. Very interesting thoughts about the Proud Boys and their old-school white identitarian rejection of my transracialist ideal. Yes, those folks still exist--although, as I note in my book, my family and I haven't encountered any of them in Mississippi over the past 20 years. But I'm sure they're out there, and we should reject their fear-based thinking. You're making me aware of a paradox that lies at the heart of my project, which is that in speaking and writing about these issues, I find myself enmeshed in precisely the sort of racialized vocabulary that I reject as a world view. In my book, for example, I begin with a preface in which I explain why I'm using the lower-case "black" and "white" rather than aligning with contemporary usage everywhere left of center, which capitalizes Black and sometimes capitalizes White. I think there's no need to raise the walls between people that extra notch, hardening each individual into their own racialized bunker. My family doesn't function like that; it feels pointless to me, that extra tick of the dial. By the same token, my wife and I DO chatter briefly when a couple "like us" comes on the TV. We're aware that we dwell in a racialized world that is slowly but decidedly overcoming the stigma that once attached to "our" kind of coupledom. It's hard explicitly to acknowledge that sort of change, however, without running the risk I've run in this article, which is misleading some readers into believing that I'm that tiresome sort of nattering, scolding, ally-demanding leftist (think Tim Wise) whose entire stock and trade is hard-edged racialization, the reduction of our humanity to the collective histories and presumptive characteristics of the "races" we of needs should be sorted into. I am not Tim Wise! I disagree with his approach, his hectoring, know-it-all tone. In any case, thanks for your post, which inspired these thoughts.
Likewise, thanks for introducing me to blues harp and Satan (that might sound weird to others out of context!).
Have you come across this book?
https://www.npr.org/2005/12/07/5042377/complicity-how-the-north-profited-from-slavery
IMO it is important in this context, ie the North has always played itself as the Good Guy and never owned nor grappled with its own sordid history and involvement in racism and slavery. I'd love to read your take on it sometime as a professor of Southern studies (north vs south is another festering division).
Caee in point: https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/exclusion_laws/#.Xt1n1Z5Ki-4
Oregon was explicitly founded as a white ethnostate. By abolishing slavery, but explicitly excluding black people from living there under threat of legal corporal punishment, Oregonians effectively racialized solidarity in the class struggle against slavery. Oregonians didn't vote to abolish slavery. They voted to abolish white slavery, specifically. Oregonians repealed these racial "black exclusion" laws only very recently, in 2002, but nearly 30% of Oregonians voted to keep them, actively supporting the legal basis of Oregon as a white segregationist ethnostate in modern times. Perhaps this helps explain why so many white supremacist groups and movements have opportunistically felt it served as a welcoming home base for their operations. In my perspective, the greatest purpose of racism is to undermine the struggle for class justice and accountability by pitting different "groups" against one another based on arbitrary characteristics (skin color, religion, gender, etc). If we allow people to continue asserting these arbitrary demographic characteristics as a basis for division and conflict, then we will continue to be ruled by unaccountable oligarchs and other modern robber barrons and their entitled nepo babies, and we'll start to look a lot like the sort of dysfunctional neo-feudal revanchist mafia empire that Ruzzia exemplifies.
Well-written, thank you for this! I've often wondered about interracial couples. I've been one half of many interracial couplings, so I have some experience in this. I remember back in the mid '80s when I had gone to a downtown Philadelphia restaurant with my Black girlfriend and the Black server truly made her disapproval known.
And then during the George Floyd riots I was invited to join a Facebook group, the name of which escapes me now, but it was supposedly all about acknowledging and healing the divisions between us. I had been a member of this group for only a week or two when a White lady posted a photo of two interracial toddlers holding hands and smiling. The reaction to this posting was devastatingly alarming.
Many people commented that this was unreal and deeply hurtful, because it was unreal. Many Black commentators opined that it reminded them of discrimination and the brutality of life in America. Many White commentators agreed and apologized to the Black commentators for being, I don't know, I guess complicit in this brutality.
The lady who posted this deleted the post. I contacted her via Facebook Messenger and had even called her, offering support and my understanding of how cultural relations had vastly improved in America throughout my years. She had been very grateful to speak to me, but it wasn't long before she dropped out of sight and refused to answer my messages. One of the last things I remember her telling me was that she and her husband had recently joined a group designed to teach all White people of how unredeemeably bad they were!
Since then, and since the riots, I have been wondering how interracial couples have been navigating this morass. And here of course I'm speaking of interracial couplings of one Black, one White... Were the White halves eternally damned?
In Matt Walsh's "Am I Racist?" a White woman admits to the cameras that she is eternally and unavoidably disparaging to her Black husband. This, a full four years after those deeply deceitful Floyd riots.
Perhaps I'm deeply cynical by sentiment, but still I have this unquenchable optimism in the human spirit. We are created for greater things! Surely most interracial couples understand and celebrate this. Sadly some interracial couples don't, and not only will one half exploit the other, Progressive in groups like Black Lives Matter exploit these couples to their profound detriment.
... Well, this is just me expressing my thoughts. For what they're worth. Allow me to conclude by repeating myself: we are created for greater things! There is a Divine purpose to life, and we get so caught up in our own little dramas we forget this. Some of us even deliberately push that Divine purpose aside. I recently heard a definition of sin as this: believing that we are better than God. That we know better than God. It is a humbling definition.
We are created for better.
You need to read my book. Since I'm looking to assemble some sort of tour, hitting up as many bookstores as I canplease give me a sense of where you live--county and state, if you'd prefer not to give the town. Or just a plausible local bookstore or two. Have car, will travel.....
I guess I'm wondering why you are continuing to divide American's into categories because of who they vote for? Did you look to see if there were any WM-for-BW or BM-for-WW couple's in the people who voted for Trump. By continuing to only look at one side as virtuous you are missing all those people who just want to be accepted as an individual and that's why Trump won. Not because of his personality but because the establishment continues to divide us into groups. Groups are made of individuals and those are the people that matter in America based on our founding documents and how they saw that every man or woman had potential to do great things.
I think you've missed the point of my essay, or one key point, which is its critique of precisely the intersectional politics that you, like me, intensely dislike. That's why I celebrate Obama's 2004 speech, which resonated with a broad swath of Americans and got him elected twice, and why I critique Hillary's rhetoric, which sought to divide us in order to conquer. That didn't work--and I'm glad, even though I did, albeit without enthusiasm, vote for her. I'm a big fan of Erec Smith's work and his underlying focus on individual identity, not group identity. I think that you and I agree on more than you realize.
Thanks for the clarification. You only mentioned one side of the political spectrum so that is why I commented.
I wasn't familiar with "Complicity," just the concept of northern slavery, but I've just ordered it and thank you for the recommendation. I've long known and taught that Perth Amboy NJ and Newport RI were slavetrading ports; those remarkable mansions in Newport were, I believe, built with slavetrading profits. There's been a lot of work done over the past 15 years--i.e., since "Complicity" was published--about the participation of elite northern universities (Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, among others) in the slavery racket. It's good that all this history is finally getting out. Yes, in part because of the persistence of Jim Crow in the South until the mid-1960s, it's been easy for northerners to project all the sins of the slavery era onto the South; that projection is something I help my Southern Studies students appreciate. It's equally true that the romanticized image of the South as a sweet dreamy land of moonlight and Magnolias is a joint-stock creation in which northern Tin Pan Alley songwriters played a huge role; my research into pop music makes this clear and I could cite dozens of songs to back this up. (See Karen Cox's book, "Dreaming of Dixie.") I also knew that Oregon had a long history of white supremacist stuff going on. But most of the western states had stuff like that going on. My maternal grandparents homesteaded in Apple Valley, California from the 1950s through the 1970s, back when it was empty desert. (It was like that in 1965 when we visited.) Now it's all built up. It's like that opening scene in the short-film version of "Old Town Road": it's gone from empty desert to the 'burbs. What I didn't know is that Apple Valley had restrictive covenants: "no blacks allowed." I can't find the video or article that hipped me to this, but I found one about Sacramento: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W9TbfdVr18
I still have a bunch of liberal leaning friends and any time a white man starts dating or expressing appreciation for any woman who isn’t white they immediately accuse him of fetishizing her. There is definitely a strain of feminist that holds the view that men cannot be genuinely attracted to a black or Asian woman without some type of sexual fetish being involved.
I’m no longer friends with this woman, but we were talking about Halle Berry and I mentioned how my husband had had a huge crush on her for decades. (Which I totally understand since she’s one of the most beautiful women on the planet!) My former friend immediately asked if he had a ‘thing’ for black women and was I ok with that? I was like, “no, he just has a ‘thing’ for stunning movie stars like most men.” The entire hyper-race-conscious conversation the last decade is so poisonous and regressive.
Can we at least admit now that Doug Emhoff is not a great role model
Made me think of the popular WM/BW instagrams; they are also from the wife’s POV.
Emhoff is Jewish, not White. I am Gay and Jewish (and old 80) and I never ever thought of myself as White. From the outset of the Affirmation Action's racialization of America, I never put myself down as White. I checked "other." We Jews are a People who are already thoroughly "intergrated."
I felt no inclination to vote for Kamala because she had married a Jewish guy. Nor, did the fact that Emhoff is Jewish tone down Biden's anti-Semitism nor stop Kamala from saying that we Jews were committing genocide in Gaza. Identity Politics in all shades is narshkeit.
I'm half-Jewish, Rick, and I don't spend much time thinking of myself as white. (I certainly don't capitalize the word and empower it in that way, as you have.) Certainly I didn't think of myelf as white growing up. I was the product of a mixed marriage--an interfaith marriage, they'd now call it--and, quite conscious and proud of how mixed I was, regularly described myself as a half Russian-Lithuanian Jewish, half Scotch-Irish-Dutch mutt. I would never have used the acronym BW/WM or WM-for-BW to describe my memoir, for example, until I searched Amazon books and discovered that there was a whole retail category of BW/WM romance novels. Let's just say that I wear my whiteness lightly, engaging it only when I have to and for strategic and/or analytic purposes. My wife similarly wears her race lightly, and we are playful about such things. "Look, honey, there's a couple like us!" I used to say when certain ads came on TV, and she'd look in from the kitchen and go "Hey now." But that was 15 years ago, when such ads were rare; now they're part of the everyday. (It's somewhat more common these days to see IR couples like us smooching in ads than to see gay men smooching, much less gay women smooching, but that, too, is changing.) Similarly, neither my wife or I has tried to impose a racial identity on our son. We just told him to be proud of who he is and of the rich stew of familial relations that lie behind and around who he is. That policy has worked out well, I think, but only time will tell. For the record, I did NOT vote for Harris because she is a "woman of color," or because I wanted to see a black/Jewish couple in the White House. But I do know the meaning of "lagniappe," and if she'd won, that--her and Doug in the Big House--would have been a lagniappe. Similarly, I'm sure you wouldn't vote for a politician just because he's gay. But I suspect that if a gay president were elected whose policies you broadly agreed with, you might feel just the slightest pleasure, when he took office, at the establishing of a new benchmark for a more accepting and tolerant USA. That's how I would have felt. No more, no less.
I started capitalizing White because everyone was capitalizing Black. White is not actually a bona fide group just as Hispanic and Latinix are not a bona fide groups, but people treat them all as such. Armenians and Jews, in contrast, are groups even if they are sometimes fuzzy around the edges due to intermarriage. Thus, I was merely following what seemed to be accepted convention with no implication beyond grammar.