Ambivalent Idealizations: Black Mixed-Race Exoticization and Standard Light-Skin Schemas

• In Event: 50617 - Desiring Intimacy

Abstract

Scholarship primarily investigates racial hierarchies of bodily idealizations and desirability through monoraciality, with Black bodies often marginalized to the bottom of hegemonic hierarchies. This monoracial framing is insufficient to explain the complex positionality of Black mixed-race bodies. I draw upon fifty in-depth interviews with Black-mixed students, twenty-five each from differing racial and institutional contexts: a predominantly White Institution (PWI) and a Historically Black College/University (HBCU). The interviews provide examples of ambivalent idealizations, i.e., social processes through which culturally valued traits generate both social rewards and costs. These social processes unfold when individuals activate idealizing cultural schemas (i.e., idealizing schemas). The “standard light-skin” schema, frequently mentioned by the Black-mixed men, elevated their attractiveness and popularity while heightening suspicion of promiscuity, emotional fragility, vanity, and untrustworthiness. Standard light-skin assumptions appeared more costly to the romantic aims of the HBCU men while the PWI men emphasized greater social advantage. The women from both institutions often emphasized negative outcomes resulting from a “Black-mixed exoticization” schema. While exoticization could increase their desirability among male peers, many of the women felt dehumanized and some experienced horizontal rejection from female peers. Across both institutional contexts, Black-mixed men and women delineated ambivalent idealizations primarily through gendered pathways.

Author

• Eliana Gagnon, Princeton University