Learning about Race: The Lived Experiences of Interracially Married U.S.-born White and European Immigrant Women in the 1930s

Abstract

How did intermarriage between African Americans and European immigrants influence how European immigrants learned about race in the United States? In this study, the authors compare the lived experiences of European-born and U.S.-born white women married to U.S.-born black men in Chicago in the late 1930s. The authors find that both groups of women characterized their lives as marked by material, social, and institutional costs, and they experienced these costs as racial boundary policing, racial border patrolling, and rebound racism. The authors argue that through these experiences, European immigrant women learned about the racial hierarchy and the importance of whiteness in the United States. The authors also find that European immigrant women had differing reactions to their race learning. Younger European immigrant women strengthened their ties to white racial community, while older European wives strengthened their ties to black racial community. These findings add to immigration literature that explores how immigrants discover the significance of race, racism, and racial hierarchy in the United States and come to understand and respond to the impact of the racial order on their life outcomes.

Keywords

immigration intermarriage whiteness race racism racial hierarchy

Race plays an important role in the assimilation of immigrants in the United States. Immigration scholars have explored how immigrants come to learn about race and their place in the U.S. racial hierarchy (Guglielmo 2004; Itzigsohn, Giorguli, and Vazquez 2005; Tuan 2001; Waters 1999). Scholarship on white European immigrants often depicted immigrants as learning about race and the importance of whiteness through the exclusion and social distancing of blacks in institutional arenas such as labor, politics, and the law, with some exceptions (see Guglielmo 2004). The scholarship also primarily focused on men because these arenas were dominated by them in the early twentieth century (see Frank 1998 and Guglielmo 2010 for exceptions). Research rarely focused on female-associated arenas such as marriage or family. Hence, both women and how immigrants learn about the racial hierarchy in interpersonal, intimate relationships with U.S.-born minorities were largely overlooked. The purpose of our research is to demonstrate how white European immigrants learned about whiteness and blackness in the United States from their intimate family relationships with U.S.-born blacks. Specifically, using a unique data set, we examine the lived experiences of white European immigrant and U.S.-born white women married to U.S.-born black men in Chicago in the late 1930s.¹

Examination of marriages between European immigrants and U.S.-born blacks is significant for two reasons. Exploring intermarriages between black Americans and European immigrants helps shed light on the unprivileged nature of blacks’ status as U.S.-born people. Classic sociological literature on immigrant assimilation demonstrates some confusion about how to view and analyze African Americans. Consequently, blacks’ role in illuminating the meaning of whiteness for European immigrants through intermarriage is obscured. For example, as late as the 1960s, Gordon (1964) placed U.S.-born blacks on his list of immigrants. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1963) lumped together black Americans with Irish, Jewish, and Puerto Rican immigrants in their examination of immigrant assimilation. Robert Park (1914), aware of the legacy of slavery in the United States, still treated U.S.-born blacks as though they were immigrants to the United States in his analyses. Because the classic immigration literature has struggled with how to deal with black Americans, it has overlooked the significance of these marriages in the process of helping European immigrants further understand the meaning of being white and the racial hierarchy in the United States.

Additionally, attending to European immigrant–African American marriages is also important given the continuing rise of interracial marriages between U.S.-born whites and U.S.-born ethnoracial minorities (Livingston and Brown 2017) and those between U.S.-born ethnoracial minorities and nonwhite immigrants (Bohra-Mishra and Massey 2015; Gambol 2016). Interracial marriage studies found that whites in these relationships were often surprised by the racial hostility they encountered because of their romantic partnerships with nonwhites (Chito Childs 2005; Dalmage 2000; Frankenberg 1993; Steinbugler 2012; Twine 2010). It is also often in these relationships that they learned a great deal about white supremacy, white racial ideology, and whiteness as a nonneutral racial category (Frankenberg 1993; Twine 2010; Vazquez 2014). Thus, intermarriage as a site where people learn about whiteness remains relevant 50 years after the ruling of Loving v. Virginia (1967) (Twine 2010). For ethnoracial minorities, intermarriages to whites or nonwhites have implications for their own racial identities and how they view racial boundaries. Those married to whites often draw racial boundaries between themselves and other ethnoracial minorities (Lee and Bean 2010), while those married to nonwhites tend to align themselves with other ethnoracial minorities (Gambol 2016). Although our study presents a historical view of these more current observations, it demonstrates how exploring racial stratification of the past continues to matter for understanding how racial stratification affects lived experiences in the present.

The concept of racialization (Omi and Winant 2015) informs our study. Racialization helps explain how race operates on institutional and interpersonal levels to teach individuals about the norms that govern racial relationships in the United States and frames learning about racial boundaries as relational (Gambol 2016; Glenn 2004). Omi and Winant (2015) defined racialization as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (p. 111). This definition captures the meanings attached to whites and their phenotype that dictate both interpersonal and institutional racial relationships between whites and nonwhites and that European immigrants learned as part of their incorporation into U.S. society. Drawing from Omi and Winant’s definition of racialization, we argue that because of the costs they experienced, European immigrant wives came to understand that racial meanings, such as that blackness is associated with inferiority and whiteness is associated with superiority (Du Bois [1903] 2007; Roberts 2011; Zuberi 2001), extended into their marriages. A relationship they may have otherwise viewed as ordinary, because of racialization, became a relevant site for learning the meaning of and boundaries around whiteness and blackness in the United States.

Immigration and Intermarriage

Sociologists have explored intermarriages between U.S.-born whites and immigrants to both understand and measure the incorporation of immigrants into U.S. society (Alba and Foner 2015; Gordon 1964; Rosenfeld 2002). These studies rarely explored the lived experiences of these immigrant partners or examined what they learned about the U.S. racial hierarchy and racial culture while in these relationships. In the recent past, sociologists began examining intermarriages between U.S.-born ethnoracial minorities and new immigrants (Asian, Latinos, and Africans) also to study and measure their incorporation into American life (Bohra-Mishra and Massey 2015; Fu and Hatfield 2008; Lichter, Qian, and Tumin 2015; Qian, Glick, and Batson 2012). First, this literature tends to treat these intermarriages as though they are a recent development, originating with the influx of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean after 1965. Yet these kinds of marriages, though previously not as common, were a reality for some immigrants long before 1965. From the seventeenth century and even after antimiscegenation laws were enacted, former English and Irish indentured servants married descendants of enslaved Africans (Roberts 1994; Rogers 1972). Chinese immigrants married blacks in the early 1920s and learned very quickly that this would block their integration into U.S. society (Alba and Nee 2003; Loewen 1971). In their study of blacks in Chicago, Drake and Cayton ([1945] 1993) found that black-white intermarriages were more likely to be between newly arrived Southern and Eastern European immigrants and black Americans than between black and white U.S.-born residents. Thus, learning about race in the United States through intermarriage is not as recent a phenomenon as the scholarship would make it seem.

Second, most of the studies on intermarriages between U.S.-born ethnoracial minorities and immigrants treat intermarriage between U.S.-born minorities and immigrants as outcome variables rather than as the focus of study (Gambol 2016; see, e.g., Bohra-Mishra and Massey 2015; Lichter et al. 2015). Other than Brenda Gambol’s (2016) article on second-generation Filipino immigrants who marry U.S.-born nonwhites, sociologists have paid very little qualitative attention to the experiences of intermarried U.S.-born minorities and immigrants.

Race Learning and Intermarriage

Immigration scholars argue that European immigrants to the United States before the 1920s were not considered racially white upon their arrival (Fox and Guglielmo 2012; Guglielmo 2003; Jacobson 1998; Roediger 2005). Matthew Frye Jacobson (1998:94–95) maintained that European ethnic groups experienced a period of “probationary whiteness” before moving into the larger racial category of Caucasian or white and receiving all the ideological privileges of racial whiteness (Guglielmo 2003; Roediger 2005). Race learning was essential for the process of moving from probationary whiteness to mainstream American whiteness (Guglielmo 2004; Jacobson 1998; Ignatiev 1995). Historian Thomas Guglielmo (2004) described how Italian immigrants learned about race through their everyday experiences in their families, settlement houses, churches, neighborhood, the press, schools, and jobs. However, most scholars who explored how European immigrants learned about race ignored European immigrants who married African Americans. In fact, most historical and sociological immigration literature about the racial incorporation of European immigrants primarily discusses how immigrants created social distance between themselves and African Americans, including violently maintaining residential boundaries to prevent blacks from moving into their neighborhoods and excluding them from unions dominated by white ethnic groups (Fox 2012; Ignatiev 1995; Jacobson 1998; Roediger 2005). In these cases, sociological research centers the social and institutional distance between blacks and whites to highlight how European immigrants learned about white racialization and the racial hierarchy. Guglielmo’s work also demonstrates that Italians learned about racial boundaries between blacks and whites because they witnessed this economic, social, and political distancing of U.S.-born whites and other Europeans from blacks. Although these processes as well as European marriage to U.S.-born whites were indeed important aspects of the European immigrant experience, they do not constitute the entirety of European integration into the United States.

Although European immigrants’ whiteness was drawn in stark contrast to blackness, and thereby seen as superior, during the probationary period, it did not yet constitute American whiteness. Similar to the studies noted above, our research illuminates how moving from probationary whiteness to a mainstream American whiteness was a process that necessarily involved learning about the contours and boundaries of whiteness. We expand this literature to include familial intimacy between blacks and European immigrants as a site where these immigrants also learned about race.

Last, the focus on the social and institutional distance as a mechanism for race learning among European immigrants obscures other discoveries about Europeans’ responses to what they were learning about race. Studies that examine race learning among European immigrants often find that with time, these immigrants “believed deeply” in the racial structure, strengthened their ties to the white racial community, and reproduced racial boundaries (Guglielmo 2004:49; Ignatiev 1995; Roediger 1991, 2005). However, we found that not all the Europeans in our study internalized white supremacy as a response to their race learning. Some women, particularly older European immigrants, strengthened their ties to the black—not the white—racial community. This finding suggests that exploring interracial marriage as a site for race learning may shed light on, or complicate, what we know about European immigrant acceptance of the racial hierarchy as they incorporated into U.S. society. Although our study does not examine a statistically prevalent aspect of European immigrant women’s social history, it nevertheless provides a useful empirical addition to and reflection on the race, immigration, and intermarriage scholarship.

Methodology

To answer how intermarriage between African Americans and European immigrants in the 1930s informed European immigrants about race in the United States and to fill in the gaps highlighted above, we analyzed the lived experiences of U.S.-born white and European immigrant women married to U.S.-born² black men. All the women in our sample were married to U.S.-born black men. We used data from interviews conducted and transcribed by Dr. Robert E. T. Roberts, a sociologist and anthropologist at Roosevelt University in downtown Chicago. Dr. Roberts conducted more than 500 interviews with black-white intermarried couples in Chicago between 1937 and 1986. His daughter organized an archive of these interviews, consisting of a mixture of transcripts of interviews and interviewer notes. Dr. Roberts used a snowball method to find participants, performed semistructured interviews, and used questionnaires to learn about the participants’ marital experiences and family lives and to gather demographic information. From the interviews Dr. Roberts’ conducted from 1937 to 1939, we analyzed those with white women formerly or currently in black male/white female marriages.

Selecting the 1930s

We examine interviews from the 1930s for two reasons. First, it is a decade that allows us to examine race, immigration, and interracial marriage during the period between the Civil War and the civil rights era, when black Americans would gain significantly greater social rights and privileges, though not parity with white Americans (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993). In the 1930s, African Americans and immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe did not have equal social status with U.S.-born whites of northern European descent. Racial ideologies that ranked these U.S.-born whites and blacks at opposite ends of a racial hierarchy, with European immigrants positioned in between, were dominant and stable (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993; Roediger 2005; Rogers 1972). Additionally, 29 states had antimiscegenation laws that prohibited whites from marrying someone who was not white. Seventeen states, including Illinois, had no ban against interracial marriage at the time; this silence, by default, made intermarriage legal in these states (Reuter 1931; Rogers 1972). Nevertheless, race relations in Chicago were governed by an unwritten “color line” that separated blacks from whites geographically and socially (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993; Philpott 1978). The U.S. Supreme Court did not strike down interracial marriage laws as unconstitutional until its 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia (Roberts 2014). Therefore, the decision by a U.S.-born white person or European immigrant to marry an African American in the 1930s deviated dramatically from the overwhelmingly dominant belief among whites that whites should only marry each other because they were superior to all other racial groups.

The second reason for choosing the 1930s sample is that this is the time period when all ethnic groups, including white ethnics, began to be categorized into larger racial groups. Although European immigrants were already considered white in terms of color and benefited from that color privilege, despite being considered racially inferior (Fox and Guglielmo 2012; Guglielmo 2003), by the late 1930s and early 1940s, race and color converged. Race increasingly referred to large groups—“whites” and “Caucasians,” “Negroes,” and “Orientals” (Guglielmo 2003)—and race became increasingly more important than color. The black-white interracial couples in the 1930s cohort were living through a pivotal historical moment as racial boundaries between blacks and whites further solidified. Consequently, this period was also ripe for race learning by European immigrants married to U.S.-born blacks. Dr. Roberts’s interviews from the 1930s offer a unique opportunity to examine the relationship between immigration, race learning, and intermarriage in this significant historical context.

The Women

In keeping with the methods used in the immigration and assimilation literature, we consider any woman born in the United States as U.S. born, even if her parents were immigrants. We consider any woman born outside of the United States and in Europe an immigrant regardless of when she arrived to the United States. Our sample includes women from Canada, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden. Although the experiences of women who came to the United States at age five may be different from those of women who came at age 20, there is consensus in the literature that the immigrant experience is qualitatively different from that of people born in the United States (Alba and Nee 2003; Portes and Rumbaut 2014). It is also important to note that, on average, the European immigrant women were older and had been married longer than their U.S.-born counterparts.

Our analysis focused on only white U.S.-born and European immigrant women. We made this decision because, among black-white intermarriages, those between black American men and European- and U.S.-born white women constituted the majority of these intermarriages in the 1930s (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993; Ruggles et al. 2015).³ They were also the majority of married individuals Dr. Roberts interviewed in the late 1930s. Moreover, we were interested in comparing the experiences of U.S.-born and foreign-born white women. We also examined only women who were married at the time of the interview and excluded women who were separated, divorced, or widowed. Given that these differences in marital status could influence how the women discussed their marital experiences (Riessman 1990), it was important to include only women with the same marital status.

Because we were primarily interested in wives’ experiences, we sought to include interviews in which the women provided their unrestricted thoughts about their lives as intermarried individuals, without influence from their husbands’ presence. For U.S.-born women, we included those who had at least one interview alone. This came to 42 women out of 51 U.S.-born white women who were currently married at the time Dr. Roberts interviewed them. Because the number of immigrant women in the sample was smaller, with only 16 respondents, we included both women who were interviewed alone and also women who were interviewed with their husbands. Only five of the 16 women were always interviewed with their husbands present. We found no significant differences between responses from European immigrant women interviewed alone and those interviewed with their husbands. In all, we examined interviews with a total of 58 women. Table 1 captures key features of the sample. Although specific demographic information (e.g., the use of “infant” instead of giving a specific age) was missing for some women on some variables, most respondents’ demographic characteristics were available. The sample size column denotes the number of women in the sample for which that particular demographic information was available.

Table 1.

Sample Description.

Sample Descriptive	European-born Women	U.S.-born Women	Sample Size
Mean age (years)	51	37	58
Mean length of marriage (years)	22	13	50
Mean age at current marriage (years)	30	26	50
Married (first time)	12	24	58
Have children	13	26	55
Range of age at immigration	Infant to 20 years	Not applicable	15
Mean length of stay in United States (years)	3	Not applicable	15
Mean length of time between arrival and marriage (years)	7	Not applicable	12 (excludes women with prior marriages)

Data Analysis

We used the qualitative analysis software Atlas.ti to categorize the women’s responses under broad topics such as marital satisfaction, couple meeting, and friendship network. Next, we coded for six topics on the basis of our initial reading of the interviews: immigration stories, societal responses to intermarriage, respondents’ stories about others’ interracial marriages, and the respondents’ opinions on intermarriage, marriage, and race. We also coded for disconfirming evidence.

Findings

We found that both European immigrant and U.S.-born white women characterized their daily experiences of being married to black American men as marked by costs they paid for being interracially married. These costs fell into three categories: material, social, and institutional. Material costs concerned financial or other economic affairs such as employment or housing. Social costs involved being unable to participate in social activities such as dining out or enjoying public entertainment and being the topic of local gossip. Institutional costs concerned problems the women encountered in institutional settings such as courts, churches, relief application centers, or hospitals because of their marriages. Similar to the U.S.-born women, European-born women also suffered a partial loss of white privilege because they married interracially. It is from this loss that they learned about the racial hierarchy and whites’ and blacks’ places in it. European- and U.S.-born wives often experienced this partial loss of white privilege through rebound racism (Frankenberg 1993), racial border patrolling (Dalmage 2000), and racial boundary policing (Osuji 2013). Rebound racism is racism that affects nonwhite partners but the impact of which white partners still feel. Racial border patrolling involves attempts to coerce individuals to follow racial norms. Racial boundary policing is the ways individuals “stigmatize” people who cross social boundaries (Osuji 2013:180). Using these concepts, we also demonstrate how U.S.-born and European immigrant women experienced these material, social, and institutional costs. As black and white actors imposed these costs on interracially married white women, their actions depicted the contours and boundaries of the white and black racial communities and what it meant to be a social citizen of these racial communities. These depictions were a significant part of race learning for the European-born wives.

Material Costs

Job Loss

Both U.S.- and European-born women experienced material costs when white employers racially patrolled and policed their relationships. For example, Mrs. Wells,⁴ a 44-year-old woman from upstate New York,⁵ stated that, “No white women can hold a job any place if it is known that her husband is colored. They would fire her immediately.” Mrs. Tyler, a 31-year-old woman from Czechoslovakia who worked as a Works Progress Administration typist, confirmed Mrs. Wells’s statement with her own story about losing her job as a result of being interracially married:

A white woman with the colored husband can’t hold a job here. . . . I was at the Chicago Boys Club. They were very pleased with me there because they hadn’t had such good results before. I had charge of the dining room at the Chicago Boys’ club. They found out [about the interracial marriage] and let me go.

White employers fired U.S.-born and European immigrant wives as a way to punish them for marrying black men and in doing so policed and patrolled the boundaries of whiteness. It is also important to note that for some immigrant women, their experiences of racial boundary policing and border patrolling further solidified for them their status as racially white. For instance, Mrs. Tyler referred to herself as a “white” woman before she recounted her story of losing her job because of she was interracially married. She did not call herself an immigrant or Czech. Because employers had little regard for differentiating between whether interracially married white women were immigrants or not when they practiced border patrolling or boundary policing of interracial marriages, Mrs. Tyler could claim a white racial identity for herself. Her words also imply that she felt she belonged to the white racial community, not to the European or black community. This is also no surprise given that the costs she encountered through racial boundary policing and border patrolling demonstrated to her that there was a strict color divide between blacks and whites and that whites were stigmatized when they crossed or blurred those racial boundaries.

Interracial marriage also posed a threat for family income. Mrs. Raymond, a 21-year-old U.S.-born housewife with two children, illustrated this point when she spoke about her husband’s employment:

Once when he [Mr. Raymond] had a day off, they called me on the phone. I didn’t say whether or not I was his wife but I guess he thought I was. They wanted to know if I was white but I didn’t say. I think the foreman or the foreman’s son said to my husband, ‘You haven’t got a white wife have you?’ He asked, ‘What makes you think that?’ And the man said, ‘I didn’t think you would be so foolish as to marry out of your race.’ He would lose his job if it was known that he has a white wife.

In Mrs. Raymond’s case, the threat of a white employer’s firing her husband was an act of racial border patrolling. Mr. Raymond’s employer used the threat of job loss to coerce him to follow social racial rules that strongly discouraged black-white intermarriage. Because Mrs. Raymond was a housewife, if her husband lost his job, they would also lose their only source of income. Consequently, her husband’s employer’s use of racial border patrolling was quite significant for Mrs. Raymond and her family.

Impact of Housing Discrimination on Job Loss

Because residential segregation created and solidified communal racial boundaries between whites and blacks, it was unusual to find a U.S.-born white or European immigrant woman voluntarily living in a black neighborhood. Both blacks and whites concluded that a woman who did so was interracially married (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993). The women in our study also reported that living in a black neighborhood was a signal that they were interracially married. As interracial marriage was a clear act of crossing racial boundaries and outside the contours whiteness, living in a black neighborhood posed yet another threat to U.S.- and European-born women’s economic resources. If white employers found out or had suspicions about a white woman’s residence, this in itself gave them license to fire her. Mrs. Tyler recounted how another white employer fired her because she lived in a black neighborhood, without confirming she was indeed interracially married. Because of residential segregation, he correctly assumed that she had to have a black husband in order to make such a housing decision:

When they [employers] find out that you live in a colored neighborhood you are through. When I was working with the Illinois Central, and they found I was not riding on the Illinois Central as I should if I lived where I said I did, they let me go immediately. They didn’t give me ten minutes’ notice. When I was called in the office I didn’t say anything. I knew why I was let go.

In firing Mrs. Tyler, her employer policed racial boundaries by showing her that being a white social citizen meant a physical and relational separation between blacks and whites—and punished her for crossing these racial boundaries. Moreover, Mrs. Tyler mentioned that she was not offered an explanation when she was called into the office because she “knew why” she was being fired. This suggests that she was now familiar with the racial boundaries and consequences of crossing them in a way that she had not been before she married her black husband.

The evidence presented above demonstrates that there were no differences in the material costs that U.S.- and European-born wives faced. The U.S.-born women Mrs. Wells and Mrs. Raymond, and Mrs. Tyler, the immigrant woman, all discussed how racial boundary policing and border patrolling could result in material costs or posed the threat of them. Additionally, by using these tactics, white employers dictated the terms upon which the women and their husbands could obtain economic resources. They showed these interracially married women, first, that working at a white-owned establishment was a privilege for both whites and blacks and, second, that continued access to this privilege demanded absolute compliance to racial ideologies, beliefs, and norms that denounced marriage between whites and blacks. This message held greater significance because these individuals lived during the Great Depression, when employment opportunities were scarce. For immigrant women such as Mrs. Tyler, it was through the experience of racial border patrolling and boundary policing that they came to conclude that “a white woman with the colored husband can’t hold a job.” Furthermore, because it was white employers who used these strategies to police racial borders, they showed these women the contours and boundaries of whiteness and what it meant to be a white social citizen in the United States.

Housing Discrimination

Another material cost these women encountered was difficulty finding a place to live. They experienced this material cost through rebound racism. State and private enforcement of residential segregation, which maintained Chicago’s color line, forced mixed couples to live in black neighborhoods, as they were refused residence in white and European immigrant areas (Dalmage 2000; Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993; Philpott 1978; Roberts 2017). As U.S.- or European-born white women, had they been married to U.S.-born white men or even white immigrants, they could have rented apartments or owned homes in white neighborhoods. However, because of racism against their black husbands, these wives were excluded from these neighborhoods and had to live in Chicago’s “Black Belt” (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993). Therefore, the impact of racism on their husbands “rebounded” onto them in their housing search (Frankenberg 1993:112). Mrs. Curtis’s experience of apartment hunting after she and her husband were newly married illustrated this rebound racism. The 45-year-old woman from Germany explained, “I was told that they would rent to me but ‘We can’t have a Negro here.’” Mrs. Tyler’s first encounter with white racism because of her interracial marriage occurred when she too was looking for a place to live with her husband. She stated, “When I married I didn’t know there were places where colored couldn’t go and couldn’t live. I wanted to live in a hotel at 25th and Michigan and didn’t know that he couldn’t live there.” After she married, however, Mrs. Tyler became acquainted with residential discrimination against blacks because it directly affected her. Mrs. Berry, a 54-year-old U.S.-born woman, was looking for housing and did not consider a residence without first asking if the landlords allowed blacks: “I always ask if they have any objections to my colored husband.”

Mrs. Duckworth, a 69-year-old U.S.-born woman, took advantage of her husband’s employment and residence in New Mexico (and her white privilege) and lived in a white neighborhood. She reported, “There aren’t any women with colored husbands out here. If they knew I was connected [married to a black man], I wouldn’t be here.” Mrs. Duckworth also visited her husband in New Mexico when she wanted to see him. The only way Mrs. Duckworth could live in a white neighborhood, and thereby benefit from her whiteness, was without her husband’s physical presence.

As illustrated above, both U.S.- and European-born white women experienced rebound racism in their home searches because white landlords drew strict residential boundaries between blacks and whites. For the immigrant women, this encounter with residential segregation sometimes provided them with their first lesson about the racial boundaries between blacks and whites and what happens to whites when these boundaries were crossed.

Social Costs

Both immigrant and U.S.-born white women also faced social costs due to being intermarried. Mrs. Emerson, a 51-year-old French immigrant who had been married for 25 years, spoke about constrained entertainment options: “Sure, I noticed the restrictions. I know I can’t go to some places with my husband. I know I can’t go to the Drake Hotel.” Like many individuals in northern cities in the United States, Chicagoans practiced de facto forms of Jim Crow racial separation (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993; Guglielmo 2004). Therefore, Mrs. Emerson would have likely run into many instances of boundary policing, border patrolling, and rebound racism in her attempts to socialize with her husband at places like the Drake Hotel that only allowed white patrons. Her interracial marriage also taught her about the racial divide. From being denied entrance or admission to whites-only establishments, Mrs. Emerson came away with the knowledge that she and her husband would be limited in their entertainment options because they crossed the racial boundaries of blackness and whiteness with their interracial marriage.

Mrs. Emerson also limited her social interactions with others to avoid racial boundary policing, racial border patrolling, and rebound racism, which could result in material costs. For instance, she was very careful about whom she allowed to visit her at home. Mrs. Emerson worked in a dress shop with both black and white women and had white clients. However, she limited her friendship with her coworkers and clients to the workplace because she did not want to take the risk of losing her job if they found out about her marriage. Mrs. Emerson explained, “Lots of people want to come and I tell them some reasons. I tell them I’m busy.” She also never shared about her marriage with her coworkers or clients. She stated that “I never tell my business else it is harder. I think if a girl married like me tells it, she is foolish.”

Another salient social cost for these interracially married women was gossip. A 58-year-old Canadian immigrant, Mrs. Pratt, mentioned that when she was first married, she was not aware of the disapproval against interracial marriage or the racism against black people. She reported, “I didn’t know much about it then. I was just out of school and didn’t pay much attention. I have learned more since then. I didn’t pay no attention then. I know better now. I know people’s feelings.” One of the ways Mrs. Pratt learned about racial borders was at her job. She observed how her black and white coworkers gossiped about one another and refused to tell them about her interracial marriage because she did not want to be the topic of gossip:

Where I work I never tell them. I notice where I work that darker colored people are prejudiced against lighter ones. Both white and colored work with me. I hear what they have to say about each other. If I did [talk] however, they would find out about my husband and probably talk about me. I guess they would talk about me. Some probably would not like it and it would not make any difference to others. I don’t like to have everybody know about my affairs.

Although Mrs. Pratt recognized that some of her coworkers may not care about her interracial marriage, she kept her marriage off limits at her job because it was more important to her to avoid being the topic of gossip than to develop close relationships with her coworkers. Like Mrs. Emerson, she too drew boundaries around her personal life in her friendships with her coworkers because she did not want to experience boundary policing of her marriage through gossip.

Similar to her European immigrant counterparts, U.S.-born Mrs. Miner, a 21-year-old woman from Chicago, recounted a story about gossip among the black children in the black neighborhood where she lived. She reported,

Last year some of the children said I wouldn’t let my girls be seen with colored children because they [the black children] were too dirty. A delegation of colored children came to me to see if that was true. . . . It was really cute the way they came here. I told them that it wasn’t true and asked who had said that. They said that it was another girl but I couldn’t get her to come here.

It is apparent from this story that Mrs. Miner and her children were not fully accepted in this black neighborhood. Gossip, as a boundary-policing tactic, had the potential to isolate her children, mark her and her children as unfriendly, and to limit their acceptance in the neighborhood.

Institutional Costs

Last, both U.S.-born and European-born white women encountered disapproval of their marriages in institutional settings such as courts, churches, relief application centers, and hospitals. Mrs. Raymond’s encounter at a hospital demonstrated how white women experienced institutional costs through racial boundary policing and border patrolling. The 21-year-old U.S.-born woman recalled,

I went to Lying-in Hospital [currently the University of Chicago Medical Center]. That’s a Jim Crow hospital. I was pregnant and signed up there. My mother was working and couldn’t go with me so I asked the Negro friend of my husband who lived on the South Side to take me there. He came with me to the hospital and the girl asked me, ‘Do you mean to say that colored fellow is a friend of yours?’ I said, ‘Sure he is.’ Then it dawned on her and she said, ‘Is your husband colored?’ I said, ‘Yes’ and she tore up the application. She said, ‘If you say your husband is light and that you will have a light baby, we can take you.’ I said that I couldn’t guarantee what kind of baby I would have. I could have managed to get in but I wouldn’t do that.

Even in the North, segregated medical care was the norm and black hospitals had much fewer resources (Rice and Jones 1994). Thus, to receive high-quality medical care, Mrs. Raymond had to go to a hospital for white patients. Had she gone with her mother, the secretary would have assumed she was having a white, not a biracial baby, and asked no questions. However, because Mrs. Raymond brought a black male friend, the secretary suspected she had a black husband, and the baby’s race came into question. The secretary used boundary policing when she tore up Mrs. Raymond’s application to show her disapproval of her marriage and to shame Mrs. Raymond for being interracially married. Furthermore, in an effort to enforce racial boundaries the hospital enacted between black and white patients, she asked Mrs. Raymond to say that her husband was light-skinned and to predict that she would have a “light” (i.e., white-looking) baby, as a condition of receiving medical services. Mrs. Raymond refused to be cowered by the secretary’s attempt at racial border patrolling and chose instead to forfeit her white privilege in this institutional context.

To avoid the potential racial border patrolling and boundary policing by government workers, Mrs. Trapp was thorough when she applied for public aid or relief. The 40-year-old woman born in Mississippi, who fled the South with her future husband to get married, explained,

My husband had a good working reference and we had our marriage certificate and the children’s birth record, so all they could do was accept us. We had registered and voted each time, and as for my parents, I didn’t give them any information at all.

Mrs. Trapp’s thoroughness with the relief application process was necessary because, although black-white interracial marriage was legal in Chicago, societal disapproval of the marriage could result in denial of public aid in the guise of some other reason (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993). Mrs. Tyler also echoed the difficulties that white women in black-white interracial marriages faced when applying for public aid. She explained, “Once you are married to a colored man, you can’t get any aid without publicity.” This “publicity,” that is, making white women the center of unwanted attention, was yet another form of boundary policing designed to shame them for marrying black men.

Mrs. Walsh, a 29-year-old woman from Sweden, described being treated badly in a court after she and her husband were arrested for speeding, shortly after they were married.

We were arrested in Worth, Illinois for speeding once. They had a speed trap there. My husband asked for a jury trial. The magistrate was the father of the motorcycle cop who arrested us. The jury came and looked at me and my husband and they threw all kinds of slurs at us. I wasn’t used to that. I wondered what kind of people they were. They looked at my husband and said, ‘they ought to arrest him.’ Then they said, ‘That white thing.’ They slurred me.

Mrs. Walsh’s reaction—“I wasn’t used to that”—indicates the jury’s actions to maintain the racial boundaries between blacks and whites were new to her at the time of this incident. However, Mrs. Walsh’s minimization of yet another insulting encounter that happened a few years later demonstrated that she had become much more familiar with such boundary policing, border patrolling, and rebound racism. She recounted,

This wasn’t so bad. We were in Indiana and had been out riding. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant in a filling station. A man came and looked at me and looked my husband and shut the door. Then a woman came out and looked at me and looked at my husband and shut the door. I said to my husband, “Let’s go. They aren’t going to serve us here.”

Mrs. Walsh quickly recognized that she and her husband would not be served because their marriage symbolized crossed racial boundaries.

Strengthening Ties to Black and White Racial Communities

Although all the European immigrant women experienced material, social, and institutional costs through rebound racism, border patrolling, and boundary policing, they differed in their responses to this race learning. Younger immigrant wives distanced themselves from blacks and strengthened their ties to the white racial community. Older immigrant wives strengthened their ties to the black racial community. We examined the women’s descriptions of living in black neighborhoods, their social networks, and their racial ideologies to gain insights about how they chose to connect to either racial community.

Strengthening Ties to the White Racial Community

Mrs. Walsh, like most of the immigrant women in our study, lived in a black neighborhood because of housing discrimination against her black husband. However, she distanced herself from her black neighbors and did not socialize with other interracial couples. Instead she built friendships with other whites. She stated, “I don’t have many colored friends. I have friends of my own race. We [her husband and herself] don’t fraternize with other mixed couples. I don’t know anybody in this neighborhood. . . . My friends are all white.” Mrs. Walsh surrounded herself with a white racial community.

Mrs. Walsh also strengthened her ties to the white racial community in her attempts to regulate her children’s social networks. She explained that

they [her children] associated with colored, but they like white. They used to go way to 68th and Cottage Grove to play. I don’t know why they are that way because I never taught them that. I taught them not to disrespect anybody, [but] they are not to associate with everybody.

Mrs. Walsh did not want her children to play with black children and even claimed on their behalf that they preferred white children. She wanted her children to respect black children, but association or friendship with them was not desirable for her.

Like Mrs. Walsh, 45-year-old Mrs. Curtis also lived in a black neighborhood. She lived with her husband and two children in Morgan Park, a black suburban neighborhood southwest of Chicago. Also like Mrs. Walsh, Mrs. Curtis did not interact with her black neighbors. She reported, “I don’t have much contact around here. . . . Everyone knows me out here, but I don’t know everybody.” Mrs. Curtis also did not have any friends who were interracially married.

Mrs. Curtis, like Mrs. Walsh, demonstrated her ties to the white racial community in how she handled her children’s lives, particularly their education. Mrs. Curtis felt that being mixed was a great disadvantage to her children because they were considered black due to the “one drop rule”. She explained,

These children, even if they have an ounce of colored blood, they are considered colored. My boy is a nice-looking boy, smart as a whip, etc., but he can’t get anywhere. He should be admitted to any school he can measure up to. He’s held back by his color.

To mitigate this disadvantage, Mrs. Curtis sent her children to a white, private school: “I’m just fortunate in having my children sent to that white school. They go to the Roseland Christian School,” three miles away from their home. Mrs. Curtis demonstrated her ties to a white racial community as she described herself as “fortunate” that her children attended a white school.

Mrs. Tyler, the 31-year-old woman from Czechoslovakia who experienced job loss as a result of her interracial marriage, voiced strong opinions about strengthening the boundaries between blacks and whites. Although she did not hold these views before she came to the United States, Mrs. Tyler came to conclude, “Colored people are different than white. They don’t care about morals. White people are more refined. You can’t expect the colored people to come up to the standards of the white in such short a time.” If Mrs. Tyler held this belief before she was married, she probably would not have married her black husband. However, after being interracially married and learning about America’s racial structure, the treatment of blacks, and the treatment of white women who married blacks, she too came to believe that black men and white women should be kept away from each other. As a result of a growing familiarization with white racism, Mrs. Tyler, like Mrs. Walsh and Mrs. Curtis, responded by maintaining and strengthening ideological ties to whiteness.

Strengthening Ties to the Black Racial Community

Some immigrant women, though also now familiar with white racism and blacks’ place at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, chose to associate with the black people in their neighborhoods and included blacks and interracial couples in their social networks. Mrs. Procter, a 74-year-old woman from Norway, married a third time to a black man, described her friends as “mostly colored.” She explained, “I only have one who is intermarried. All those I used to know are dead. I believe I’m the only one living. I have one white and three colored friends.” Unlike Mrs. Walsh, Mrs. Curtis, and Mrs. Tyler, Mrs. Procter’s social network was a mixed one. In the past, it was filled with people in interracial marriages. Her current social network primarily included blacks.

Mrs. Procter’s ties to the black racial community were also evident in how she described her interactions with her neighbors and her identification of herself and family as a colored, not an interracial or mixed, family in the neighborhood. She stated, “I’ve been in this neighborhood about 40 years. I guess we were about the first colored family that moved out here. I moved here with my second husband about 40 years ago. He’s been dead 20 years or more.” Significantly, Mrs. Procter referred to her family, which included herself, as “colored,” and did not separate herself from them as the white woman in the family. Her identification with her black family members and inclusion primarily of blacks in her friendship network demonstrates she felt she belonged in the black community.

Like Mrs. Procter, 68-year-old Mrs. Brown, another German immigrant wife, created her social community with blacks and saw herself as one of them. She lived in a neighborhood that had become predominantly white when blacks were no longer allowed to live there. Her description of living in a white neighborhood revealed her sense of affiliation with black people:

We’re the only colored people here. . . . There are no colored on this block. There were four or five colored families here years ago. They passed this law of restriction, from 55th to 75th and from State to Racine, I guess. An Italian owned these two buildings on the corner and rented to colored, but they [the laws] made them move. I think she’d rather have them because the tenants in there were good people, and the ones they have now [white tenants] are always moving.

Similar to Mrs. Procter, Mrs. Brown described herself as “colored” rather than grouping herself with her white neighbors. She also described the former tenants and neighbors around the corner from her home as “good people.” This is in stark contrast to Mrs. Tyler’s negative views about blacks.

Age Differences in Strengthening Racial Ties

We found that the major difference among the European immigrants who were more likely to strengthen their ties to blacks than to whites was age. Immigrant wives above the age of 50 were more likely to embrace blacks, have blacks in their social networks, and even view themselves as black. Wives below the age of 50 were more likely to align themselves with the white racial community. It is possible that the older women had more time to adapt to the costs of being intermarried and, as they became older, refused the racial ideologies that governed the disapproval of their interracial marriages. It is also possible that the younger women felt the impact of the move toward a national white racial identity more acutely than their older counterparts. By the late 1930s, European ethnic identities were being subsumed under the category of “Caucasian” or “white” as race and color converged (Guglielmo 2003; Jacobson 1998; Roediger 1991, 2005). The older European immigrant women mentioned that they experienced less resistance to their black-white interracial marriages when they were younger than they did at this time. Sixty-eight-year-old Mrs. Brown, one of the few women who lived in a primarily white neighborhood, noticed that her new white neighbors and the churches in her neighborhood were not as approving of her marriage as the whites had been when she first moved there 30 years ago. She reported, “When we came here 30 years ago, the neighbors were just fine. . . . They would ask me to come to church with them. You don’t see that anymore. I think the prejudice is worse than ever before.”

Mrs. Pratt, a 58-year-old woman from Canada, went to a church where over time the primary race of the parishioners changed from white to black. She noticed increased prejudice from blacks, not only whites. She stated, “I go to Corpus Christi Church. They used to be all white but now most of the members are colored. We have a hard time. I feel it more than before. People on both sides don’t like it.” Mrs. Pratt felt the disapproval of her marriage more strongly than she had in the past.

Younger wives closer to the age of 50 also noticed the change in societal acceptance of black-white marriages. Forty-five-year-old Mrs. Curtis explained,

When I married my husband I took him everywhere. I didn’t know the difference. I never hid around or kept it secret. . . . As times have gone on, thirty years has changed things. I believe it [interracial marriage] is a terrible handicap. Outside opposition makes it a handicap.

As white ethnic and ethnoracial minority groups underwent categorization into larger racial groups, this process solidified the bright boundaries between racial groups, especially between blacks and whites, and left little room for crossing racial boundaries. Younger wives spent a greater and more formative part of their marriages in this transition than their older counterparts. Thus, connection to the white racial community became more crucial as racism and discrimination increasingly defined life for both blacks and whites until the start of the civil rights movement in the 1950s (Guglielmo 2003; Jacobson 1998; Roediger 2005).

Discussion and Conclusion

We argue that European immigrant women learned about race through the material, social, and institutional costs they faced as a result of being married to black men. Like their U.S.-born counterparts, they experienced these costs as whites and, to a lesser extent, blacks used racial boundary policing and border patrolling and rebound racism to punish these women for their intermarriages. We also found that, depending on their age, European wives had differing responses to their race learning. Younger wives were less likely to associate with their black neighbors and have blacks in their social networks and more likely to have negative attitudes about blacks. Instead, they strengthened their ideological and network ties to the white racial community. Consequently, we maintain that exploring marriages between European immigrants and African Americans as a site of race learning broadens and complicates current understandings of how Europeans reacted to a growing familiarization with white racism.

Our findings support previous studies that explored the lived experiences of those in interracial relationships and families, particularly black-white partnerships and biracial families, and found that these groups experienced racial hostility as a part of their daily lives. Although the severity of the costs such as job loss or refusal of service has decreased, these couples and families are still subject to disapproval from family, friends, and strangers (Chito Childs 2005; Dalmage 2000; Frankenberg 1993; Osuji 2013; Steinbugler 2012; Twine 2010; Vazquez-Tokos 2017). Future research could examine how new immigrants in intimate partnerships with U.S.-born whites or ethnoracial minorities learn about race, racism, and racial hierarchies and navigate the complexities of being interracially married.

Future research might also explore race learning among European immigrant women married to black men in historical periods following the 1930s. In addition, although our research highlights the race learning of U.S.-born and European immigrant women, future research might compare race learning between European immigrant men and women. Such a comparison would illuminate how race and gender intersect to influence how European immigrants learned about whiteness, blackness, and the racial hierarchy.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Sarah Adeyinka-Skold would like to thank Professor Dorothy Roberts for giving her the opportunity to examine this incredible data set and encouraging me in the writing process. She would also like to thank Wesley Adeyinka-Skold and her family for their love and support.

Dorothy E. Roberts would like to thank Sarah Adeyinka-Skold for the opportunity to collaborate with her on this article, George A. Weiss and the American Council of Learned Societies for financial support, and her family for moral support.

Notes

Author Biographies

Sarah Adeyinka-Skold is currently a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include interracial partnerships, partner and family formation among college-educated women, and dating and relationships. She is currently working on a dissertation that examines the romantic partner search experiences of black, white, Latino/Hispanic, and Asian college-educated never-married women.

Dorothy E. Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Department of Africana Studies and Department of Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of race and gender in U.S. institutions and is author of Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty ([1997] 2017), Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001), and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (2011) and more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as coeditor of six books.

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