Interracial Intimacy and the Limits of Legal Analysis

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Solangel Maldonado, The Architecture of Desire: How the Law Shapes Interracial Intimacy and Perpetuates Inequality (New York University Press, 2024).

Russell K. Robinson

Professor Solangel Maldonado’s book shines a light on an important subject, which is how racial identity determines access to loving relationships. Race scholars have long focused on education, employment, and voting as measures of racial equality. Fewer have explored how race determines access to intimate, enduring relationships, whether marital or non-marital. Much of Maldonado’s book carefully documents how multiple laws interface to impose structural obstacles to people of different races meeting and forming meaningful relationships. For many decades, state and federal laws prohibited or penalized White people who sought to marry a Black person or another person of color. Moreover, over 50 years after the Supreme Court invalidated miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia, laws that appear race neutral on their face continue to foster what I have called “romantic segregation.” For example, Maldonado recounts how residential segregation, including racially restrictive covenants and redlining, reduce opportunities for people to live in neighborhoods that are truly integrated. Because public school assignments typically rely on these segregated neighborhoods, children of color are likely to attend schools that are underfunded and predominantly Black and/or Latine. Maldonado observes that, even when workplaces appear racially integrated, they are often stratified, with White people occupying the most powerful positions and people of color populating the lower rungs. These power differentials influence the nature of cross-race interactions. The cumulative effects of these multiple legal regimes create hurdles for people to meet potential romantic partners of different races. 

An important contribution of Maldonado’s book is that it demonstrates that anti-Blackness suffuses communities of color. That is, in general, Asian-American and Latine people’s perceived distance from Blackness provides them romantic opportunities that do not extend to Black people. The key divide may not be between White people and people of color. Perhaps instead we should delineate between people of color, including many Asian-American, Latine, and multiracial people who can obtain what Maldonado calls “honorary White status” through partnering with a White person, and the Black and other darker-skinned people of color whose phenotype precludes them from such assimilation. Maldonado writes candidly of her own Dominican-American family’s opposition to her dating a Black man, but also how their attitudes apparently changed over time. Her work joins that of Tanya Hernandez in urging us to reckon with anti-Blackness in Latine communities.

Maldonado’s focus on the law—including laws repealed or invalidated by courts many decades ago—is understandable because she is a law professor. Nonetheless, a legal lens may be inadequate. This book is hardly the first to enumerate the structural legal obstacles to interracial relationships. I would have preferred a more concise summary of this prior scholarship and greater attention to the social, political, and psychological barriers to interracial relationships that may endure long after legal change. Maldonado appears to assume that lifting structural impediments will enable people of different races to mix, and that will naturally increase the prevalence of interracial relationships. First, we can’t assume that quantity will increase just because society lifts legal impediments. The primary barriers in 2024 may not be legal. Second, we should care about the quality of interracial relationships at least as much as their quantity.

A qualitative exploration of interracial relationships might investigate the following questions. How is power distributed in interracial relationships? How might some White partners wield White privilege in the relationship, even as they profess to be “color-blind”? Are most White partners cognizant of their partner of color’s experiences with racial/gender discrimination? Do most people of color in a relationship with a White person feel empowered to challenge their partner’s perceptions of race and racism? To what extent do such White partners evolve in their race/gender consciousness over time and learn to take on race/gender discrimination as their personal concern? How is the Trump era and the MAGA movement roiling interracial couples and multiracial families? Did the racial uprising of 2020, which followed the killings of several unarmed African-Americans, shift the consciousness of White people in interracial relationships? 

We need more scholarship that illuminates the lived experiences of people dating across race lines to provide an overview of the diverse and complex experiences of people in interracial relationships. We also need a better understanding of how limiting groups such as Black women’s access to interracial relationships distorts the power dynamic between Black men and Black women. We ought not assume that interracial couples transcend race or are “color-blind” through love alone. Nor should we assume that such relationships were forged by racial fetishization. We need more qualitative and quantitative social science scholarship listening to the experiences of people who have dated interracially, synthesizing those accounts, and critically analyzing them. 

Some scholars involved in this symposium, such as Professor Dorothy Roberts, are doing this work. My scholarship is also taking up some of these questions. One stream of my scholarship uses intersectionality to investigate sexual racism. My initial interviewing study focused on LGBTQ people. We are in the process of launching a new study that centers young women of color who date men. Excerpts from two of my recent publications provide glimpses into how race, gender, and sexual orientation may intersect to skew the power dynamic in a romantic relationship. These excerpts come from the LGBT Relationships Study. My research team interviewed 100 LGBTQ people, mostly people of color, in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Chicago. The interview guide asked a series of questions about the participant’s dating and relationship experiences over their lifetime, including how race, gender, class, and sexual orientation impacted their relationships. (All of the names in the following section are pseudonyms.) 

In “It’s Like Slapping Somebody in the Face in the Middle of Sex”: An Intersectional Exploration of Emotional Abuse in Queer Relationships, I wrote about Kelsey, a lesbian in New York City who is half-White and half-Cuban and does not speak Spanish. Kelsey discussed a long-term relationship with Linda, a White woman who was fluent in Spanish. Linda spoke Spanish during sex, and this made Kelsey uncomfortable. Kelsey explained: “I’m like, ‘I don’t speak Spanish. I can’t do this with you.’ When you do that, even though I tell you that I don’t speak Spanish, it tells me that you’re not really seeing who I am here. You’re just having a fantasy that I’m here to serve that.” Linda, who had “only dated Hispanic women,” continued to speak Spanish while having sex with Kelsey. One way of making meaning of this dynamic is that Linda was coercing Kelsey to conform to an ethnic stereotype if she wanted to be Linda’s partner. Linda expected Kelsey to play up her Cuban heritage, at least in the bedroom. By pressuring Kelsey to “act like a Latina,” Linda aligned Kelsey with the other Latinas Linda had dated and erased Kelsey’s individuality. 

In Sexual Racism as White Privilege: The Psychic and Relational Negotiation of Desire, Power, and Sex, I wrote about Brittany, a Black transgender woman in her late 30s who described herself as conventionally feminine. Brittany described “coming out” as trans to her love interest Nico, an Italian and Colombian cisgender man in his mid-50s. Shortly after Brittany disclosed being trans, Nico asked Brittany to dominate him. Nico appeared to associate being a Black, transgender woman with an aggressive, dominant sexuality. Even though this role was not what Brittany desired, she acquiesced to Nico’s desires, in part because of her limited dating opportunities. 

Ramsey, a Black, nonbinary person in their 20s and living in the San Francisco Bay Area, described similar tension between their race and gender identity while in a committed relationship with Tyler, a White gay cisgender man. Ramsey said that Tyler “always expected, although [he] never said it— he always expected me to be the top in the relationship. . . . He was very adamant on taking pride on being the bottom . . .and particularly bottoming for a Black man.” Tyler’s prior partners had been Black tops, just as Linda’s prior partners had been Latinas. Ramsey recalls being “very clear” with Tyler at the beginning of their relationship that they were not a top nor a man, but Tyler projected his own racialized fetishes onto their experience. In all three of these interracial relationships, the price of admission was acclimating to a White person’s fantasy. The White partner seemingly either did not know or did not care about their partner of color’s divergent sense of self and their sexual/gender desires. 

Of course these are just three particular experiences and cannot represent the general health of interracial, LGBTQ relationships. But they do urge us to display greater curiosity and conduct more research on how power operates in interracial relationships, heterosexual and LGBTQ. Scholars should explore the full range of the experiences of people in interracial relationships and resist simplistic assumptions that such relationships are “colorblind” and embody a future free from racism. Focusing on the law may limit our ability to grapple with the complex, multidimensional nature of dating across race lines in 2024. 

Russell K. Robinson is the Walter Perry Johnson Professor of Law & Faculty Director, Center on Race, Sexuality & Culture, University of California, Berkeley School of Law. You can reach him by e-mail at rkrobins@berkeley.edu.