Normative Ideals, “Alternative” Realities: Perceptions of Interracial Dating among Professional Latinas and Black Women

Societies

Rocio Garcia¹  Silvia Dominguez¹ 

[1] Department of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1551, USA; E-Mail

关键词: family formation;    interracial dating;    Latinas;    Black women;    intersectionality;   

DOI  :  10.3390/soc5040807

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Family types continue to expand in the U.S., yet normative patterns of endogamy and the privileging of nuclear families persist. To understand how professional women of color navigate endogamy and family ideals, I draw on 40 in-depth interviews of professional Black women and Latinas to ask how they construct partner preferences. I find that professional Latinas and Black women prefer same-race, similarly educated partners but report significant barriers to satisfying these desires. Respondents’ experiences with racism, the rejection of ethno-racial and cultural assimilation, gendered racism from men of color, and the college gender gap emerge as mechanisms for endogamous preferences. These preferences resist and support hegemonic family formation, an ideological and behavioral process that privileges, white, middle class, endogamous, heteronormative ideals for families comprising courtship, marriage, and biological childbearing. By challenging the racial devaluation of people of color while preferring the normativity that endogamy offers, the women in this study underscore the fluidity embedded in endogamy.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.