Abstract
The fear of race-mixing through sexual and romantic relationships has long plagued the psyche of the United States (Ferber, 2004; Frankenberg, 1993; Steinbugler, 2005), and has had serious consequences in terms of buttressing the racial order (Irby, 2014; Spencer, 2011). The college and graduate school years are times when individuals learn from a range of romantic and sexual relationships, and development along this interpersonal line is critical to growth and maturation (Patton et al., 2016). This chapter takes up a feminist poststructural perspective on the narratives of 20 multiracial and contested white postsecondary students at a predominantly white postsecondary institution, and delineates the construction of subjectivity for some cisgender men. Namely, some men are interpellated as the Unwanted, Colored Male through enactments of the discourses of essentialist anti-Black racism, normative whiteness, colorblindness, denial, and the binary discourse, sometimes separately and other times working together. It is important to flesh out how antiquated mental models around race continue to shape the experiences of current students at postsecondary institutions across the U.S. in order to better prepare for the higher education’s mixed race future. The chapter concludes with implications for research and practice.
“I’ve always felt it’s harder for me. I basically view this like [I am] less than desirable … I just get the cold shoulder a lot of the time…” (Roland, Ph.D. student, late 20’s)
“I’m on these dating apps. The rate that I match with people is significantly less than my friends who have been on them! They’re no better looking, I’m probably smarter, or I’m equally as smart as them, if not smarter … I feel race has played a role, and I don’t use race as an excuse, but it [has] definitely impacted opportunities to date” (Michael, Ph.D. student, mid-30’s)
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Notes
- 1.
Throughout this chapter, I use the term multiracial to indicate mixed, multiracial, and transracial people. I capitalize the words Black, Indigenous, and other words meant to indicate racially minoritized populations in the U.S. context but do not capitalize white or whiteness—following the standards of Pérez Huber (2010)—as a grammatical move to decenter white dominance.
- 2.
Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) is also referred to as the Middle East & North Africa (MENA). Whereas MENA centers “the West” as the point of reference from which all Others are located and named, SWANA centers Asia as the geographical center of the continent.
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Mohajeri, O. (2022). The “Unwanted, Colored Male”: Gendered Contested White Subjectivity Hailed Through Contemporary Racial Discourse. In: Johnston-Guerrero, M.P., Combs, L.D., Malaney-Brown, V.K. (eds) Preparing for Higher Education’s Mixed Race Future. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88821-3_8
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