TY - JOUR
T1 - Normative ideals, “alternative” realities
T2 - Perceptions of interracial dating among professional latinas and black women
AU - Garcia, Rocio
N1 - Funding Information:
I would like to thank Vilma Ortiz for unwavering support and feedback on numerous drafts. I am thankful to Mignon Moore for feedback on earlier drafts and to the members of Vilma Ortiz’s UCLA research group for providing valuable suggestions on several versions of this paper. I would like to thank Phi Su and Lina Stepick for their advice and encouragement. Thank you also to the reviewers at Societies whose comments notably improved this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
PY - 2015/12
Y1 - 2015/12
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Black women
KW - Family formation
KW - Interracial dating
KW - Intersectionality
KW - Latinas
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U2 - 10.3390/soc5040807
DO - 10.3390/soc5040807
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85089450520
SN - 2075-4698
VL - 5
SP - 807
EP - 830
JO - Societies
JF - Societies
IS - 4
ER -