A black person and a white person coming together has been given many names—miscegenation, amalgamation, race mixing, and jungle fever—conjuring up multiple images of sex, race, and taboo. Black-white relationships and marriages have long been viewed as a sign of improving race relations and assimilation, yet these unions have also been met with opposition from both white and black communities. Overall, there is an inherent assumption that interracial couples are somehow different from same-race couples. Within the United States, the responses to black-white couplings have ranged from disgust to curiosity to endorsement, with the couples being portrayed as many things—among them, deviant, unnatural, pathological, exotic, but always sexual. Even the way that couples are labeled or defined as “interracial” tells us something about societal expectations. We name what is different. For example, a male couple is more likely to be called a “gay couple” than a gender-mixed couple is to be called a “heterosexual couple.”
The Internet is a particularly interesting social arena that symbolizes for many the future of interaction and society. The images and discourses around black-white unions on the Internet can serve as an important data source that—like the transcript of an interview—can be read and analyzed for content and meaning, including the social, cultural, and political interactions that take place online. The meaning and significance of these Internet discourses and images are “social products in their own right, as well as what they claim to represent.”
The word “interracial” returns thousands of results with search engines such as MSN, Google, Yahoo, and Excite. Surfing through these sites, one can find individual Web pages of interracial couples, large multiracial support sites such as Interracial Voice or the Multiracial Activist, or even pornographic Web sites for those who want to see interracial sex. Based on an extensive review of Web sites where black-white couples or interracial sexuality figure prominently, interracial Web sites can be grouped into three main categories: multiracial organizations/support sites; pornographic Web sites and dating sites; and hate group sites. These very different types of Web sites do not simply represent individual views but are part of the reproduction of certain images and ideas about black-white unions that draw from contemporary societal views. The Internet, like society, has a complicated relationship with black-white unions, accepting them in theory but opposing them in practice.
darkice85
You make a good point as always about how society treats, interracial relationships. I’m very interested to see results of 2010 census see how much interracial relationships have either increased or decreased.