Color, Culture, or Cousin? Multiracial Americans and Framing Boundaries in Interracial Relationships

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

The use of the term “colored” was coined by mixed-race people (Ottley 1968:95). In the eighteenth century this population and their descendants created their own caste system, which was marked by color and class. In one case in South Carolina, mixed-race people formed the Brown Fellowship Society, an exclusive mulatto organization that I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 2. Mixed descendants of French and Spanish settlers in New Orleans also distinguished themselves by adopting the terms gens de couleur or people of color. This term carried with it all the connotations of higher case associated with nonblackness and mixed ancestry. In the first half of the nineteenth century, “colored” also became the term of polite usage among free Negroes of the North.

Objections to the term “colored” were duly noted in the African American press. In the September 24, 1831, edition of The Liberator, an editorial declared that “the term ‘colored’ is not a good one. Whenever used, it recalls to mind the offensive distinction of color.” T. Thomas Fortune, a leading journalist in the first quarter twentieth century, also declared that the word was a vague misnomer and had “neither geographical nor political significance, as applied to race” (a quoted in Barry and Blassingame 1982:391). Nevertheless, many people, especially middle- and upper-class African Americans, used the term “colored” (Isaacs 1964:70). The need for a name that was self-defined and descriptive remained.

Obiagele Lake, Blue Veins and Kinky Hair: Naming and Color Consciousness in African America (Santa Barbara: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003), 11.

Color, Culture, or Cousin? Multiracial Americans and Framing Boundaries in Interracial Relationships

Color, Culture, or Cousin? Multiracial Americans and Framing Boundaries in Interracial Relationships

Journal of Marriage and Family
Volume 81, Issue 5 (October 2019)
pages 1221-1236
DOI: 10.1111/jomf.12583

Shantel Gabrieal Buggs, Assistant Professor of Sociology and African American Studies
Florida State University

Abstract

Objective: This article analyzes how some multiracial people—the “products” of interracial relationships—conceptualize what counts as an interracial relationship and how they discuss the circumstances that influence these definitions.
Background: Scholars have argued that the added complexity expanding multiracial populations contribute to dating and marriage‐market conditions requires additional study; this article expands on the limited research regarding how multiracial people perceive interraciality.
Method: The article uses in‐depth interviews with self‐identified multiracial women (N = 30) who used online dating platforms to facilitate their dating lives in the following three cities in Texas: Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.
Results: In framing their relationships through lenses centered around skin color, cultural difference, and “familiarity” in terms of seeing potential partners as similar to non‐White male family members, multiracial women illustrate varied and overlapping means of describing their intimate relationships, providing additional nuance to sociological understandings of shifts in preferences and norms around partner choice across racial/ethnic lines and opening up opportunities to continue the exploration of the impact of racial inequality on partner choice.
Conclusion: Multiracial people internalize racial, gendered, and fetishistic framings about potential partners similarly to monoracial people, demonstrating how racial boundaries and degrees of intimacy are (re)constructed for this growing demographic in the United States.

Read or purchase the article here.

Tags: Austin, Houston, Journal of Marriage and Family, OkCupid, San Antonio, Shantel Buggs, Shantel G. Buggs, Shantel Gabrieal Buggs

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 19th, 2019 at 01:48Z and is filed under Articles, Family/Parenting, Media Archive, Social Science, Texas, United States, Women. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Mixed Race Studies

Color, Culture, or Cousin? Multiracial Americans and Framing Boundaries in Interracial Relationships

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