Seeing red over black and white: popular and media representations of inter-racial relationships as precursors to racial violence.

• Author: Perry, Barbara

Remember those wonderful Saturday mornings as a child when you were firmly planted in front of the television, watching cartoons? Do you remember, specifically, watching Krazy Kat? It was a typical cat-and-mouse cartoon, much like Tom and Jerry, right? Apparently not. In retrospect, with the wisdom of middle age, we can now see the raced, gendered, and sexed undertones that permeated that "study in black and white." While not the first, Krazy Kat was perhaps the most creative "documentary" of images of intimate inter-racial relationships (IIR) in the media.

The authors of this article have been exploring the issue of public responses--including violent responses--to IIRs for some time now. One issue that arises with some regularity is the foundation for what have typically been negative reactions to black-white IIRs. Undoubtedly, the basis is to be found in associated cultural images. And while these emerge in myriad sites--legislation, political rhetoric, and white supremacist websites for example--our present interest is in media representations of IIRs that reinforce the images of such relationships as dysfunctional at best, dangerous transgressions at worst. The prevailing trend has been either to deny the existence of IIRs by rendering them invisible or to portray them as "unnatural" border crossings. What we offer here are some tentative first thoughts on media representations of IIRs--"tentative" because there is a glaring paucity of literature from which to draw conclusions. While racialized images have been the focus of considerable inquiry, this analysis has not extended to how these images bleed into representations of inter-racial relationships.

Our discussion opens with a consideration of the role of controlling myths in shaping our perceptions of difference. In particular, we emphasize the ways in which cultural constructions of race and gender set up the context in which IIRs are subsequently enacted and perceived. We then turn to the heart of the article: observations on the ways in which the images noted are portrayed in one cultural form, that is, the media. While there are some exceptions, the tendency has been to portray IIRs in very derogatory ways, whether as inherently doomed or as inherently dangerous to "racial purity." We close with a brief discussion of how these widespread mythologies might inform subsequent violence against those involved in IIRs in the real-as opposed to mediated--world. Throughout, our discussion focuses on the U.S. context; however, we also draw on material and examples from the United Kingdom.

Border crossing

The hostility toward inter-racial relationships and inter-racial sexuality is ultimately grounded in the essentialist understanding of racial difference. Boundary crossing is thus not only unnatural but threatening to the rigid hierarchies that have been built around these presumed differences. This sentiment is evident in a letter to the editor written in response to a photo of black and white youths dancing together:

Interracial marriages are unbiblical and immoral. God created different races of people and placed them amongst themselves ... There is nothing for white Americans to gain by mixing their blood with blood of other peoples. There will only be irreversible damage for us. (qtd. in Mathabane and Mathabane 1992: 186) The essentialist, mutually exclusive categories of belonging that frame hostility toward those in IIRs assume an either/or understanding of identity, in which one is forced to choose "a side." Discrete, "normally" impermeable boundaries are assumed. Consequently, identity formation is often concerned with "drawing boundaries, engaging in boundedness, configuring rings around" the categories of difference (Weis, Proweller, and Centrie 1997: 214). The task of difference, then, is to police the borders between categories. There is no room for elision or "border crossing," since this would threaten the "natural" order.

Either side of these borders is significant to the extent that each is "posted" with exclusionary signs that keep whites on one side of the fence and blacks on the other. They are integral, then, in creating the boundaries that inform public responses to IIRs.

When we speak of IIRs, sexuality becomes a particularly important "construction site." Every culture can be characterized by a series of definitions of "appropriate" and "inappropriate" sexual forms. Specifically, these definitions "provide permissions, prohibitions, limits and possibilities" with respect to activities, partners, and objects of sexuality (Messerschmidt 1993: 73). Given these definitions--which typically include prohibitions on inter-racial couplings--certain behaviours and identities become marginalized at best, stigmatized and demonized at worst. Again, whatever is outside the norm is considered deviant, the negative Other, and therefore subordinate in the hierarchy of sexuality.

Popular culture--including the media--is integral in reinforcing these prohibitions. David Goldberg (1990: 297) describes a relatively consistent discursive formation characterized by

a totality of ordered relations and correlations--of subjects to each other and to objects; of economic production and reproduction, cultural symbolism, and signification; of laws and moral rules; of social, political, economic or legal inclusion and exclusion. The socio-discursive formation consists of a range of rules: "is's" and "oughts" "dos" and "dont's" "cans" and "cannots" "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots." Popular culture thus plays a vital role in reminding black and white people alike that "thou shalt not" cross the boundaries of sexuality that have been built up since the first black slave was brought to North America's shores. From the perspective--historical and contemporary--of white Americans, one of the most palpable realms of difference between "us" and "them" lies in sexuality. And it is in this context that people of colour--and people who transgress the boundaries--are often subject to the most vicious opprobrium and hostility precedent to racial violence. While people of colour are perceived generally as threatening--in economic, political, and social terms--they are especially to be feared, ridiculed, and censured on the basis of their presumed sexualities. Black male sexuality is constructed as a "dangerous, powerful and uncivilized force that is hazardous to white women and a serious threat to white men" (Daniels 1997: 93). Moreover, women of colour are also feared and reviled on the same basis: they are racialized, exotic Others who do not fit the Western ideal of womanhood. Whether male or female, people of colour--and their white partners--are most at risk of public opprobrium when they visibly cross the racialized sexual boundaries by engaging in inter-racial relationships.

On the basis of these controlling images of people of colour, white women and, especially, white men are fearful and suspicious of the sexualities of the Other. Speaking of the white fear of black bodies in particular, Cornel West contends that this

fear is rooted in visceral feelings about black bodies and fueled by sexual myths of black men and women ... either as threatening creatures who have the potential for sexual power over whites, or as harmless, desired underlings of a white culture. (1993: 119) White Western culture has long clung to paradoxical controlling images of the sexualities of people of colour. Foremost among these has been the tendency to imagine people of colour as "excessive, animalistic, or exotic in contrast to the ostensibly restrained or 'civilized' sexuality of white women and men" (Frankenberg 1993: 75). At different times, in different contexts, most non-white groups have been perceived as sexual predators, guided by their animal-like instincts. Since all but the white race were historically held to be subhuman...