Mixed Race Studies

An Exploration of the Experiences of Inter-racial Couples

Canadian Journal of Family and Youth (Le Journal Canadien de Famille et de la Jeunesse)
Volume 1, Number 2 (2008)
pages 75-111
ISSN: 1718-9748

Temitope Oriola
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada

This study utilizes in-depth interviews of five interracial heterosexual couples to explore how couples live, and re/de/construct their everyday lives within a multiethnic society. I examine how couples experience public spaces, negotiate their identities, raise biracial children and confront cultural differences. The study also investigates the process of acceptance of partners by couples’ respective families and the media representation of interracial relationships. This paper demonstrates that minority families are more likely to raise strong objections or resistance to their children marrying Whites. Another major finding of this study is that subjects experience gradual shifts in their identities and changes in their worldviews as a result of their relationships with their spouses regardless of whether they adopt a ‘colourblind’ or ‘colour-conscious’ approach. Subjects’ narratives are also laced with intermingling discourse of race and culture.

Introduction

More than most concepts, ‘race’ and its concomitant outcomes like racism, racialization and racial profiling have been subjects of intense debate by the academia and laity. Amid widespread issues of marginalization and inequality, it is easy to dismiss the ties that bind some members of the various groups—dominant or dominated—together. One of these is interracial intimacy like common-law heterosexual unions and marriages. Why do some individuals in spite of the ‘one drop of blood’ rule, widespread stereotypes, social (mis)construction of the Other, potential loss of privilege and historically entrenched and societally enforced boundaries cross the colour line when it comes to love and/or marriage? How do interracial couples negotiate their way in public spaces and raise biracial kids? What influence does their relationship have on their worldview and identities? How does society encompassing significant others like family, friends, neighbours, and the sea of unknown faces they encounter daily relate with them? How do interracial couples assess the representation of interracial unions on Canadian television? These are the questions this study attempted to explore through in-depth interviews conducted with five interracial couples in Canada between February and March, 2008.

Integration and Social Construction of Interracial Unions

Most studies done on interracial unions are American or British in origin, even though Canada, compared to the United States, has a higher proportion of interracial couples (Milan and Hamm, 2004). There are, however, some Canadian studies on the unease over mixed race offspring from heterosexual relations between First Nations’ women and White men in British Colombia by Mawani (2002) and the experiences of White women involved with Black men by Deliovsky (2002). From issues such as the media representations of interracial relationships as aberration, events and/or spectacles Perry and Sutton, 2006) to the contestedness of the identity of children of interracial ouples (Barn and Harman, 2006), to why young, upwardly mobile and career-driven lack men ostensibly prefer White women regardless of class (Craig-Henderson, 2006) to short (melo-dramatic) autobiographical accounts of interracially-involved young eople (Alderman, 2007) to the making of ‘multiracials’ and the problematic of the intersticial space of mixedness (DaCosta, 2007), to the ironic and paradoxical contradiction of ‘talking Black, sleeping White’ among some activists in post-bellum United States (Romano, 2003); interracial relationships have come to stay as evidenced in the ‘proliferation’ of those called a myriad of names like ‘coloured’, ‘mulattoes,’ ‘halfcaste’ and ‘mixed race’ (Barn and Harman, 2006: 1314) but are still largely seen as problematic. There is an urgent need to fill the intriguing lacuna in the Canadian literature on the experiences of interracial couples…

…Data Analysis—Interviews

In this section, findings from the interviews with all five couples are presented under thematic issues. These include reaction of subjects’ families to their choice of spouses, experiences in public spaces, shifts in identities and changes in the worldview of subjects, concerns about the identities of their biracial children, experiences in public spaces and media representation. The results show how divergent subjects’ experiences were when they introduced their partners to their families, how they began to learn, adopt and adapt to otherwise ‘alien’ cultures, and what impact these have had on their identities. The results indicate that except in one case, minority families are generally reluctant to accept their children’s White partners. Subjects also opine that the medium of television and movies seldom cast couples that look like them preferring to depict more ‘conventional’ couples…

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