Interracial couples and the phenomenology of race, place, and space in contemporary England

ABSTRACT

Drawing from ethnographic research in England, this article discusses interracial, Black-white couples’ perceptions and experiences of racism and racial discrimination. Empirically, it enlarges scholarship’s prevailing focus on the effects of anti-Black racism on their social worlds, to an exploration of the relationship between race, place and space. More specifically, it discusses how partners’ differently racialised and gendered subjectivities impact their perceptions of being or not the object of interracial couple-based discrimination in public spaces, their residential choices, and their selection of leisure travel destinations. Use of an intersectional lens and the inclusion of both opposite- and same-sex couples contribute to mitigating the currently underexplored role of social class and sexuality in the shaping of interracial couples’ everyday lives. Theoretically, the article contributes to the study of whiteness as habitus and phenomenology: focusing in particular on how race mediates partners’ spatialised perceptions of dis/comfort and un/safety.

KEYWORDS:

• Interracial couples
• racism
• racial discrimination
• whiteness
• intersectionality
• same-sex couples

Scholarship on contemporary interracial couples living in Europe and white settler societies largely considers how the white supremacist order affects their social worlds. Studies mostly concentrate on how partners draw and navigate their relationship with kith and kin. Outside of the emotional and spatial boundaries of the home, many scholars have observed that partners relay being the object of disapproving gazes and commentaries by strangers;¹ this, however, has not led to in-depth inquiries into the relationship between race, place and space in couples’ everyday lives. Existing research prevalently focuses on Black-white couples.² In the UK, the relatively few works set in the 1970s and onwards (Benson 1981; Bauer 2010; Twine 2010) are compounded by extensive literature exploring interracial couples’ offspring’s identities and educational experiences.³ Everywhere, the over-representation of middle class couples has led to an under-theorisation of the intersections of race with social class (but see McKenzie 2017). Similarly, the overarching focus on married couples (Telles and Sue 2009, 140) has long implied the marginalisation of the experiences of same-sex couples, who were until recently denied access to this rite (but see Steinbugler 2012; Onwuachi-Willig 2013).

Drawing from my multi-sited ethnographic research on race, intimacy and the law in contemporary Europe,⁴ and particularly from fieldwork undertaken in England, this article contributes to existing scholarship on interracial, Black-white couples in multiple ways. Empirically, it addresses a largely underexplored area of enquiry, that is, how the relationship between race, place and space mediates partners’ perceptions and experiences of racism and racial discrimination. Using an intersectional lens (Collins and Bilge 2016), this article further shows how race interplays with other axes of social differentiation, thereby contributing to mitigate the current over-representation of the experiences of middle class opposite-sex interracial couples. Theoretically, the article contributes to the study of whiteness as habitus (Bonilla-Silva 2018) and phenomenology (Ahmed 2007). Drawing from Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (Bourdieu 1977), Bonilla-Silva defined white habitus as that which ‘creates and conditions [whites’] views, cognitions, and even sense of beauty and, more importantly, fosters a sense of racial solidarity’. (Bonilla-Silva 2018, 140). Elsewhere, I have suggested including in this definition whites’ perceived entitlement to unrestrained mobility in space and permanence in place (Zambelli 2020). Here, I discuss how race mediates partners’ perceptions and experiences of dis/comfort and un/safety as they move in predominantly white spaces.

The article puts forward a three-fold argument. First, partners’ perceptions of their exposure to interracial couple-based forms of racism and racial discrimination are inflected by their differently racialised and gendered subjectivities and positionalities. Second, interracial couples’ residential choices are not necessarily primarily determined by their assessment of a place’s ‘social geography of race’ (Frankenberg 1993, 43–44), but might be deeply affected (also) by other factors, such as gendered and class-based constraints and aspirations. Third, couples’ choices of leisure travel destinations reflect at least one of the two partners’ perceptions and projections of dis/comfort and un/safety, based on their subjective political geography maps of anti-Black racism. For same-sex partners, these considerations might further interplay with, without necessarily overriding, fear of becoming the object of homophobic violence.

The article is structured as follows. Next, I outline my methodology, followed by a description of the research context. In the subsequent three sections, I present the analysis of my data. First, I discuss whether and how entry into an interracial couple affects partners’ perceptions of how they move in public spaces. Second, I foreground how couples’ home-making choices reflect subjective assessments that include, without being determined by, a place’s racial composition. Third, I show how fear of exposure to racism and/or homophobia affects couples’ choice of leisure travel destinations.

Methodology

My research methods consisted of participant observation and in-depth, open-ended interviews with interracial couples – by which I mean: currently or formerly married, civil partnered or otherwise cohabiting couples constituted by partners whose bodies, heritage and/or nationality are socially ascribed to distinct racial categories. More specifically, the research focused on couples constituted by a white European and a Black or mixed-race European partner with African diasporic heritage, or who is (or was at birth) an African national. With mixed-race and critical race scholars, I acknowledge the double bind underpinning use of racial categories in research, for the risk they carry of ontologizing rather than demystifying race (Gunaratnam 2003, 32–33). Yet, I also share their conviction that only by showing the lived materialities of race can racisms be challenged. As a white Italian ciswoman academic, I am aware that my positionality has thoroughly shaped the research process. Still, an intersectional approach acknowledges that the primacy of any axis of mutual identification/differentiation over any other (including) in the relationship between the researcher and her research subjects, ought to be empirically investigated rather than assumed. Accounting for this complexity requires the practice of ‘strong objectivity’, that is, ‘strong reflexivity’ (Harding 1993, 69).

Participant observation mainly revolved around race- and antiracism-related public events (meetings, marches, festivals). I approached potential research participants through contacts made then, and through my personal networks.⁵ Participants themselves chose the interview method (joint, separate or individual), for reasons reflecting epistemological, ethical, and pragmatic considerations.⁶ Interviews generally took place in their homes, lasting between one and three hours. Questions addressed couples’ hetero-classification and self-identification, and their experiences of racism and racial discrimination (if any) in housing, work, mobility, and parenting (if relevant). I transcribed interviews verbatim, pseudonymized them, and sent the transcript to research participants for verification. I analysed data thematically using qualitative coding software.

This article draws specifically from my fieldwork in England (October 2018 – May 2019), which concentrated in the South East and London regions, and a few other main cities (Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester). Data amount to over one hundred and seventy pages of fieldnotes and twenty-six interviews with a total of thirty-two participants. Couples consisted of different combinations of partners’ race/gender and they were largely opposite-sex, married, and with children. Approximately half consisted of two British partners, and the others included at least one first generation migrant – often an EU citizen. I captured social class using self-identification, occupation and cultural capital (education) at the individual level and economic security (housing tenure) at the couple level. Generally, both or at least one partner had completed higher education and most couples were homeowners; the majority, therefore, enjoyed a middle class living standard. Participants’ age spanned between 21 and 77 years, but most were in their late 30’s–40s; their narratives, therefore, largely reflect the experience of being an interracial couple in the 1990s and onwards.

Between interracial glamour and anti-blackness

My fieldwork unfolded at a time when interracial couples featured highly on British media following the royal engagement and then wedding between Prince Harry, sixth in line to the throne, and Meghan Markle, a (former) American actress of mixed white and Black heritage. Celebrated by an Afro-American Bishop of the Episcopal church, the wedding sermon included references to Martin Luther King’s thought on the transformational power of love, evoking the trope of interraciality as cure and antidote for racism (Song 2009, 341; Roberts 2018, 7). In a country where approximately 10% of the married, civil partnered, or cohabiting couples are inter-ethnic (Potter-Collins 2014, 3),⁷ the high-profile visibility and sanction afforded by the royal newlyweds appeared to mark a watershed moment – one, that departed from interracial couples’ historical stigmatisation.

Rooted in white supremacist discourses and practices, social disapproval of interracial coupling has indeed been an entrenched feature of twentieth-century Britain (Bland 2005; Caballero 2019, 3; Benson 1981, 9). In the aftermath of World War II, this sentiment went hand-in-hand with hostility towards and discrimination against Black migrants hailing from the Commonwealth (Bauer 2010, 18). In the 1950s-60s, ‘miscegenation […] emerged ahead of crime as a theme in the popular politics of immigration control’. (Gilroy 1987, 80) Many couples refrained from going ‘out together in public so as to avoid becoming visible targets of racism’. (Bauer 2010, 215) In the 1980s, amidst the rising influence of the Black Power movement, Black disapproval compounded white disapproval (Tizard and Phoenix 2002, 194; Bauer 2010, 216), reflecting the opposite aspirations to resist against, or preserve, white supremacy. Whereas spaces of interracial sociality flourished amongst the second generations, interracial families ‘have continued to experience racism’ prevalently in the form of ‘disapproving stares and unpleasant comments from both blacks and whites’. (Bauer 2010, 222–23) The extent to which this is still the case is part of my subsequent discussion.

While the aura of royalty cast a positive light on interraciality and mixedness, the country was traversed by deep and pulsing political fissures at the intersection between race and immigration policies. Delays in the UK withdrawal from the EU (‘Brexit’) were compounded by rising social polarisation and violence against EU nationals, Blacks and people of mixed heritage (Burnett 2017, 86). In 2018, the ‘Windrush scandal’ surfaced, as subjects who had been living in Britain for over forty years suddenly lost homes, livelihood, social security; and some were detained, deported, and denied entry (Home Affairs Committee 2018). In 2019 also fell the twentieth anniversary of the public inquiry report into the racially motivated and still partly unresolved murder of Stephen Lawrence (Macpherson 1999), and several events marked its watershed impact on the country’s race and anti-discrimination framework (Murji 2017). Yet, disappointment prevailed amongst the Black and mixed-race people I encountered and/or interviewed at the failure to deliver the report’s wide-ranging recommendations.

Eventually, the interracial glamour emanating from the royal newlyweds quickly dissipated away, shadowed by entrenched anti-Black currents. Recurrently, some British media outlets negatively portrayed the now Duchess of Sussex, broadly hinting at her unfitness for royal life, while a BBC journalist compared the couple’s first child to a chimpanzee (Hirsch 2020). Less than a year after, the spouses were no longer working members of the Royal Family and left the country.

Against this background, I now move on to present the analysis of my data. Rather than an ‘average’ experience, which ethnographers neither claim nor seek to portray (Small 2009), what follows offers a nuanced discussion of how race, as further inflected by gender, class and sexuality, mediates interracial couples’ perceptions and experiences of racism and racial discrimination as they traverse, inhabit or refrain from entering in different spaces and places.

Moving with, or without one’s partner

Rosalind is a fifty-year-old mixed-race British woman married to Henry, a white British man of approximately her age. Before moving to London, they lived a few years in Colchester – a predominantly white city that she described as ‘really small and quite conservative’.⁸ I asked Rosalind whether she ever experienced any form of discrimination for being in an interracial couple. Thoughtful at first, she then denied firmly:

if anything, maybe I had two or three experiences of racism, but in terms of being in a relationship with Henry, that was never an issue either. I have never really had anything in my relationship with Henry where that’s been [an issue] …

Rosalind’s neat juxtaposition between her experiences of racism while moving alone in public spaces⁹ – which her social (middle) class did not mitigate – and their absence when next to her white partner, emerged recurrently in the narratives of the Black and mixed-race people I interviewed. Often, this contrast was already, immediately evincible from the disorientation, surprise, and/or puzzlement sparked by my asking. Recurrently, and similar to Rosalind, many underlined that it rather was when they were on their own that they experienced racism and/or discrimination. Generally, antiracist white partners suggested the same.

Simona and Mustapha are two first generation migrants in their mid-30s, respectively from Italy and Ghana. They met, fell in love, and got married a few years ago in London, and they recently bought a flat in superdiverse Hackney (Wessendorf 2013). When I asked Simona whether she recounted any experience of interracial-couple based discrimination, she looked dismayed. ‘What, here? Didn’t you figure out what Hackney’s like?!’¹⁰ Still, she offered that ‘London is not all like Hackney. So, sometimes you can feel hostility, or stared at’ – a perception echoing Bauer’s findings in the early 2000s (Bauer 2010, 223). Immediately after, though, she shifted the focus on her partner’s experiences:

[But] I think that Mustapha might have more to say on this – because clearly, these are couple-based questions, but I think that it would be better to ask them directly in their individual experience, and they would have a lot to tell you. Obviously, as the white partner in the couple, I don’t want to diminish the difficulties that they suffer, but personally, I have experienced less of those because this is how racism works: that perhaps if I’m nearby, they happen less.

While contingent upon the physical proximity of the white partner, whiteness’ potentially shielding effect, which Simona’s words above hint at, emerged frequently in partners’ narratives, across gender/race differences. Indeed, Mustapha recounted having experienced racism multiple times, but ‘as a mixed [interracial] couple in the UK, nobody ever looked at us weird. It is normal, and we live in Hackney so I never ever felt that as a feeling’.¹¹ I argue that whiteness’ potentially shielding effect contributes to explaining why the overwhelming majority of couples I interviewed did not relay experiencing racism or discrimination when partners were next to each other. Still, there is a discernible difference in emphasis between Mustapha and Simona, as the latter – a white woman – did relay occasionally feeling stared at with hostility. Making sense of this nuance, I contend, requires moving beyond positivistic binaries of un/truth and authentic or false consciousness, to consider how partners’ differently racialised and gendered subjectivities and positionalities may inflect their perceptions.

For white partners, entry into an interracial couple engenders a phenomenological rupture with their (white) habitus to moving comfortably, safely and seamlessly as white bodies in majority white spaces (Ahmed 2007). However, lacking the embodied knowledge of how appearance-based discrimination feels, they might struggle distinguishing hostility directed at the interraciality of the couple from that independently directed at their Black or mixed-race partner. In her US-focused work, Osuji indeed offered some examples of particularly white women, who couldn’t seemingly distinguish interracial couple-based hostility from that directed at one of the two partners only (Osuji 2019, 185; 199) – notably that whom either whites or Blacks disapproved for contributing, respectively, to undermine white supremacy or Black resistance against it.

Conversely, Black and mixed-race partners neatly distinguished their experiences when moving in public spaces alone or with their white partners, and they associated the latter circumstance with lower exposure to racism and discrimination as compared to when they moved on their own. Importantly, this emerges from both women and men’s narratives, suggesting that in superdiverse contexts, such as London, the peculiarly entrenched stigma placed on Black male/white female couples (Caballero 2017, 42; Tizard and Phoenix 2002, 35–36; Bauer 2010, 176; 216) might have levelled off. While this proposition requires further empirical exploration, it points to a possible difference vis-à-vis the North American context, where scholars continue to observe this racialised and gendered difference (Yancey 2007, 206; Kitossa and Deliovsky 2010, 527).

Gender might also significantly affect partners’ perceptions of racism and/or discrimination. In particular, I contend that the centrality of women’s cultivation of their heterosexual desirability in the political economy of heteronormativity (Grosz 1990), and the intersecting patriarchal and class norms binding their dis/respectable status to their appearance, comportment and use of space (Skeggs 1997), might make women more sensitive to third party gazes. Differently, men’s (enduringly) structural position as the holders of the gaze (Mulvey 1975) and their undisputed, patriarchal entitlement to partner choice, from within or from without the boundaries of race,¹² might contribute to their lower receptivity to third party’s stares.

Eventually, understanding partners’ perceptions of racism and/or discrimination requires a nuanced engagement with their complex subjectivities and positionalities, which include, but cannot be reduced to, race. In the next section, I shift this intersectional lens from couples’ perceptions of how they feel as they move in public spaces, to the factors influencing their residential choice (or lack thereof).

Home-making

Jade is a fifty-year-old Black British woman of Afro-Caribbean heritage, married to Luke, a white British man her age. They met in London approximately twenty years ago, and there they lived their early years together. Tired of city life, Luke suggested moving to the coast to be closer to nature. Doing so, he recounted, required passing Jade’s ‘criteria [of] sitting in the cafe and counting Black people’.¹³ He explained:

One thing that was really important to her, and this was something I was learning, is that the kids would grow up having people that look like them around them, and obviously, London fits that. It ticks all those multiracial boxes. […] So, we came down here while we were house-hunting. I had a campervan, so we’d come down and we’d look around and then Jade would sit in a cafe and she’d be watching people go by, and I think it was one day we did that and she goes, ‘I’ve just seen fifteen people that are non-white,’ and she started to tick: ‘well this could work.’

Scholars have suggested that interracial couples privilege making home in ‘metropolitan multicultural areas’ to raise children in diverse neighbourhoods and schools (Caballero, Edwards, and Puthussery 2008, 43). Indeed, Jade’s evaluation of the city’s racial composition was driven by concerns for their children’s identity formation. Akin to Luke, white partners generally, unquestionably acknowledged that the competence necessary to this assessment lay in the Black or mixed-race partner’s eyes. Yet, this did not necessarily engender similar outcomes.

Vea is a mixed-race woman and Jamaican citizen in her early 40s, married to Tim, a white Dutchman in his late thirties. They met in the Netherlands while pursuing their studies, and a few years ago they settled in and bought a house in London. It was Vea who had the strongest input in the choice of neighbourhood:

I always feel like where Caucasian people are, their services are better [she smiles]. The schools are better. Which is probably true, actually. And … you know, I am in England: I don’t want to feel like I am living … in the Caribbean or somewhere else, you know? And then we wanted to have kids after, so it is something you have to think about in terms of the schools as well, right? And in London, everything is about the postcode. So that is one reason. So, I did have certain areas I looked at. I do not think Tim was thinking along those lines probably [she laughs] He was not here as yet because I came down to London before […] and I looked at this neighbourhood because a friend of his, who is from Germany, lives here. […] And he really spoke highly of this area, so, I said, ‘Okay, I will stop off there and see what it looks like,’ and I really liked it, you know … It was a very nice area and it is fairly close to the centre as well, so [I chose this place] for those reasons really. Too expensive though [she laughs]!¹⁴

Vea’s tale highlights how race and class were intimately entangled in her assessment of where to make home. Understanding her wishes and aspirations requires engagement with scholarship on Caribbean formations of race, class, and respectability (Hall 2017). Still, her choice to live in a predominantly white (‘Caucasian’) neighbourhood seemingly departs from the expectation that interracial couples and multiracial families wouldn’t do so for fear of ‘standing out’. In fact, as what follows will show, the relationship between race, place and space in partners’ perceptions, experiences and expectations of racism and discrimination is not univocal and rather reflects (also) their lived experiences of it:

Sometimes you tend to find [that] where you have more mixed people like, more metropolitan, there is a lot more of this [racial] prejudice happening. I mean … this is just me applying from what I have seen living in different countries. Canada is a typical example. Nice country, but you will find, like, in Vancouver, where it is very mixed, you have more of the prejudice, racism coming in, all these kinds of things, as opposed to if you live in a more Caucasian, purely Caucasian area, [where] people don’t bother you as much. That is what I experienced. I might be wrong. I don’t know how it is here. So.

Not just a class aspiration, for Vea the choice to live, in London, in a predominantly white neighbourhood was also a means to reduce exposure to the racism that she relayed experiencing when she lived in more metropolitan areas. Eventually, people’s unique biographies, subjectivities and positionalities always mediate the ways in which they perceive and navigate the politics of location, i.e. the ‘local field of reading positions and practices, power relations, and material conditions’. (Luke and Luke 1999, 229) Inasmuch as the relationship between race, class and space underpinning couple’s home-making choices is not univocal, other factors also require consideration.

Stella is a Black British woman of Afro-Caribbean heritage in her mid-fifties, formerly married to Joe, a white British man a few years older than her. Both Londoners, mid-way into their marriage they decided to move to the South East, in a predominantly white town. In their separate interviews, they relayed having considered the place’s racial homogeneity, but also their confidence that, as Joe recounted, ‘whatever the town lacked in terms of diversity we could make up for with our own friendship group and kind of cultural awareness generally’.¹⁵ However, while Joe could not recall what exactly triggered their move, Stella’s memories were clearer:

We had three small kids … and at some point, one was at school, we had an au pair and another one used to be picked up by a childminder … so we had three different bits of childcare. And I used to sort it all out, and it was bloody exhausting! And we had some friends that moved there, and we would go and visit them with the kids and it would be … nice, relaxed: there was space in the house – and we didn’t have that in London, it was quite hard, you know? You had to get a babysitter, and then even if someone lived a couple of miles down the road, it could take you an hour to get there in the traffic. It was just hard and there was never an exchange of childcare, it was always: this has to be paid for. And our eldest son was going to secondary school … and like any middle-class parents, for some reason, we thought he couldn’t possibly get on a goddamn bus and go across London!¹⁶

Gender roles, and particularly the unequal division of childcare responsibilities, emerge strongly in Stella’s account, compounded by aspirations to improve their quality of life such as by having more space to live in and the opportunity to cultivate neighbourly relations based on reciprocity and care. In hindsight, some regret filtered through their accounts, as they retrieved memories of some racist incidents affecting their children – something that had not happened in London, where interraciality and mixedness are ‘part of “the norm”’ (Caballero et al. 2012, 17).

Last, but not least, understanding interracial couples’ home-making choices requires acknowledgement that choice already implies affordability, and hence, it marks a particular class position.¹⁷

Claire is a white British woman in her late forties and lives in a council flat in a city in the South East with her son, whom she had with her former husband – Kofi, a Ghanaian man her age. They met approximately twenty years ago in his home country, where she travelled as a carer for ‘a disabled [sic] lady’,¹⁸ and again the following year, in similar circumstances. When she returned to the UK the second time, she was pregnant. ‘So, it was very quick […] and … I thought the best thing was to tell him and give him the opportunity to come over and … be a father. So that’s what happened’. Together, they went through hard times, including multiple evictions:

When Michael [their son] was a week old, we went to a place and … we were there a year, we got evicted, it was in a third-floor building and there was apparently some new legislation introduced about the windows when you have kids on a higher floor, because they were the old-fashioned sash windows, so the landlord would have had to have changed all of the windows, so instead he got us to leave. So, we went to another place for a year. And then after a year, the landlady, she, I think, claimed she wanted to move back in, [so] we got evicted again. By that time, we were starting to break up, and … . We were just at the end of the marriage. And then we got evicted again, and I was really tired of the whole insecurity, so I decided I wanted to get social housing and … I told the council I didn’t have any money for another place, and you know, blah-blah-blah. So, the process was: you wait until the bailiffs come and kick you out and then you are officially homeless, and then they will house you. So, I went through that process on my own, then I went into bed and breakfast with our son. Luckily only for ten days, and then I got a social housing flat, which was a secure tenancy.

Back then, Claire did not consider that racism weighted on this series of evictions: ‘No. No. I never thought that’. Then she paused. ‘Yeah, I hope not’, she thoughtfully added. The shift from denial to belief partly reflects the racial awareness that she developed over time by mothering their mixed-race child, and also, her lived experience that racist intent frequently remains covert. In fact, in her new accommodation, the extent by which she was harassed for no apparent reason by an old, white British male neighbour, deepened the hiatus between what she could and could not know, nor prove. It was only ‘after about eight years of this going on that it came out that he was definitely racist’.¹⁹ And it was only when he left out of his own will, that that situation changed – for she didn’t have the choice of an elsewhere.

Even for couples who can afford it, however, choice is never entirely ‘free’. In the following section, I foreground how partners narrated the constraints underpinning their leisure travels away from home.

Mapping un/safety and dis/comfort

Jaslyn is a British mixed-race woman of Kenyan heritage in her late forties. Born and raised in northern England, she later moved to London, where she lives with her husband, a white British man a few years older than her. We met for a coffee when I had almost completed fieldwork,²⁰ and a bit puzzled, I shared with her my early impression that, while anti-Black racism in Britain was forceful, the interracial couples I interviewed relayed little exposure to it. In response, Jaslyn told me how she reacted when, while planning a family holiday, ‘Bulgaria came up in the [search engine’s] suggestions. Uhm … ’, she said, curling her nose, ‘maybe a family like ours would not be welcome there’. Promptly, she searched for a different destination but explained to me how ‘these things just get buried into everyday life, you’re not out there on social media to denounce them. You just go on with your life. It’s about the choices that power took away from me’.

Like Jaslyn, many interracial couples I interviewed and who could afford leisure travel relayed pondering the intensity of anti-Black racism in different countries in their choice of destination. Reflecting the couples’, or at least one partner’s perceptions and projections of un/safety and dis/comfort, these subjective political geographies maps blend personal and vicarious experiences, media representations, and history. While possibly diminishing couples’ exposure to racism and/or discrimination, these considerations foreground an element of defensiveness in their mobility. Two areas recurred frequently in their accounts: Eastern Europe, and the US.

A well-travelled white British man, Luke (see under ‘Home-making’) was perplexed at my question of whether there were places where he wouldn’t go to with Jade, his wife:

Probably, I wouldn’t go to Eastern bloc countries, I wouldn’t go to Russia. Yeah, I’d be quite worried. […] Within Europe … I mean, Italy [he pauses, maybe pondering that I am Italian] … Italy is fairly racist. You know … I have been [there] … because they’re a predominantly white … well … let’s not go to the Moors or anything but … yeah … Europe probably: fine. But, in Eastern Europe – Romania or any of … I probably wouldn’t … unless Jade really wanted to go, and Jade was happy … then I would be fine but, I would be a little bit cautious about some places. But that wouldn’t … if I’d been in a … if my wife had been white … it wouldn’t really be something I would have probably ever thought about.

During the interview, Luke recounted that Jade had taught him how to see the world through ‘Black eyes’, that is, ‘from a Black person’s perspective’. Indeed, his mapping of countries based on his perceptions of the relative intensity of anti-Black racism characterising them, suggests his awareness that the experience of mobility is heavily racialised. Similarly, many partners relayed hesitation or outright fear of travelling in the US, and particularly in the South. Their accounts blended historical references to the segregationist regime, of which interracial marriage prohibitions were a cornerstone (Roberts 2014), and contemporary police brutality. As noted consistently throughout this article, these perceptions were not necessarily shared at the couple level, but they could reflect partners’ differently racialised and gendered subjectivities and positionalities, as further inflected by other salient characteristics, such as sexuality.

Raya and Julia are two British women in their late thirties, respectively white and mixed-race. For many years, both pursued parallel nomadic lifestyles, mixing international travel, temporary work, and fun. After meeting each other and deciding to live together, they chose to settle in Manchester – a city where neither had lived before, but which felt homey to both due to the presence of friends and family to one or the other. Now, however, the idea of travelling abroad together, as a couple, elicited different reactions:

Raya: There was a discussion of going to the [United] States – like, you have that little dream: ‘let’s get a convertible’, like Thelma and Louise … but not driving off the cliff! [Julia and I laugh] Do you know what I mean? ‘Let’s go and do that,’ and one of the instant things that I thought of is (a) her colour, the big Afro, and then (b) the sexual orientation between the two of us, and it has put a completely different spin on any aspiration of travel, anywhere.

Julia: For you, but not for me.

Raya: For me it has. So, then we’ll have conversations about that and it’s like, ‘How are we going to hold ourselves in these spaces? Black people are getting shot left, right and centre across the United States, for nothing’, because I’ve got that sort of understanding, and it’s not like I’m going to walk into every situation feeling like that but that is a reality and I’m not saying that that would happen to us but these are things that I think about in terms of, like, her safety, and I don’t want to go into a racist town.²¹

Anti-Black racism and homophobia intersect in Raya’s political geography maps, reflecting her perception of their being always potentially in danger. On the other hand, Julia’s firm stance arguably mirrors the navigating skills that she developed living as a mixed-race woman in a predominantly white country:

if we’re keeping on the racial rather than the gay [level], I’ve never let it stop me from going. I literally do not even think about it [Raya laughs] Never. […] I just go wherever I want. And like I said, I’ve always had amazing experiences. I have never had a negative experience. I’ve never had. Whether it happens with me being completely oblivious to it [Raya laughs], which is possible [she laughs] … obviously I have that feeling of walking into a bar and I’m the only Black person, and I know people are looking, but I’ve always had that? So maybe I don’t really feel that anymore, or it’s just normal because it’s normal to me, it always has been. So, I don’t feel it if I’m in another country because I have it in my own country.

In Julia’s political geography, anti-Black racism does not figure as an external danger to anticipate and mitigate against, as she is used to being considered, in the eyes of her fellow British citizens, as not of her own country. Still, she considered homophobia to be a prominent obstacle to their mobility – one, the tackling of which required tactical and tactful context-specific considerations:

If I’m travelling with my partner and we’re going to a country wherever – it could be Mongolia, it could be Thailand … : I don’t expect to be walking around the streets holding hands. I’d never do that because … I’m respectful of their culture and that that might just be a little bit … overboard? So.

By refraining from displaying affection publicly – a tactic which Steinbugler similarly observed in the US context (Steinbugler 2005, 435) – interracial same-sex couples might attempt to mitigate the risk of experiencing homophobic and/or racist violence. In so doing, however, they also conform to an aesthetic of intimacy and race that reflects disapproval against their intersecting non-normativities.

Conclusions

In this article, I have discussed the relationship between race, place and space underpinning the perceptions and experiences of racism and/or discrimination narrated by partners in interracial, Black-white couples in contemporary England.

First, I have argued that partners’ perceptions of interracial couple-based discrimination, or absence thereof, reflect their differently racialised subjectivities and positionalities, which gender inflects further. For white partners, entry into an interracial couple engenders a phenomenological rupture with the seamless comfort and safety that they enjoy moving as white bodies in white majority countries. While possibly triggering a new or sharper awareness of anti-Black racism, this rupture also deeply transforms their perception of the space in which they move. As a result, I have argued that racism directed at the Black or mixed-race partner might be perceived as hostility against the interraciality of their union. Conversely, for Black or mixed-race partners entry into an interracial couple does not depart from, but stands in a phenomenological continuum with the racism and/or discrimination that they relentlessly experience on their own; a continuum where proximity to whiteness seemingly has a potentially shielding effect. Having highlighted that the latter appears in the narratives of couples constituted by partners of different race/gender characteristics, I have suggested that in superdiverse contexts such as London, the historically more entrenched stigma against Black male/white female couples may have levelled off. This proposition needs further empirical research. Likewise, further research is needed to explore in-depth the extent to which gender inflects partners’ perceptions of being stared at disapprovingly (or not) by strangers – a suggestion that I have put forward based on the acknowledgement of women and men’s heteronormative positioning as respectively the objects or holders of the (male) gaze.

Second, I have argued that interracial couples’ residential choices encompass, but are not necessarily determined by their evaluation of a place’s racial composition. Whereas most couples undertook this assessment through the eyes of Black and mixed-race partners – who, in the cases here discussed, were also all women – the plurality of its possible outcomes suggests that partners’ perceptions of the relationship between race, place and space do not only depend on the politics of location, but also on their biographies, subjectivities and positionalities. Therefore, gendered and class-based constraints and aspirations to a better quality of life (e.g. by reducing the childcare burden, accessing better public services, et al.) ought to be considered together with the more obvious, albeit perhaps insufficiently underlined acknowledgement that ‘choice’ is always already a class marker. Arguably, it is only if and when couples can afford it that issues of representation come into play.

Third, I have argued that for couples who can afford leisure travel, their choice of destination also reflects partners’ differently racialised subjectivities and positionalities, as further inflected by other salient characteristics, such as sexuality. I have shown that many partners seemingly gauged their options based on subjective political geography maps reflecting their perceptions and projections of un/safety and dis/comfort. Many relayed refraining from travelling to places, such as Eastern European countries and the US, which they associated with high levels of anti-Black racism. While possibly reducing their exposure to it, these considerations convey an element of defensiveness, suggesting that they do not feel to be moving under conditions of their choice. Nevertheless, anti-Black racism does not necessarily, solely determine interracial couple’s leisure travel destinations. Hence, for example, same-sex couples might (also) consider countries’ perceived attitudes towards non-normative subjects, reflecting their subjective political geographies of homophobia. However, differently from opposite-sex couples, whose determinations were formulated in a binary (yes/no) fashion, same-sex partners spoke of the possibility of navigating spaces in disguise, that is, concealing their affection and hence, their couple status. While effective in limiting their exposure to homophobic and/or racist violence, the wariness underpinning such tactic nevertheless strengthens the proposition that their mobility enduringly unfolds under racist and/or heterosexist constraints.

Acknowledgments

I thank the women, men and non-binary subjects who shared with me their experiences, the EUROMIX project’s team and advisory board for their comments on an earlier draft of this article and the anonymous peer reviewers for their suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme, as part of the project ‘Regulating Mixed Intimacies in Europe (EUROMIX)’ (grant number 725238).

Notes

1. On the US see Osuji (2019, 184; 203), Killian (2013, 86), Hibbler and Shinew (2002, 149–50); on Canada: Luke (1994); on South Africa: Anina and Basson (2015, 7); on the UK: Bauer (2010, 223).

2. In addition to the works listed above, see also Childs (2005) and Flores (2019) on the US, but see Luke and Luke (1999) on white-Indo/Asian couples in Australia, and Yancey (2007) and Kitossa and Deliovsky (2010) on white/non-white couples respectively in the US and Canada.

3. See e.g., Tizard and Phoenix (2002); Ali (2003); Song (2010); Caballero, Edwards, and Puthussery (2008); Caballero et al. (2012); Lewis and Demie (2019).

4. The research received ethical clearance on 24 May 2018 by the Ethics Committee of Juridical and Criminological Research of the Faculty of Law, VU Amsterdam.

5. Informed voluntariness was secured through prior sharing of written information on the research purpose and procedures, and subsequently, by participants’ signature of an informed consent form on interview day.

6. Both individual and joint interviews are context-specific performances of the self rather than gateways to participants’ inner ‘truth’. Method flexibility minimised pressure on potentially reticent or uninterested partners and aligned with participants’ work/care arrangements.

7. The UK Census classifies the population in ethnic groups, hence ‘inter-ethnic’ couples.

8. Interview with Rosalind, 24.04.2019.

9. The episodes she recounted concerned being insulted and threatened by strangers in public spaces.

10. Interview with Simona, 13.04.2019.

11. Interview with Mustapha, 13.04.2019.

12. Several scholars have observed that men are less disapproved of than women for choosing a partner outside of their race, see Yancey (2007); Twine (2010, 240; 242); Kitossa and Deliovsky (2010, 526); Onwuachi-Willig (2013, 140–41).

13. Interview with Luke, 26.04.2019.

14. Interview with Tim and Vea, 3.05.2019.

15. Interview with Joe, 15.03.2019.

16. Interview with Stella, 1.04.2019.

17. On race- and class-based constraints affecting housing in Britain, see Shankley and Finney (2020) and Preece (2018, 20).

18. Interview with Claire, 5.03.2019.

19. A white child told his mother that the man had urged him not to play with Black kids, and the woman reported this incident to Claire.

20. Field notes, 25.03.2019.

21. Interview with Raya and Julia, 17.05.2019.