That is not to say that heterosexual interracial couples have not engaged in a politics of respectability. Indeed, cross-race couples have sought to distance themselves from negative stereotypes of illicit interracial sex by stressing exactly the kinds of behaviors that heteronormativity requires: that they married for love, that they are no different from same-race heterosexual couples, that they are stable and monogamous, and that they have children and form nuclear families. But this project has been, at best, incomplete. The 1951 intermarried couple who insisted to Ebony magazine that they were ordinary people, “nothing spectacular nor side show freaks,” differed little in perspective from couples in the 1980s who railed against the negative portrayal of interracial relationships on television talk shows from current couples who feel they must constantly work to deflect negative stereotypes and to position themselves as normal, legitimate, and “in love.”41 Normalizing heterosexual interracial love through a politics of respectability remains an elusive strategy for full acceptance because it is not the status of an interracial relationship—commercial or not, married or not, stable or not—that makes it deviant. It is the fact of the relationship at all. As with queer couples, heterosexual interracial couples have had to fight to be considered respectable because their object choice automatically renders their relationship nonnormative.
It is not only respectability that has eluded interracial couples but also the possibility of participating in a politics of nation building. Interracial relationships not only have threatened the construction of a white heteronormative state but also have been viewed with disgust by other racial groups who envisioned constructing a sense of nationhood based on their ethnic or racial heritage. The preeminent black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, the head of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, went so far as to praise the white-supremacist Ku Klux Klan in 1922 because that organization, like his, believed in racial purity. Garvey and the Klan shared similar antimiscegenation views. “Whilst the Ku Klux Klan desires to make America absolutely a white man’s country, the Universal Negro Improvement Association wants to make Africa absolutely a black man’s country,” Garvey explained. Interraciality threatened both of these nation-building projects.42 In the 1960s and 1970s, black nationalists attacked blacks who intermarried for betraying the race and “sleeping with the enemy.” Malcolm X echoed Garvey in his opposition to intermarriage. “Let the white man keep his women and let us keep ours,” he instructed blacks. Black nationalists described interracial relationships, in the words of Eldridge Cleaver, as a “revolutionary sickness,” a sign of one’s desire to be white. Building a strong black nation required, as one black woman explained, that blacks eschew interracial relationships and “want to see the blood of our heritage running in and through the veins of our children.”43 There is no space for interraciality in racial nationalism, whether espoused by whites or by other racialized groups.
Although there have always been a handful of Americans who have praised racial mixing as a way to fulfill the United States’ destiny, it has proven difficult for interracial couples to imagine themselves as engaged in their own political project. The historian Greg Carter, who writes about the understudied intellectual American tradition of viewing racial mixing as a positive good rather than a threat or sign of degradation, shows how advocating racial mixing could be part of a vision of full equality for all races in a transformed country.44 Thus, the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips urged people of all races to mix freely in the United States, while more recently, groups created by and for mixed-race couples and families have sometimes described interracial love as one avenue toward reducing racial tensions. As one magazine for interracial couples insisted in 1977, “Love is the answer, not legislation.”45 But whatever nation-building project interracial couples and their families might be involved in has always been viewed as utopian, as even the title of Carter’s book—The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Race Mixing—suggests.
Interracial couples, moreover, have found that their relationships are stigmatized and discredited if there is even the slightest hint that their actions are politically motivated. While same-race heterosexual couples can be part of a nation-building project—even an explicit one—and not have the status and legitimacy of their relationship called into question, interracial couples have been much more easily charged with being together for reasons that heterosexuality deems illegitimate, such as marrying to promote a political agenda. Not surprisingly, different-sex interracial couples have historically taken great pains to insist that their marriages are respectable, traditional, and loving.46 The earliest clubs for interracial couples, the Manasseh Society, which was founded in Milwaukee and Chicago in the late nineteenth century, and the Penguin Club, founded in New York in 1936, explicitly required that all members be legally married and even demanded proof of character. The Manasseh Society required that members attend church regularly; the Penguin Society forbid childless couples on the ground that the presence of children indicated a more stable marriage.47 Being seen as “crusaders” for interracial love served to reinforce negative stereotypes about these relationships in ways that placed them even further outside heteronormativity. For same-race couples, building stable nuclear families has been considered a key aspect of nation building, but cross-race couples have found little place for themselves in that project.
Deviant or Other? The Visibility of Hetero Interraciality
Scholars of normative heterosexuality tell us that there are many ways to be a “bad” heterosexual. While the invention and institutionalization of heterosexuality served most powerfully to regulate and stigmatize same-sex acts, it also created hierarchies that privileged heterosexuals who were involved in monogamous, gender-conventional, long-term (preferably married) relationships based on love over those who engaged in casual sex or commercial sex, who had multiple partners, or who in some ways challenged gender norms. As Steven Seidman argues, “normative heterosexuality not only establishes hierarchy with homosexuals, but creates hierarchy among heterosexualities” as well.48 Interracial couples might be considered the poster children for deviant heterosexuality; adhering to heteronormative conventions has done little to normalize them historically.
The exclusions of different-sex interracial couples from the most basic aspects of heterosexual privilege raise the question of whether they are really lesser heterosexuals, ranked lower on a hierarchy than normative heterosexuals, or are perhaps instead defined as outside the norm entirely. One of the most powerful aspects of heterosexual privilege, Hanne Blank writes, is the right to go through the world without your relationship attracting much notice. “Having your sexuality and your relationships be perceived as ‘normal’ provides unearned privilege,” Blank argues. “It accrues automatically and invisibly to everyone who is perceived as being heterosexual for as long as they continue to be perceived that way.”49
Are different-sex interracial couples “perceived as being heterosexual” under this definition? If being heterosexual means one has the right to go through the world without your relationship attracting much attention, they certainly have not had that right. Different-sex interracial couples in the United States have historically encountered disapproval