How “Commonsense” Notions of Race, Class and Gender Infiltrate Families Formed across the Color Line

How “Commonsense” Notions of Race, Class and Gender Infiltrate Families Formed across the Color Line

Sociology Mind
Volume 2, Number 1 (January 2012)
pages 75-69
ISSN Print: 2160-083X
ISSN Online: 2160-0848
DOI: 10.4236/sm.2012.21010

Eileen T. Walsh, Assistant Professor of Sociology
California State University, Fullerton

This research presents data from in-depth interviews of sixty adults in Southern California who have formed families across the black/white color line. In a societal context where normative family formation remains mono-racial, many adults in multiracial families manage their social performances to mitigate the stigma associated with their unusual family pattern or to challenge social expectations associated with race, class, and gender. Their stories reveal how they deploy strategic exaggerations of gender and stereotypes of social class in their day to day lives. These deployments operate to manage social interactions when confronting commonsense expectations about what it means to be a man or woman who trespasses the color line in family formation.

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