Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)
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Guess Who's Welcome to Dinner: Contemporary Interracial Romance and the New Racism / Tru Leverette
Abstract: Although contemporary representations of interracial romance may appear, on the surface, progressive, they share elements of what Patricia Hill Collins has called "past in present" racism; that is, although the films no longer portray interracial romance as taboo, their presentations obscure deeper messages that perpetuate traditional views of interracial romance, race, and gender. This article analyzes a classic interracial romance film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and two contemporary films, Guess Who and Something New, in order to explore traditional ideologies inherent within these seemingly progressive representations. Both contemporary films present interracial romance as acceptable, but only within certain constraints, and neither offers the historical awareness that these relationships are, in fact, nothing new at all. These films, then, while appearing to assert an anti-racist stance, are implicated in the new racism; they appear to promote equality and argue against racism while simultaneously clinging to and perpetuating racist ideologies that often go unnoticed but that, ultimately, are not without effect.
In the theatrical world, as in the aesthetic world more generally, ideology is always in essence the site of a competition and a struggle in which the sound and fury of humanity's political and social struggles are faintly or sharply echoed.
Louis
Althusser, "Contradiction
and Overdetermination"
Don't Question the Imaginary
<1> At the dawn of the millennium, we learned about Tiger Woods's "Cablinasian" identity. We saw on the cover of Time magazine in 1993 the face of the future: a morphed image created from faces of various races. Race mixture was making headlines…again. Since we've entered the twenty-first century, this attention to race mixture has not abated, and in a number of recent popular films, interracial romance is again reaching the spotlight. James Bond's second African-American love interest was played by mixed race Halle Barry in the 2002 film Die Another Day [1], and in 2005 the Civil Rights classic Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) was remade with a twist - this time, the family is African-American and the man coming to dinner is white. Even more recently, Something New (2006) depicts a successful African-American woman confronted with the reality of a dwindling number of eligible African-American male partners and the question of whether she can fall in love with a white man.
<2> Although these contemporary representations of interracial romance appear, on the surface, progressive, they all share elements of what Patricia Hill Collins, relying on Frederic Jameson's ideas of sedimentation [2], has called "past in present" racism: "the new racism reflects sedimented or past-in-present racial formations from prior historical periods. Some elements of prior racial formations persist virtually unchanged, and others are transformed in response to globalization, transnationalism, and the proliferation of mass media" (55). Historically, images of interracial sexuality and romance often followed the pattern of the tragic mulatto stereotype: "a readily identifiable symbol of racial conflict, alienation, and insurmountable struggle…" (Giles 63). Indeed, "the mulatto character has not escaped being cast as a pariah…" (Giles 78); likewise interracial relationships have been deemed despicable in historical representations, often portrayed as dangerous, flawed, and ultimately undesirable to both individuals and society. As bell hooks notes, "Hollywood's traditional message about interracial sex has been that it is tragic, that it will not work" (53). In her analysis of The Crying Game and The Bodyguard, hooks asserts that since race is a "hot issue," these films allow filmmakers to commodify the taboo subject of interracial sexuality and allow moviegoers "the marketplace to let our prejudices and xenophobia…go, and happily 'eat the other'" (55). Ultimately, hooks concludes, these films assert that "desire, and not the realm of politics, is the location of reconciliation and redemption" (55).
<3> In her critique, hooks notes that neither of the films she discusses makes race an issue; indeed, the publicity suggests that race is thoroughly unimportant. This is not so with the films I explore here; both Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Guess Who offer consciously racialized messages and Something New, also conscious of the races of its characters, purports to be a movie about staying open to love through the color-blind rhetoric of much contemporary racial discourse. Although Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as well as the later two films, which I claim are indicative of contemporary representations of interracial romance, no longer portray such romance as taboo or necessarily tragic, they are indicative of the argument that desire is nonpolitical and that it is the realm within which the races must find harmony. In offering this "apolitical" message, I argue, they perpetuate traditional views of interracial romance, race, and gender, reinforcing historical politics that relegate racism and sexism to the personal and private realm and thereby undermining efforts to secure social justice at the public and avowedly political level. These contemporary images, which on the surface appear to have escaped the legacies of historical representations, nevertheless maintain close ties, subtly reinforcing earlier ideologies. These ideologies, which Louis Althusser defined as "the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Lenin 52), often escape our notice, so that we remain unaware of the forces controlling the real conditions of existence: public, social control over the private lives of individuals. Instead, we imagine that our lives are within our own control, that we are not influenced unduly by social representations or cultural mandates regarding how we live our private lives, including whom we love and choose to marry.
<4> Understanding the function of ideology within our lives entails recognizing the realm of the imaginary, which Althusser noted as fundamental to our relationship to the world. In her discussion of heterosexuality in popular culture, sociologist Chrys Ingraham elucidates Jacques Lacan's notion of the imaginary, writing:
The 'imaginary' here does not mean 'false' or 'pretend' but, rather, an imagined relationship between the individual and the world. The heterosexual imaginary is that way of thinking that conceals the operation of heterosexuality in structuring gender…and closes off any critical analysis of heterosexuality as an organizing institution (Ingraham 1994)…The effect of this illusory depiction of reality is that heterosexuality is taken for granted and unquestioned while gender is understood as something people are socialized into or learn. By leaving heterosexuality unexamined as an institution we don't explore how it is learned, what it keeps in place, and the interests it serves in the way it's currently practiced. (16)
Likewise, endogamy, or the practice of marrying within one's racial group, is taken for granted in American society and culture. As Ingraham argues with heterosexuality, intra-racial heterosexuality specifically is unexamined as an institution, relegating variations from this norm as deviations and difference as undesirable [3]. Taking Ingraham's cue, then, we might question how these practices of intra-racial heterosexuality are learned, what they maintain, and what interests they serve. Subsequently, we might then question how representations of interracial heterosexuality either challenge or maintain traditional ideologies and practices surrounding race, sexuality, and marriage. Indeed, interracial romance is an important site of inquiry, since the
Manichaean conflict between the antipodes of light and dark [is] usually most intensely expressed as a sexual threat…For the white woman as the essence of whiteness, the most prized possession of the white man and the object of desire of all other races, is a powerful representational current running through Western literature and cinema and is one of the generic sources of race imagery in [the twentieth] century. It is the threat of the white woman's rape by the monstrous, black other that gives white-black contrasts much of their social charge and meaning. (Guerrero 64)
Don't Ever Fall in Love with a Colored Man
<5>
In this regard, an important representation of interracial
heterosexuality occurs in the film Guess
Who's
Coming to Dinner,
starring Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, and Katharine Hepburn.
Originally released in 1967, the year the Supreme Court in Loving
v. Virginia
declared anti-miscegenation laws illegal, it depicts an emotionally
tumultuous day in the lives of two families whose white daughter and
black son have announced their plans to marry. John Prentice, an
internationally renowned doctor, is the son of working-class black
parents from Los Angeles, John and Mary Prentice. His father, a
retired postal worker, is adamantly against the impending marriage,
but his mother expresses sympathy and is disappointed that her
husband cannot remember what it was like to feel the passion John
does. Joanna, John's
fiancée,
is the daughter of a wealthy white couple, Matt and Christina
Drayton, from San Francisco. Mr. Drayton is a successful publisher
who initially expresses strong reservations about the marriage but
ultimately offers the young couple his support. Mrs. Drayton, an art
gallery owner, although initially surprised, wholeheartedly
encourages her daughter and Dr. Prentice in their plans. As she tells
her husband, "The
way [Joanna] is is just exactly the way we brought her up to be…we
told her it was wrong to somehow believe the white people were
essentially superior to the black people - or
the brown or the red or the yellow ones, for that matter. People who
thought that way were wrong to think that way - sometimes
hateful, usually stupid, but always, always wrong. That's
what we said. And when we said it, we did not add, 'But
don't
ever fall in love with a colored man.'"
<6> The film was groundbreaking in its historically unique representation of a black man and white woman in love planning to marry [4], and it was highly commercially successful [5]. Given the fact, as John's father declares, that in "sixteen or seventeen states [they'd] be breaking the law" to marry, this depiction of an interracial couple offered a political statement at a time when such relationships were being debated in court. Although interracial relationships had occurred throughout the history of the United States, public representations of them were uncommon and were not likely to be positive portrayals of love and commitment. White men's sexual abuse of black women throughout slavery and beyond was invariably overlooked by the white majority, while black men were assumed to lust after white women, an assumption that led to rampant lynching of black men throughout the early twentieth century and cinematic portrayals of hypersexual black brutes [6]. Subsequently, during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, romantic relationships between blacks and whites continued and, for some, became part of the political struggle for equality. Thus, there was heightened sensitivity to interracial marriage at this time and responses to it varied. As Alex Lubin shows in his insightful study, the issue of race mixing was a problematic subject during the civil rights movement. Many segregationists raised the issue in ways similar to its use by anti-abolitionists in the nineteenth century. If legal restrictions separating the races were relaxed, they argued, this would lead to the relaxation of social and cultural mores as well, resulting in race mixture. Thus, civil rights activists were careful in their treatment of mixed race. Hoping to avoid the assumption that desegregation would lead to miscegenation, many treated race mixture and intermarriage as a personal and private issue, arguing that they wanted equality within institutions such as schools, workplaces, and housing but that they were not seeking to change norms within the institution of marriage.
<7> Of course, others used the issue of race mixture to highlight the uneven history of sexual abuse between the races; black women, they argued, had been victimized by white men because they could not summon the force of the law in righting the sexual wrongs committed against them. White women who had fallen prey with white men to sexual desires, they asserted, could still save themselves from social scorn by marrying their sexual partners. Black women were not offered this same protection, and black men met with violence and death. Ida B. Wells attested that "white men lynched, burned, and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women [that white men had done to black women]; even when the white women were willing victims" (71) [7]. Thus, a number of blacks believed that striking down anti-miscegenation laws would protect black women from the abuse they had historically suffered and equalize the uneven responses to interracial sexuality.
<8> Lubin's study demonstrates that, after World War II, the argument of civil rights activists changed. No longer were they primarily concerned with guarding black womanhood. Instead, many often sought to give black men access to the same economic and material privileges that white men enjoyed: "Advocacy for the right to intermarriage thus meant far more than the right to choose a mate, it meant the right to accumulate social and material capital" (68). For this reason, race mixture during this time primarily highlighted marriages between black men and white women; this focus on black men attempted to "rescue the black male body from the weight of historical representations of black male sexuality as perverse, disabled, and dangerous" (69), while at the same time playing into white segregationists' fears that black men desired white women.
<9> Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, then, offers a political message regarding interracial marriage, black male sexuality, and the varied responses they engender, although these messages are less progressive than they might appear at first glance. Despite its clear commercial success, the film was soundly critiqued by African Americans who were frustrated by its integrationist theme and its shallowness. In fact, according to Ed Guerrero, Sidney Poitier's image overall "was increasingly wearing thin for African Americans; it did not speak to the aspirations or anger of the new black social consciousness that was emerging" (72), causing one black critic of the time to declare the film "warmed over white shit" (Elliston 28). Cinematic representations of African Americans had shifted into "sterile paragons of virtue completely devoid of mature characterization or of any political or social reality. Critics, as well as the audience at large…began to perceive the neutered or counterfeit sexuality of Poitier's roles as obsolete and insulting, especially when contrasted with rising black nationalist calls for a new liberated black sense of manhood and self" (Guerrero 72). Indeed, many African Americans' dissatisfaction with Poitier's character in the film was parallel to their growing dissatisfaction with the methods and aims of the Civil Rights movement [8]. As Black Power consciousness grew among the younger generation, so did their disillusionment with the prior generation's attempts to secure racial justice. As Guerrero contends, "For the social history of black folk, as well as the issue of their cinematic representation, 1967 and 1968 were years of violent struggle, contradiction, tension, and dramatic turning points" (71). Urban riots beginning in 1965 signaled the decline of the civil rights movement and the increasing frustrations of blacks who ostensibly had rights as American citizens but were unable to reap fully the benefits of that citizenship.
<10> The film is considered a "problem picture," meaning that it presents the audience with a social "problem" that is "completely stripped of its social or political context, reduced to a conflict between individuals, sentimentalized and happily resolved at the picture's end" (Guerrero 76). Furthermore, "this narrative formula was distilled from a long-established strategy of ideological containment that allowed Hollywood to stay current, keeping abreast of the contemporary social and political climate and simultaneously upholding the status quo and containing all insurgent political impulses" (76). Interestingly, for example, the most resistance John and Joanna receive comes from John's father and the Draytons' black housekeeper, Tillie, who asserts disparagingly, "Civil Rights is one thing. This here is something else" and "I don't care to see a member of my own race gettin' above hisself [sic]." Throughout the film, John and Joanna's relationship is continually referred to as both a "situation" and a "problem," yet the audience ultimately is led to understand that the most pressing problem is the way others, such as Tillie, will react to the couple. In the scene depicting the most reactionary bigotry, the camera angle tilts unnervingly as Tillie harangues John for being just another "nigger" trying to get ahead; she asserts that, having raised and loved Joanna since the girl was a baby, she'll be keeping her eye on John, whom she clearly does not trust. This scene is interesting, too, for its clear portrayal of the co-optation of black women's emotional as well as physical energy as they labored in white households.
<11> Despite the attention given to Tillie's dissatisfaction, the film focuses most often on the interactions between and the opinions of men, which may be due to the era and the realities of male domination. Joanna, Mrs. Drayton, and Mrs. Prentice are all in agreement: all succumb to the impulses of sentiment over rationality. John, Mr. Drayton, and Mr. Prentice, however, are concerned with rational matters, with the fact that millions of people will be "shocked, offended, and appalled" by John and Joanna and that they might suffer as a result. The final decision, then, is John's, and as he declares at the beginning of the film, his decision depends on the Draytons', specifically Mr. Drayton's, approval.
<12> Overall, however, the film's primary message has as much to do with the racial generational conflict between black men as it does with the social problem of interracial marriage. In interactions with his own father, John asserts his separation from his father and his father's generation. He shouts, "I owe you nothing. You did what you were supposed to do because you brought me into this world. And from that day you owed me everything you could ever do for me like I will owe my son if I ever have another. But you don't own me…You and your whole lousy generation believes [sic] that the way it was for you is the way it's got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs…You've got to get off my back!" Thus, the film briefly asserts that this older generation to which John's father belongs, the Civil Rights generation, has held back the younger generation and would do well to step out of the way of progress. Despite this generational racial tension, however, the film's conservative ideology tramples its potential Black Power message, crushing it beneath a sentimental resolution that minimizes any serious political effect. In the end, the film reduces the overarching problems of racism and the question of interracial marriage to mere skin color contrasts, ignoring the larger political and social realities of race in America and side-stepping the significant question of how to advance racial justice on a larger social and political scale. Likewise, "what conflict there is in the film is transposed from race into a conflict between black generations, reflective of the surrounding 'generation gap'" in black consciousness (Guerrero 77).
<13> With Mr. Drayton, the film offers a "reversed, contrasting gesture that frames the dominant white perspective as the solution to the race problem" (Guerrero 77). Ultimately, then, the film requires white male approval of the black man and the former's gift of his daughter to the latter. Mr. Drayton's summation at the end of the film both highlights and distracts our attention from the fact that his opinion holds the most weight. As only he can assert, he states, "Where John made his mistake, I think, was in attaching so much importance to what her [Joanna's] mother and I might think. Because in the final analysis it doesn't matter a damn what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel and how much they feel for each other." Thus, Mr. Drayton is able to condemn John even as he welcomes him into the family, for in doing the gentlemanly thing in asking for parental approval, John has done the unmanly thing in not placing Johanna above everything else. Clearly, the premise of the entire film is that it does matter what Mr. Drayton thinks, making his final judgment mirror the opinions of the white male justices who in the same year would strike down restrictions against interracial marriage. Because so much of the film is invested in Mr. Drayton's final monologue, it is clear that the film is less about the question of interracial marriage itself and more about how it affects Mr. Drayton - i.e., white male America. The fact that Mr. Drayton relies on sentimental platitudes leads the film to a predictable conclusion, one that simultaneously restricts the film's political import, "masking its conservative assumptions about race, passing them off as consensus" (Guerrero 77), and fragmenting African-American efforts toward social justice.
Don't Marry a Black Girl
<14> In keeping with the earlier film's political conservatism, Guess Who, the 2005 interracial romantic comedy starring Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher, replicates the messages of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, appearing progressive when in reality it advocates the status quo. Clearly a remake of the 1960s' version, on the surface the movie appears radically different than the original. No longer is the couple comprised of a highly successful, internationally known handsome black doctor and the young, naïve daughter of white liberal professionals. Now, both are young and naïve, the white man a rising star in the financial sector and the black woman a photographer who is, again, the daughter of a comfortably moneyed couple. The black parents' upper-class status suggests that they have encountered no hindrance, and above all no racial hindrance, in their achievement of the American dream; race, in fact, seems to have been a distinct non-issue in their lives, unlike the lives of the black parents in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner who, perhaps understandably, had trouble believing that whites might accept them and as social equals.
<15> Guess Who chronicles the first meeting of Simon Green, the white male love interest, with his black fiancée Theresa Jones's family on the occasion of her parents' sterling wedding anniversary. Because Perry, Theresa's father, takes a man's job and job status seriously, Simon delays telling her that he has left his job because his boss denounced the young couple's plans to marry. As can be expected, confusions and comedy ensue as Perry, untrusting of Simon for no concrete reason (but assuredly not because he is white), aims to discover what Simon is hiding.
<16> What has remained consistent, beyond the class status of the individuals involved and the racial swap of the main characters, is the credo of colorblindness and the attempt to sublimate large-scale social inequities into an individualized difference of contrasting skin colors. As Marilyn, the mother of our heroine in Guess Who, tells Perry, "We taught our girls to see people, not colors," a line that is reminiscent of Mrs. Drayton's comments to her husband in the earlier film. What sounds like white liberal hope in the 1960s' film, however, sounds alien coming from the mouth of a black woman, moneyed or not; although it is true that African-Americans typically try to instill in their children the knowledge that they are equal in worth and potential to people of other colors, few African-Americans counsel their children that color itself will not be an issue in their lives.
<17> Of course, it's easy to see that the political context of the two films is different. The 1960s saw the clash between the Civil Rights Movement, with its prominent themes of integration, and the Black Power Movement, with its separatist stance; the need to address interracial romance; and the abolishment of anti-miscegenation laws. Today, it is no longer necessary to the same extent to point to the similarities among races or to argue the legality of interracial marriage; what remains, however, is the effort to deny that racism is larger than personal responses to skin color differences. Likewise, the issue of interracial romance remains the perfect screen for larger social inequities, encouraging us to imagine that racism entails nothing more than the personal, individual response to someone whose skin happens to look different than ours.
<18> Guess Who is less a movie about interracial romance and marriage than it is yet another buddy movie between a black and a white man [9]; the difference between this film and many other buddy movies, though, is that the black and white men share an equally important role in the film's plot and resolution. Consistent with other buddy films, however, is the demotion of women to the supporting role; strangely, though, this demotion seems less apparent in Guess Who because it is a romantic comedy. Nevertheless, the film's most important relationship is between the two male protagonists; conflict between them takes center stage and this conflict is resolved through the side conflicts that the men have with their respective female partners. Not until tensions arise within the heterosexual relationships do the male stars bond successfully and homosocially. Suggestions of homosexuality abound in one scene of the film (as well as others) as one character queries, "What happened here last night?" Perry and Simon awake to a disheveled living room where they've fallen asleep after a night of drinking, "floor" football, and dancing the tango. Their bonding is allowed, finally, since both men were suffering the wrath of Marilyn and Theresa, who angrily abandoned them for the night. Perhaps, then, we should see this film as a romance of another kind.
<19> Although the movie minimizes its commentary on interracial romance, it does suggest the difficulty that its interracial heterosexual couple will face. The film's main subtext on the theme is that, even in 2005, this couple and others like it will face the harsh disapproval of the world, a disapproval often felt, it suggests, in very material ways since Simon has decided to quit his job rather than follow his mentor's directive that he not marry a "black girl." As Perry later jokes, "This boy is broke, jobless, and white…" and we know that the first two are the direct result of the hostility interracial couples face. Nevertheless, this racism that the couple faces remains in the realm of the personal, allowing the film, like its predecessor, to relegate racism to the minds and hearts of a few mean-spirited and irrational people. As we would expect from a Hollywood romantic comedy, the film ignores larger social injustices as well as the racialized violence that still affects interracial couples and other minorities. The very fact of the film's denial, however, is symptomatic of a larger social trend to revisit questions of racial mixture in times of racial crisis or uncertainty. As Suzanne Bost has noted, "multiracialism is receiving increased attention in part as a result of [a] conservative trend. The current erosion of progressive racial politics coincides - temporally and rhetorically - with increased interest in mixed-race identity [and interracial romance], and this convergence recalls the racist invocations of mixture from more than a century ago. The millennial rhetoric celebrating mixture felicitously masks this affinity to racially stratifying impulses" (199). Bost attributes this attention to race mixing leading up to and since the year 2000 to anxiety about changing social demographics and the meanings race will (and should) assume in the future.
<20> Guess Who fits within this trend, as it minimizes and masks larger social issues and, ultimately, relegates interracial romance to the realm of blackness. Toward that end, the main support this couple is allowed is only through the black family. Although we hear what may be the genteel racism of Simon's octogenarian grandmother, we are not privy to the sentiments of his immediate family, which consists solely of his mother. In another interesting shift from the earlier movie, the characters do not seem to need the approval of Simon's white mother, a fact that seems to dismiss her as irrelevant, perhaps because the movie characterizes her as a less than ideal mother to begin with, given her former abandonment by Simon's father. Simon's family of origin is a single-parent one, unlike the family of Dr. Prentice in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, who were a hard-working, though by no means well-off, black couple. Simon's mother, we know, raised him by working hard at several jobs, among them as a dance instructor. We are led to believe that Simon's lack of sporting ability is due to the absence of his father from the home, and his lack of sports sense is characterized as something disgraceful by Perry, who not only respects the sports that are deemed typical in black communities - e.g., basketball - but also those that attract huge white audiences such as NASCAR. Simon, from the outset, is deemed less of a man by Theresa's father, who equates manliness with sporting skills and job description. This fact, of course, turns the tables on certain historical stereotypes that deemed white men to be the only men and black men to be boys. At the same time, however, the film does maintain the image that manliness is equal to heterosexuality, teasing as it does its metrosexual character and his beautiful, though somewhat masculinized, wife.
<21> However, in this era that has celebrated sensitivity in men, we are also allowed to see how Simon has something to add to Perry's manly repertoire. Simon, after all, is the one who teaches Perry how to tango so that he can dance with his wife at their marriage renewal celebration. Likewise, it is Simon who, in explaining why he loves Theresa, gives Perry, the man who believes he knows what to say to women, the speech he needs to reconcile with his wife. His heart-felt words thus stolen from his own mouth, Simon is left with little that might win Theresa back. In front of her parents and a group of black women, Simon mimics Perry, lamely dropping to one knee and stating the lyrics from a song that has been circulating throughout the movie, "I want to see your sexy body go bump, bump, bump." Naturally, this does not go over well, as it is an absurdly misplaced sentiment for reconciliation. Simon and Theresa, at the end of this scene, have called their engagement off (a point never reached in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), not because of parental disapproval, but because of internal conflicts spawned by Simon's lies and by Theresa's fears that he won't always be up to the challenges they will face as an interracial couple; the irony here is that Simon has quit his job in defense of his relationship with Theresa.
<22> The fact that Simon is the product of what the film consistently characterizes as an undesirable family, one in which the father left when Simon was a boy, suggests that, having been the product of a non-traditional family, he may be the only type of white man who may be inclined toward interracial romance and the non-traditional and "undesirable" families that it forms. Thus, the film leaves intact the idea of the traditional white family and suggests that products of non-traditional families may continue their less than desirable circumstances elsewhere. Perhaps because of his family of origin and his current joblessness, Simon is displayed as undesirable for white families; at no time in the film do we see white women attracted to him; instead, we see black women as those who are drawn to him. Theresa's sister, for example, seems attracted to him, saying he is "so cute," and she seems titillated by the idea of sex with a white man. Her first question to Theresa when they are alone is, "Well…how is it?" Theresa proceeds to dispel the myths by asserting that, despite the common sentiments regarding penis size between black and white men, "it's exactly the opposite," white men's penises are, to use her word, "huge." She continues with sexual innuendos, saying that white men can sing, too, and that they can hold a note like no one would believe. Of course, both Theresa and her sister look at each other and laugh heartily, allowing the audience to realize that Theresa has been kidding with her sister. What remains unclear, though, is whether Theresa is simply being private or whether her attempt to dispel the sexual myths about black and white men is pure comedy. Unlike in the original film with its white female/black male relationship, white families are left intact in Guess Who because interracial romance is subsumed within black families and black communities. Even Theresa's sister can date a man from another race, a Samoan, since this will not disrupt the traditional, normalized white family. Thus, what on the surface appears to be an acceptance of interracial romance is really a tolerance of it within certain contexts, which masks the underlying perpetuation of the normalized white family. Normalized white womanhood, too, is completely absent from the film's romantic relationships, thereby preserving its sanctity [10].
<23> Interestingly, the preservation of white womanhood, although obscured in this movie, is made explicit in the discourse of white supremacy. As sociologist Abby L. Ferber has described, interracial sexuality and the preservation of white female purity is a clear obsession of white supremacist discourse. This conflation of the female body with an entire race results in a discourse that manufactures control of women's bodies in service to a male-dominated group bound by fictions of race, keeping them within the confines of nineteenth century ideologies such as the Cult of True Womanhood, which required (white) women to remain pure, pious, domestic, and submissive. Women unwilling or unable to achieve these strict standards were deemed not women at all, justifying all the more white men's rape of black women. While I would not go so far as to claim the contemporary films under discussion here are meant to advocate white supremacy, they nevertheless align race mixture with minority families or failed white men, refusing to represent interracial romance for white women or within white families. This is a strange representation, indeed, when one considers that more interracial marriages occur between white women and black men than between black women and white men [11]. In fact, according to Census data, in 2002 there were 279,000 marriages between black men and white women compared with 116,000 marriages between black women and white men, and black women comprise the group least likely to date or marry interracially (DePass 175). Still, "when Hollywood explores interracial love relationships, it is almost always from the perspective of the white male with an exotic woman of color, not the other way around" (Guerrero 125).
<24> As previously mentioned, most black women's reluctance to date and marry interracially is rooted, in part, in the history of racial abuses of black women by white men. For other reasons - including the fact that, due to structural and institutionalized racism, within the last five years more American black men have been in prison in than in college [12] - black women are the group least likely to marry at all. Representing and reinforcing this reality, mainstream America's cultural images of marriageable women do not favor black women and are, in fact, in keeping with its cultural images of beauty. As Chrys Ingraham notes,
Women's experience with weddings and the wedding industry is racially structured. Over and over again the icon of the beautiful white bride in the beautiful white bridal gown is replayed and reinforced, sending a clear message to young and old alike that white counts as beautiful and marriageable is white. Not only does this process secure the consent of white women in participating in the commodification of weddings, but it also contributes to the production of white heterosexual privilege. (97)
Within these contemporary films that depict interracial romance, however, the women typically are not white. This is not to suggest, of course, that wider social discourse on beauty and marriageability does not prioritize white womanhood, because it does. What these films do suggest is two-fold and paradoxical: when racial mixture results from romance, it is 1) safely contained within black families, and 2) exclusive to white male/black female pairings. I claim that these suggestions are paradoxical because they are both strangely traditional and, in some ways, outside the practices of tradition (and, as I have shown, reality); that is, they are traditional in preserving black women's availability to white men while at the same time they recognize the reality of love and romance between them, rather than maintaining black female availability to white men solely through racial domination and sexual violence. Of course, it is possible to read these variations from tradition as attempts to liberate white men from the guilt and culpability of their past abuses of black women; nevertheless, it is clear that they highlight the present reality of mutual consent and love between two groups of people whose past relations were soaked in brutality and blood.
<25> What, then, can we make of contemporary representations of interracial romance such as that in Guess Who? Despite their depictions of love and consent, they also contain subtexts that illustrate the "past in present" racism that Collins describes, a sexualized racism that maintains and reifies traditional notions of race, gender, and sexuality. As she argues "sexual regulation occurs through repression, both by eliminating sexual alternatives and by shaping the public debates that do exist. In order to prosper, systems of oppression must regulate sexuality, and they often do so by manufacturing ideologies that render some ideas commonsensical while obscuring others" (Collins 36). This is the effect of skewed representations of interracial marriage, which obscure, and thus encourage people to ignore, the fact of white female/black male romance and marriage [13]. These representations effectively mask realities not in keeping with traditions of black female availability to white men. And they make commonsensical the notion that white families are (and should be) preserved from racial mixture, continuing assumptions that racial mixture (and even blackness itself) is tantamount to pollution.
Don't Do White Guys
<26> In keeping with this tradition that deems racial mixture inimical for white families, Something New also depicts romance between a black woman and white man. It nevertheless chronicles some of the issues that problematize these relationships for many black women. Kenya McQueen, played by Sanaa Lathan, is a successful accountant being considered for partner at the firm where she works; she is overworked and stressed by the reality of being a black woman in a white male-dominated environment. Additionally, Kenya is depicted as uptight due to her upper class and sheltered upbringing as the daughter of a prominent neurosurgeon and his pampered wife. She wears a business suit on a Saturday and is uncomfortable with the outdoors. After agreeing to a blind date, Kenya is surprised to meet Brian, a white man, played by Simon Baker. A laid back man who has dated "all kinds of women," Brian is amused by Kenya's immediate refusal to see past his whiteness, by the fact that, among other things, she "doesn't do white guys." Later, the two meet again through a mutual acquaintance who insists Kenya, a new homeowner, consider hiring Brian, a landscape architect, to cultivate her backyard oasis. Brian is literally a down-to-earth guy who has abandoned the upwardly mobile white-collar world of advertising for digging in the dirt and taking "hard things and making them bloom." Romance ensues between the two, and dilemmas bloom for Kenya who acknowledges that 42.2% of black women have never been married and that the odds are against finding her I.B.M. (Ideal Black Man).
<27> Touted as a movie more about staying open to love than about encouraging interracial dating, Something New nevertheless deals specifically with issues of race and color, subsuming its purported message of simple openness under the complexities of interracial romance; similarly, it once again subsumes the complexities of interracial romance under the guise of personal predilection. Its characters deal less with social scorn than with internal conflicts and perceived incompatibilities. In fact, Kenya and Brian are never publicly harassed, but their romance does receive criticism, notably from Kenya's brother, who uses the fact that "Kenya's dating white boys" to re-direct parental admonishment away from himself, and the romantic partner of one of Kenya's close friends, who admits that he initially has doubts about Brian's sincerity. Additionally, they encounter mild teasing by a black comedian in a nightclub and titillated surprise from Kenya's black girlfriends who want to know the usual sexual details. Although these girlfriends encourage Kenya in the sexual relationship, they do so initially so that she will relax and have some fun, urging her to remember that it's not like she's marrying the man. Kenya's brother and mother, on the other hand, push her firmly in the direction of Mark, a successful and eligible black attorney played by Blair Underwood who is clearly thinking of a future with Kenya.
<28> The movie strikingly illustrates the policing of black women's sexuality by both black women and black men, who urge her to remember that she can play with white men but should marry a black man (even though, the film attests, marriageable black men are few and far between). This self- and communal regulation that Kenya endures throughout the movie demonstrates that
hegemony is…a mode of social organization wherein the dissent of oppressed groups is absorbed and thereby rendered politically useless…power is diffused throughout a social system such that multiple groups police one another and suppress each other's dissent…if African Americans come to believe the dominant ideology and accept ideas about Black masculinities and Black femininities constructed within the dominant framework, then Black political dissent about gender and about all things tied to gender becomes weakened. (Collins, 314)
Similarly, questioning of marriage traditions and movement beyond the history of black female/white male sexuality becomes difficult - but not impossible - to enact and sustain. This policing of black women's sexuality, in effect, problematizes individual attempts to move beyond the limited stereotypes, traditions and, obviously, hegemony itself, deeming those who attempt to escape these confines aberrations, even racial traitors. Black women who date or marry interracially, then, do so with the awareness that their choices may be condemned by other blacks as a lack of racial pride. Within Something New, however, Kenya's choice to date Brian is not met with accusations that she has lost touch with her racial pride. Black women encourage her playful experimentation, while black men attempt to intimidate Brian and maintain their symbolic possession of her as patriarchs. Thus, as in Guess Who, opposition to interracial romance exists solely within the black community and within Kenya's own mind as she struggles with the fear that Brian will never fully understand or relate to her world; this interpretation is further supported by the fact that it is a white woman co-worker who arranges Kenya and Brian's blind date, seemingly so colorblind that she never mentions Brian's race to Kenya. And again as with Guess Who, we never are privy to the reactions of Brian's parents, who spring into the picture only at the end of the film when the couple have married and are surrounded by supportive friends and family.
<29> Despite the movie's questioning of many social stigmas within black communities regarding interracial dating, it does not reflect on the fact that relationships between black women and white men are, in fact, nothing new at all, having been perpetuated in violent ways throughout the era of slavery and beyond. I am not suggesting here that we can equate the sexual violation of enslaved black women with contemporary interracial relationships, nor am I suggesting that there have not been significant changes in social relations and contexts. I am suggesting, however, that the film ignores the history of race mixing in America altogether, thereby minimizing the very real legacies of these relationships. By ignoring this history, the film offers these relationships as both curiosities and titillations, sentiments that were among the rationales white men used to justify their desire for black women in the first place. The film's denial of history is not surprising, of course, given that it is a light-hearted Hollywood romance. Yet in refusing to offer black women's past sexual abuse by white men as among the reasons the characters lobby against such relationships, this film, like the others discussed here, makes racism nothing more than a personal conflict over skin color divorced from historical (and even contemporary) realities. In this case, racism becomes nothing more than a prejudice that black women can hold against white men, an ironic twist given the racialized and sexualized oppressions that black women have endured. Kenya, in fact, is encouraged to interrogate why her "preference" for black men might be a "prejudice" and to realize that, while Brian may not have experienced the racism and sexism she encounters as a black woman, he can still empathize. Real terrors and injustices that interracial couples face - such as housing discrimination, intimidation, or outright violence - are never acknowledged let alone scrutinized.
<30> To the contrary, the actuality of discrimination against black women is called into question when Kenya is repeatedly challenged to rethink some of her interpretations. Relating to Brian that an important client whose account she is handling questions her competency simply because of her gender and race, Kenya is met with the question: "Are you sure you're not being paranoid?" And Brian later challenges Kenya's difficulties when he catalogues the opportunities she has had and the privileges she has enjoyed - including attending prestigious schools, earning a salary higher than average for both blacks and whites, and being a homeowner. Thus, the movie subtly suggests that, given her class privilege, Kenya's cries of racial discrimination fall flat, and we are led to believe that her class has, in some way, altered her racial status. This is not particularly surprising in a movie where the blackness of wealthy and privileged characters seems almost an afterthought, as it did in Guess Who. By this I mean that all of the characters except Kenya seem to live in a utopia where they enjoy wealth and opportunity and just happen to have brown skin, a fact they are really never forced to think about. Their lives are devoid of racial politics, and the only characters who must be aware of their race are single black women searching for that Ideal Black Man. For example, although Dr. McQueen worked in Kenya for the World Health Organization early in his career, we learn that Mrs. McQueen hated the country because she couldn't go shopping and didn't trust the hospitals. No commentary is made regarding connections among members of the black diaspora or the imperative for improving health conditions in developing countries; instead, Mrs. McQueen, seemingly because of her class status, becomes raceless and devoid of political concern.
<31>
White people, black men and married black women in the movie, it
seems, need give no thought to race; it is a concern only to those
black women who are still searching for romantic fulfillment. And
heterosexual partnership, I must add, is presented as the only viable
option for black women. Thus, the movie depicts race mainly as a
private, romantic, familial concern. As Kenya's
experiences of workplace discrimination are minimized and she
advances to partner, social, economic, and political realities of
racism remain muted. She acknowledges that she has to work twice as
hard to be taken seriously, but since she ultimately is
taken seriously, she (and other black women, it seems), may as well
continue to work twice as hard. Although the movie suggests that
social and public issues of race are of little importance, it deems
worthy of attention and reconsideration ideas of race as they relate
to the romantic and private. It is only after her father offers his
support and encouragement for her relationship with Brian that Kenya
admits to loving and wanting a partnership with him. Dr. McQueen
states, "I
know love when I see it…he's
a good guy. If you have feelings for him, you need to do something
about it."
He
continues by drawing a parallel between Kenya and Brian on the one
hand and himself and Mrs. McQueen when they met. Not having "
a
pot to piss in,"
her
parents disapproved, equating his previous class status with other,
less-than-desirable realities, in this case the interracial nature of
his daughter's
romance. Diminishing the implications of their racial difference,
Kenya's
father advises: "Love
is an adventure. It's
not a decision you make for others; it's
a decision you make from the heart. Anyway, the boy's
just white; he ain't
a Martian. Folks carry on like we're
some kinda pure race that shouldn't
be diluted. But look at us, all of us in this country - black,
white, brown, yellow - we're
all mixed up, mutts all of us, nothing pure about us."
<32> While encouraging liberal colorblindness and recognition of America's multicultural reality, this scene is also strange in that Dr. McQueen's assessment is more in keeping with what more white folks, rather than black, have tried to believe: that they're some kind of pure race that shouldn't be diluted. Suggesting that upper-crust black folks, too, have desired racial purity ignores the common sentiment among many blacks that African-Americans are and have long been "mixed." Likewise, the statement ignores the historical reality that many upper-class blacks actively worked to emulate whites - a fact that belies the very context of this scene, which takes place at a cotillion, the "black debutante ball" - and that some even prodded their families to become more white by "marrying light." Yet, in persuading his daughter to dismiss Brian's whiteness as an impediment to their relationship, Dr. McQueen speaks to the "heart" of the movie's message. In urging black women to "let go and let flow," to remain open regarding romance, the movie also encourages them to rethink previously held notions about ideal marriageable men. This, in itself, is not scandalous advice; yet, likely due to its genre as a romantic comedy, the film refuses to consider the political realities that make such "new" thinking necessary if black women hope to marry men; as we would expect, the causes behind what many perceive to be a shortage of marriageable black men - such as increased incarceration rates, early deaths, and lack of higher education - are never mentioned.
Don't Ask Who's Coming to Dinner
<33> Something New ignores the fact that, as the feminist motto goes, the personal is political, that families function as political entities making social commentary and enforcing or challenging social ideologies. On one hand, of course, depictions of interracial romance and non-traditional families are often worthy of support and even celebration, as healthy representations have been all too rare throughout United States' history. On the other hand, many of these contemporary popular representations reflect sedimented notions of race and even racist ideologies that in themselves necessitate reconsideration. Why is it, for example, that both of these contemporary movies, unlike Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, present romances between black women and white men while ignoring the oppressive history surrounding such relationships and, in effect, maintaining an assumed racial purity for white women and within idealized white families? [14] Moreover, why are the individuals and families in these movies typically depicted with class privilege? Since race and class are interlinked and black families often stereotyped as poor or working class, characterizing upper-class black families as those involved in romantic racial crossings may effectively preserve stereotypical notions of blackness as well, suggesting that these families aren't really black after all because of both their race mixing and class privilege. The contemporary films' racial ideologies are further complicated by this point; if these black families are really not black, does their acceptance of a white man into the fold alter existing notions of race or family in any way? If they are black, is their initial objection to a white man an attempt to depict the "reverse racism" often believed by many whites to exist? The films, then, protect white families from racial mixture and may even go as far as keeping white men out of truly black families. Thus, a third type of family may be imagined through these films: one in which an undesirable white man is ejected from white families but not debased to the point of embracing blackness; rather, these black (but not really black) families become the site where racial mixture is relegated [15].
<34> Of course, the intended audiences of these contemporary films contribute to their ideological underpinnings. The young, mainstream audiences that are targeted by these romantic comedies may be characterized as a group who believes much of the racism in the United States is relegated to the past. Popular depictions of interracial romance reinforce this notion that racism is no longer a pressing concern while they draw America's racist history into the present moment through messages so subtle that they likely go unnoticed. In 1967, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner carried the tagline of "a love story of today." Today's interracial love stories follow in its tradition and do so with similar political hesitancy, for all of these films reflect conservative racial ideologies that suggest progress while maintaining the status quo. Guess Who unconsciously offers a romance between black and white men, appealing to contemporary understandings of brotherhood and, ultimately, not expanding broader social definitions of family in any significant way since black families have, historically, been those inclusive of racial mixture. Something New, in undermining the realities of race and racism, tries to encourage a colorblind vision of love and ultimately gives us a romance that, in its naivety, diminishes its own possibility for revolutionizing the ways in which we envision relationships and family. These films, then, while offering the semblance of an anti-racist stance, are implicated in the new racism; they appear to promote equality and argue against racism while simultaneously clinging to and perpetuating racist ideologies that often go unnoticed but, ultimately, are not without effect. They acknowledge the contemporary assumption that all are now welcome to dinner, but they leave the question of who will get invited where and by whom as problematic as ever. The love story of today, it seems, assumes answers to questions that, given contemporary realities, still need to be asked.
<35> These questions, however, are rarely asked or even imagined since so many remain unaware of the pressures of ideology and hegemony within their lives. After all, "contemporary forms of oppression do not routinely force people to submit. Instead, they manufacture consent for domination so that we lose our ability to question and thus collude in our own subordination" (Collins 50). This is not to say that marrying within one's race necessarily entails a capitulation to hegemony; rather, we acquiesce control when we remain ignorant of the forces that maintain normative forms of behavior, when we refuse to recognize the hegemonic messages that reach us through contemporary culture.
<36> Clearly, ideology does influence if not tyrannize our lives. As Collins notes, "because they are used to justify existing social hierarchies, hegemonic ideologies may seem invincible. But ideologies of all sorts are never static. Instead, they are always internally inconsistent and are always subject to contestation" (314). And as the epigraph from Althusser attests, ideology is necessarily a site of contestation and struggle. Through recognition of hegemonic structures, they may be subsequently disrupted and finally revised. It is possible to imagine that, through disruption and revision of these hegemonic structures, new hegemonies may be created at the macro level. But at the level of the individual, the disruption of hegemonies can result in an awareness of the political component of the private realm, the revision of personal lives, and the opening of space necessary for individuals to ask the necessary questions and, ultimately, find their own answers.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971.
---. "Contradiction and Overdetermination." In For Marx [1965]. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1977. 87-128.
Bost, Suzanne. Mulattas and Mestizas: Representing Mixed Identities in the Americas, 1850-2000. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.
Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005.
DePass, Dee. "Looking for Mr. White: Interracial Relationship Survey." Essence June 2006: 175-177.
Elliston, Maxine Hall. "Two Sidney Poitier Films." Film Comment Winter 1969: 28.
Ferber, Abby L. White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.
Giles, Freda Scott. "From Melodrama to the Movies: The Tragic Mulatto as a Type Character." In American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity. Ed. Naomi Zack. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. 63-78.
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993.
Guess Who. Dir. Kevin Rodney Sullivan. Perf. Bernie Mac, Ashton Kutcher. Sony Pictures, 2005.
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Dir. Stanley Kramer. Perf. Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn. Columbia, 1967.
hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Kenyatta, Mary L. "Reflections on Conventional Wisdom." In Critical Ethnicity: Countering the Waves of Identity Politics. Eds. Robert H. Tai and Mary L. Kenyatta. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. 193-197.
Lubin, Alex. Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945-1954. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
"More black US men 'in jail than college.'" BBC News World Edition 29 Aug. 2002. 19 Dec. 2007. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2223709.stm>.
Something New. Dir. Sanaa Hamri. Perf. Sanaa Lathan, Simon Baker, Blair Underwood. Focus Features, 2006.
Smith, Valerie. Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1970.
Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. "Diva." Film Quarterly 26, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 55-56.
Notes
[1] Bond's first African-American romantic partner was the villainous Rosie Carver, played by Gloria Hendry, in Live and Let Die (1973). After their romantic liaison, Bond discovers Carver's deceitfulness, and she is later killed. [^]
[2] See Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell, UP, 1981. [^]
[3] Of course, variations from this norm include interracial sexuality as well as homosexuality, and although representations of both intra-racial and interracial homosexuality are worthy of investigation, this discussion focuses solely on interracial heterosexuality. [^]
[4] Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was not the first film to depict interracial romance between black men and white women, but it was the first with an optimistic ending. It was preceded by the 1957 film adaptation to Alec Waugh's novel Island in the Sun and the 1959 post-apocalypic film The World, The Flesh, and The Devil. Both films were likewise impacted by Civil Rights-era racial tensions and restrictions. [^]
[5] The film ranked "second in the top moneymaking films of 1968 and in the top ten moneymaking films of the 1960s…by 1982 Dinner ranked 79 in the top 200 moneymaking films of all time. The film also won critical acclaim for the industry; at the 1967 Academy Awards, it won two Oscars and five other nominations" (Guerrero 75). [^]
[6] Of course, the violent hypersexualization of black men was more than an attempt to protect white women; it was, as activist and journalist Ida B. Wells argued at the turn of the century "an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus 'keep the nigger down'" (64). Additionally, it allowed white men "to exercise their property rights over the bodies of white women" (Smith 5), a point to which I will return. [^]
[7] Wells's term "willing victims" appears to be an oxymoron, but as such it highlights the unequal positions of black and white women vis-à-via white and black men in instances of interracial sexuality and rape. [^]
[8] In fact, Guerrero credits the rise of the Black Power genre known as Blaxploitation to "black dissatisfaction with the Sidney Poitier 'star' image and its attendant integrationist film narrative" (70). [^]
[9] Ed Guerrero notes that Hollywood's "one-dimensional 'star' roles and formulas [often] narrowly confine black talent to the genres of comedy, the biracial buddy film or the male-oriented ghetto action-adventure" (180). Buddy films, such as the Lethal Weapon series starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, depict a white hero and his helpful, non-threatening (usually in some way bumbling and desexualized) black sidekick. These films also flirt with homosexuality, depicting heterosexual men whose desire for each other (and/or white men whose desire for blackness) is sublimated into socially acceptable channels. Biracial buddy films ultimately allow black masculinity and power to be successfully contained and used toward the interests of white men. [^]
[10] While two white women are characterized in the film, one of these is the masculinzed wife of the metrosexual. The other is the business woman Liz whom Simon contacts for a job; we do not see her romantically at all in the film. Not surprisingly, because she, too, has been masculinzed, this time because of her business, rather than familial, context. [^]
[11] An additional interpretation of the prevalence of white male/black female relationships might be what Mas'ud Zavarzadeh has suggested: "The traditional codes of connection in male-female relationships have been decentered and Western women are no longer a mere actant of men's erotic and domestic fantasies. As a result Western man has had to search for this lost center…somewhere else….the new search for an erotic and emotive center, following a rather familiar pattern in Western history, has led to the emotional sexual colonization of the dark woman" (55). This interpretation, however, does not reflect on the fact that "the dark woman" has long been sexually colonized, even before the codes of connection between Western men and women were decentered. [^][12] See "More black US men 'in jail than college.'" BBC News World Edition 29 Aug. 2002. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2223709.stm>. And see Mary L. Kenyatta's "Reflections on Conventional Wisdom" in Critical Ethnicity: Countering the Waves of identity Politics. [^]
[13] Much more can be written as well on interracial homosexual relationships, which are often overlooked in popular representations due to the hegemonies of heterosexuality and endogamy. [^]
[14] I write of "ideal" white families here because, as I argued in my discussion of Guess Who, Simon is not an ideal white man; although his class status is desirable, his family of origin is not. In Something New, Brian is also less than ideal since he is among the working class, having traded a white-collar job for the pleasures of working in the dirt. His family, like that of Simon in Guess Who, remains basically an unknown but, perhaps, may also be interpreted as working class if viewers are able to transfer knowledge of John Ratzenberger, who appears, we can only assume, as Brian's father and who played the working everyman/postman Cliff Claven on the television sitcom Cheers. [^]
[15] In discussing the comfortable class status of characters in these films, I am not suggesting a lack of depictions of working class men and women involved in interracial relationships; however, such pairings, too, are often represented in distinct ways that maintain stereotypical notions of race. Working class interracial romance is typically depicted as troubled by both race and class issues; overall, they usually are not depicted as loving, honest, and successful relationships. Consider, for example, Monster's Ball (2001) with its ambivalent ending or Hustle and Flow (2005), which relegates interracial sexuality to the realm of prostitution. Often, too, contemporary popular films do not depict successful relationships between upper-class black men and white women; it seems that the stage for powerful black male/white female couples was set with Othello and contemporary representations have not greatly progressed. Instead, pairings between black men and white women typically are characterized as working class or are depicted as teenage experimentation that the audience is unlikely to view as having long-term potential. Here, consider Jungle Fever (1991), in which the successful black man is married and has an affair with a white Italian-American secretary, or teen films such as Save the Last Dance (2001), which depict the couple as naïve, idealistic, and likely to grow up and go their separate ways. [^]
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