Interracial Intimacy and Racial Equality

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).

Dorothy Roberts 

Legal scholars, social scientists, and historians have studied the legal regulation of interracial intimacy because it has served as a critical means of enforcing white supremacy throughout United States history. Legal barriers to interracial unions were essential to establishing the political order that separated human beings into races, policed the boundaries between them, and subordinated people of color to white rule. Laws restricting interracial marriage passed in all but nine states safeguarded both white racial purity and the privileges of legal marriage to a white person. Anti-miscegenation laws were part of the Jim Crow legal regime that took hold after the Civil War and officially separated black people from white people in every aspect of social life, including schools, hospitals, buses, restaurants, hotels, swimming pools, and drinking fountains.

Solangel Maldonado’s book, The Architecture of Desire, makes a noteworthy contribution to this literature by extending the investigation of the legal regulation of interracial intimacy into our current digital age. A central claim of Maldonado’s book is, “[o]ur intimate preferences reinforce racial hierarchy and inequality in society.” (p. 144) Some scholars have approached this relationship between intimacy and inequality by interpreting interracial marriage as a symbol and means of overcoming racial hierarchies. They argue that these private crossings of racial lines show that racism is waning, offer sites where individuals can overcome racial prejudices, and constitute a powerful symbol of the potential for racial harmony. Unlike some of these scholars, Maldonado importantly states that she is not suggesting “that romantic partnerships should be used as a mechanism for racial and economic equality.” Rather, her goal is to demonstrate that “not everyone has equal access to the benefits of committed relationships and this lack of access disproportionately impacts certain racial groups.” (p. 10) The law should be concerned with racial preferences, she argues, because they “result in significant long-term consequences for groups at the bottom of the hierarchy” and with racial hierarchy in the dating market because “the individuals we prefer in the boardroom might resemble those we prefer in the bedroom.” (p. 11) This leads to her conclusion that the law should end its facilitation of the dating market’s racial hierarchy. “If lawmakers wish to eliminate race discrimination in housing and employment, for example, they cannot simultaneously allow dating platforms to encourage and facilitate discrimination in the dating market,” she writes. (p. 134)

I applaud Maldonado’s illuminating spotlight on the connections between interracial intimacy, racial preferences, and racial inequality. I have similarly interrogated the relationship between interracial marriage and structural racism in prior scholarship and an ongoing book project, a memoir based on my parents’ interviews of black-white couples in Chicago in the 1930s to the 1960s. My project is grounded in a conceptual framework that calls for investigating interracial marriage from the perspective of interracially married couples without assuming any inherently problematic or progressive role of such unions in the advancement of racial equality. 

As Maldonado points out, “[p]reventing interracial intimacy was a primary purpose of laws mandating segregated housing.” (p. 55) My study examines how housing discrimination encountered by interracial couples in Chicago was inextricably tied to residential segregation and the confinement of black residents to the “Black Belt” by white terror, restrictive covenants, federal housing policy, and white flight. Being married to a white person did not confer on black Chicagoans the privilege of living in a white neighborhood, and being married to a black person stripped the white spouse of that privilege. The twin regimes of anti-miscegenation and residential segregation worked together to subordinate all black people living in Chicago and to relegate white individuals married to them to black neighborhoods. The impact of residential segregation on black-white couples in Chicago highlights the critical role white supremacy played in not only blocking interracial marriage in the South but also shaping its meaning in the North. Residential segregation and anti-miscegenation were intertwined means of maintaining an unequal racial order in both regions. Anti-miscegenation in the South and residential segregation in Chicago operated as parallel and interrelated systems not only to discriminate against interracial couples but also to maintain an unjust racial order that subordinated the entire black population. 

Although interracial couples did encounter stigma and discrimination because they were “mixed,” the barriers that prevented them from living wherever they wished in Chicago stemmed from broader structures designed to maintain white supremacy as much as their interraciality. I distinguish between an approach that focuses on interracial marriage bans’ distinctive harms to interracial couples themselves and one that understands these harms in the context of the broader work of anti-miscegenation in upholding the racial order. Thus, rather than challenging a separate type of discrimination against mixed couples because of their interraciality or advocating interracial marriage itself as a means of racial progress, integration, and upward mobility, I focus on contesting institutionalized racism—like the residential segregation that subordinated all black people in Chicago. 

The experiences of these couples show that residential segregation designed to subjugate black people in Chicago drastically limited the potential for interracial marriage to flourish or to strike a blow against the city's racial hierarchy. Rather than transcend the color line, black-white couples were bound by it. While their willingness to marry interracially despite Chicago's violently enforced racial boundary is remarkable, it did not by itself reflect or promote any significant change in the racial order. Their experiences as mixed couples were inextricably governed by the segregated landscape. 

At the end of her book, Maldonado acknowledges that some readers might be disappointed by her “soft” proposals, “which focus on removing the barriers that the law created but do not suggest legal mechanisms to directly encourage interracial relationships.” (p. 144) By contrast, I agree with Maldonado’s reluctance to deploy the law to encourage more interracial intimacy. My worry lies in the efficacy of a strategy for promoting racial equality that focuses on dating preferences—especially for black women. As Maldonado demonstrates, compared to other race-gender groups, black women suffer the most discrimination in the dating market; they are the most likely to be excluded and rejected by other online users and marry interracially at half the rate of black men. Maldonado centers on the dearth of eligible black men to make a case for legal reforms that will expand black women’s opportunities for marriage. Recommending the expansion of black women’s dating options, however, seems to sidestep the real issues—the long history of vilifying stereotypes of black women’s sexuality and maternity reinforced by state policies, mass arrest and incarceration of young black men, racist employment discrimination, and under resourcing schools in black neighborhoods. Blaming black women’s social, economic, and political subordination on higher rates of unwed motherhood and proposing marriage as the solution have been longstanding conservative strategies that fuel repressive social policies, including restructuring welfare and policing black families. I don’t oppose Maldonado’s recommendations, and I agree that we should remove legalized impediments to interracial dating, but I am not sure how effective they will be at eliminating the root of the problem. 

Maldonado and I share a belief in the importance of studying the relationship between interracial intimacy and racial equality as a means of understanding the costs of white supremacy and the legal work needed to eradicate it. My historical study of black-white couples in Chicago tells me that eliminating residential segregation, as well as other state enforced means of racial subordination, was essential to any radical potential their marriages could have had—and is essential to the radical transformation of personal relationships required for Americans to relate to each other as equal human beings.

Dorothy E. Roberts is George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania. You can reach her by e-mail at dorothyroberts@law.upenn.edu.