As I pushed him around the neighborhood, I thought of him as the perfect brown baby, soft-skinned and tulip-lipped, with a full head of black hair, even if it was the opposite of my blond waves and fair skin. What nationality is his mother? Virginia struck down laws banning such unions. In , 12 percent of all new marriages were interracial, the Pew Research Center reported.
Media Representation and Interracial Couples | JSTOR Daily
As a descendant of slaves and slaveholders, I embody uncomfortable incongruities — just as America does. There was a Strom Thurmond-esque artificiality to this cry for racial purity. Southern patriarchs made an art out of objecting to what was happening under their own noses — or pelvises. As history would prove, human urges, whether violent or amorous, inevitably muddy lines, and master-slave rape and coupling produced many mixed people.
These eleven couples, from the United States and beyond, each found their own way of navigating the challenges that interracial couples have faced throughout recent history. Some stories are heroic and others read as cautionary tales. What the couples have in common is a determination to live and love on their own terms.
Recent years have seen increases in both interracial adolescent romances and portrayals of young interracial relationships. How does fear of judgment affect these couples? We demonstrate that youth involved in romantic interracial relationships may be using some of the techniques proposed by this theory to avoid stigmatization when in public, such as avoiding letting others know about their partner, not introducing him or her to their parents, or not holding hands in public. Young interracial couples may also find themselves without models. Interracial relationships have increased significantly in both number and visibility, however, since , when Vaquera and Kao published their paper.