Law, Racism, and Interracial Intimacy: The Architecture of Desire by Solangel Maldonado

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).

Kevin R. Johnson 

As we well know, systemic racism infects every part of U.S. society.  The killing of George Floyd began a national discussion, which appears to have come and gone, of the issue.  Given the prevalence of racism, it should not be surprising in the least that the structures creating racial separation dramatically influence who, how, and where people meet and build romantic relationships.  Is it mere happenstance that the group of close friends in the hit turn-of-the-century television shows Seinfeld and Friends were all white?  Racial separation is reflected in rates of intermarriage, especially between a member of any racial group and an African American person.  We cannot be surprised that anti-Blackness infects intimate choices when it influences so much in our society.

Solangel Maldonado’s fascinating book The Architecture of Desire:  How the Law Shapes Interracial Intimacy and Perpetuates Inequality (NYU Press 2024) insightfully analyzes legal issues surrounding interracial relationships in U.S. society.  It nicely builds on Rachel Moran’s 2003 book Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance.  A racially separated society, the United States sees relatively few interracial relationships, especially relationships between Black people and members of any other racial group.  In efficiently presenting a wealth of facts and figures, The Architecture of Desire show how law and society effectively discourages interracial relationships.

In the book, Maldonado considers in detail online dating platforms and “sexual racism” (pp. 8, 66, 79, 121) expressed by people who intentionally avoid dating people of certain races.  Many online daters exclude the profiles of African Americans in their search for dating partners.  (pp. 66-70).  Maldonado “agree[s] with scholars who have argued that the law should prohibit dating platforms from facilitating discrimination.”  (p. 83) (footnote omitted); (pp. 131-34).  Such matters are complicated, however, because persons can opt for dating partners of similar races and backgrounds because of the greater likelihood for mutual understanding, cultural appreciation, and similar affinities.

            The chapters of The Architecture of Desire are laid out in logical progression.  Chapter 1 offers data showing “a gendered racial hierarchy” (p. 13) in interracial intimacy.  It makes for interesting reading to all, with most no doubt having some experience with dating, attraction, and romance.  The reader learns, for example, that, “[i]n 1967 [when Loving v. Virginia was decided], just 3 percent of marriages in the United States were interracial.  In 2019, 19 percent of new marriages were between persons of different races.” (p. 2) (footnotes omitted).  The increase is significant but not what one might expect in an era of so-called color blindness.  “Latinos and Asian Americans are significantly more likely than African Americans to have a spouse or partner of a different race.”  (p. 3).  Most jarring were these stark facts: “46 percent and 38 percent of U.S.-born Asian Americans and Latinos, respectively, and 18 percent of African Americans who married in 2015, married out.” (p. 16) (emphasis added) (footnote omitted). 

Chapter 2 analyzes how the law historically regulated relationships across races.  Chapter 3 scrutinizes issues of freedom of association and sexual racism implicated by the pursuit of intimate relationships.  Chapter 4 outlines how contemporary law shapes opportunities for interracial relationships.  Chapter 5 discusses the psychological, economic, and social costs of sexual racism on the persons excluded, particularly African Americans.  Chapter 6 offers innovative ideas about law reform.

The Anti-Miscegenation Laws and Violent Policing of Racial Borders

            Historically, the most obvious legal impediments to interracial relationships were state anti-miscegenation laws, many that criminalized interracial marriages.  Criminal punishment unquestionably deterred crossing racial lines.  In the larger scheme of things, however, those laws played less of a role than violence in discouraging interracial relationships.  Lynchings brutally punished Black/white relationships, with the Ku Klux Klan and kindred spirits violently enforcing racial borders.  As young African American Emmett Till tragically learned, a few words—real or made up—to a white woman could lead to a brutal death. 

Like Rachel Moran’s Interracial Intimacy, Solangel Maldonado’s The Architecture of Desire shines a spotlight on the demise of the anti-miscegenation laws.  California’s law of this type was struck down, in a famous opinion in Perez v. Sharp (1948) by legal legend Justice Roger Traynor for the California Supreme Court (pp. 44-47).  See Kevin R. Johnson & Kristina L. Burrows, Struck by Lightning? Interracial Intimacy and Racial Justice, 25 Human Rights Quarterly 528, 531-42 (2002).  The U.S. Supreme Court did not invalidate a state anti-miscegenation law until 1967 in the famous case of Loving v. Virginia. (p. 36-39). 

Perez v. Sharp is fascinating because, among other nuances, it involved a Mexican-American marriage to a Black man.  The Architecture of Desire notes several times (pp. 44, 48) that persons of Mexican ancestry were treated as white for purpose of various state anti-miscegenation laws through the operation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war between the United States and Mexico in 1848.  (pp. 48-49).  However, whatever the law on the books, social discrimination in the Southwest against Mexican-Americans was widespread, virulent, and often violent.  Buttressing the social pressures against Anglo/Mexican relationships.  Persons of Mexican ancestry were subject to housing segregation and separate and unequal schools, and were denied access to public accommodations.  Marriages between whites and Mexicans was disfavored at various times in various places in the United States.  Consequently, social structures, not necessarily anti-miscegenation laws, effectively discouraged white/Mexican-American marriage.  As a product of one of those relationships in greater Los Angeles in the late 1950s, I know first-hand of that unfortunate history.

Practical Solutions?

            The laws barring interracial relationships are not the cause of the modern dearth of interracial marriages.  Rather, there are deeper social dynamics at play in the formation of intimate relationships.  Indeed, inquiring into the relative lack of Black/white relationships, as one might say colloquially, opens a can of worms.  To truly combat sexual racism and promote interracial relationships, the nation must carefully look at some of the more intractable, and far-reaching, problems of U.S. social life, including:

1.     The prevailing de facto residential segregation of African Americans who live in a separate society in ways that show few signs of abating in the near future.  “Segregation was a tool to enforce racial categories and reinforce the message of white supremacy.  As such, it served to limit opportunities for interracial intimacy even in states without anti-segregation laws.”  (p. 55).

2.      In light of the deep and enduring commitment to neighborhood schools, combined with residential segregation, hypersegregation exists in the K-12 schools throughout the United States, with the majority of African Americans and Latina/os attending the most segregated and least resourced schools.  Such educational disparities contribute to lack of opportunities for interracial relationships and unequal educational opportunities contribute to the next issue.  (pp. 57-59).

3.     The lack of African Americans and Latina/os in higher education, which reduces the possibilities for the development of interracial relationships during college and the later work-a-day world.

Without integration of neighborhoods, schools, colleges and universities, and workplaces, interracial relationships are not likely to occur organically.  Neighborhoods and professional opportunities will remain racially separate and unequal.  Ending segregation in all spheres of U.S. social life would go far to promote interracial marriage.  Maldonado acknowledges this fact (p. 92-96), and calls for a variety of law reforms with that end in mind.  A ban on racial screening of dating prospects on online dating platforms, while a sensible approach to restricting stigmatic harms caused by rejection on the basis of race, is too little too late.  By the time of life when dating occurs, the die of anti-Blackness is cast.  Residential and school segregation influence one’s romantic preferences, which in modern America are developed over a lifetime of racial separation.  Early exposure to people of different races may affect romantic preferences later in life and who one desires.  Law plays a background role, but it impacts more basic human instincts and issues.  Although it may be too much to ask for concrete reform proposals from housing to education, that is essential to get to the bottom of the modern barriers to interracial relationships. 

The Architecture of Desire illustrates the ripple effects of ending systemic racism (or failing to end it) in the United States.  Systemic racism infects our institutions but also our most intimate relationships.  Absent an end to systemic racism and the stigma generally attached to Blackness, we will not have true freedom in our intimate relationships.

Conclusion

Solangel Maldonado’s The Architecture of Desire has taken on an ambitious set of topics.  Love, romance, and relationships are tied to some of the broadest systemic forces, including but not limited to racism in housing, education, and the workplace.  But they also implicate very individual issues of beauty, romance, cultural attachments, and comfort in intimate relationships.  Complications multiply when there are both racist and non-racist reasons for desiring romance with a person of a particular racial background.  Ultimately, The Architecture of Desire suggests that to truly see any lasting increase in interracial relationships, we must devote ourselves to removing racism root and branch from U.S. society.  Maldonado helps us understand the scope of racism’s pernicious impacts on the most intimate part of our lives.

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Kevin R. Johnson, Dean and Mabie/Apallas Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Davis School of Law.  krjohnson@ucdavis.edu.