Over the past decade, interracial marriage and dating have become regular talking points in mainstream discussions of U.S. race relations.  For instance, it is not uncommon for news outlets to feature prominently reports of unprecedented increases in the acceptance of interracial marriage or stories about persistent generational divides in interracial dating.[1] However, when these discussions turn to those born to interracial relationships or "multiracial" individuals, the focus of the conversation often dramatically narrows to one on racial identity.[2] In all fairness, there has been much to report on multiracial identity in the past decade, including the ability to designate more than one race for the first time on the 2000 Census and the election of a U.S. President who was "born to a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas."[3] Nevertheless, one subject that has been sorely overlooked in this focus on identity has been multiracial individuals' perspectives on interracial relationships. That is, while the American public has become more familiar with the perspectives of "monoracial" individuals on interracial marriage and dating, we hear comparatively little about the views of those born to these relations, many of whom have been privy to the day-to-day dynamics of interracial relationships since birth. In this "thought piece," I present the story of Anna-Marie Charles (pseudonym), a multiracial individual born to a Filipina mother and white father, as one example of the multi-dimensional and sometimes conflicted portraits of contemporary interracial intimacy that many multiracial individuals have to offer but that are frequently left out of the national dialogue.

Anna-Marie's account is one of over sixty I collected between 2007 and 2010 for my doctoral research on multiracial individuals' personal relationships.[4] Fifty of those I interviewed were like Anna-Marie, multiracial Filipino Americans—those born to white/Filipino and black/Filipino interracial relationships. I was drawn to speak to such a specific population not only because I was born to a Filipina/African American mother and white (Danish/Scottish) father but also, and more importantly, because Filipinos' comparatively high rates of out-marriage (28.6 percent), multi-race identification (25.2 percent), and immigration (second largest U.S. immigrant group) exemplify key trends social scientists have attributed to the rise in the U.S.'s multiracial population in the last quarter-century.[5] Anna-Marie's account was similar to roughly one-quarter of the multiracial individuals I interviewed in that she held an ambivalent stance toward interracial relationships.[6] Interviewees like Anna-Marie recalled that during their college years they were exposed to enduring gender and racial inequalities in the U.S. and the Philippines that fundamentally challenged their personally-steeped desires, as "mixed race" individuals, for racial difference to be a compatible and not obstructive part of their interracial families. In Anna-Marie's case, the catalyst was learning about the mail order bride industry and correspondence or “pen pal” relationships. Unable to embrace wholly nor entirely reject the possibility of close interracial relationships, Anna-Marie’s ambivalent narrative offers a glimpse into the complexities of discussing race and intimacy in an age in which global inequalities continue to propel gendered Filipino migration and numerous Filipino/non-Filipino interracial relationships.

I met Anna-Marie on a cool, late-winter day in a popular park in San Francisco’s Financial District. In her early twenties, Anna-Marie was, as she was quick to point out, “made in the Philippines” but born in San Francisco in the mid-1980s. From the outset of our interview, Anna-Marie seemed keen to present racial difference not as an obstacle but as a compatible part of her closest relations, particularly her parents’ interracial marriage. Anna-Marie suggested the impetus for this desire in her recollections of how race often manifests in her everyday interactions. That is, although Anna-Marie’s straight dark hair, brown eyes, and olive complexioned skin have led many to ask her “what” she is (a question often directed at mixed race individuals), what has troubled her the most has been the question that frequently follows:

A lot of people when they ask me what I am, and I tell them, the second question they ask me is whether or not my parents are still together, and I always thought that was interesting. Like, “Wow. Is it because I’m mixed race that [people ask] why are my parents together?”

Guiding this line of questioning is the antiquated stereotype that all interracial relationships, especially marriages, are unstable and non-lasting compared to same-race relationships and often to the detriment of any mixed race offspring.[7] Anna-Marie went on to explain that these negative perceptions are often magnified when born to an Asian mother and non-Asian, especially white, father. That is, these relationships are sometimes presumed to be fueled by the male partner’s attraction to gender and sexual stereotypes of Asian women as loyal and subservient “good wives” and by the female partner’s aspirations for social mobility.[8] Anna-Marie described frequently finding herself defending her parents’ marriage from these negative images. However, she also confided that these efforts became more difficult when she learned that, in the case of her parents, some of these accusations were based in social realities:

My dad’s really good friend a few years ago told me, straight up, that my mom married my dad because she needed to get out of the ghetto, essentially. She’s the only one out of her brothers and sisters who came to America, and so she needed to support them, which, you know, is common, but and then my dad just needed a wife, so it was very much like marriage for convenience, and I just couldn’t really deal with that fact. I always wanted to believe that my parents were like madly in love like you saw in the movies, and I was, like, going through it I remember trying to come to terms with that, that my parents were more just like friends. I mean, they were pen pals or whatever and they would talk on the phone … When my dad went to go see her first in person, they were together for two weeks and then they got married. Like, it wasn’t like a long courtship.

Anna-Marie’s revelation shines light on the increased popularity over the last quarter-century of pen pal agencies worldwide that recruit women, many from Asia and Eastern Europe, to correspond with mostly (white) Western men seeking foreign marriage partners.[9] In these agencies, Filipinas are often the most common nationality and are regularly hyperfeminized in advertisements as making, of all Asian women, “the most loyal and faithful” wives.[10] However, for Anna-Marie, this revelation proved most significant in its recasting of the story of her parent’s interracial marriage, from one sparked by romance (e.g. “like you saw in the movies”) to one possibly driven by more pragmatic concerns (i.e. a mother who wanted “to get out of the ghetto” and a father who “just needed a wife”). Nevertheless, like several other multiracial individuals I interviewed who came to similar realizations, Anna-Marie continued to express a desire for racial difference to be, at the very least, a compatible part of her closest relations. For instance, Anna-Marie shifted her attention momentarily to another personal relationship, friendships, and described how racial difference was an integral component of the racially-mixed group of friends she formed in the “diverse” but “divided” schools she attended in San Francisco. However, Anna-Marie’s ardent efforts met their greatest test during her reflections on her college years.

Anna-Marie explained that, while attending college at a large public university in New York, she learned of the exploitation of Filipina women, namely in the mail order bride industry, that resonated with her personal struggles and fundamentally challenged her perceptions of interracial intimacy. Specifically, Anna-Marie became a member of a U.S.-Philippines women’s solidarity organization, which addresses a variety of social issues including globalization, militarism, and sex trafficking that affect Filipina women’s lives both in the Philippines and its diaspora. Anna-Marie recalled how a news story about the organization’s protest of a Wal-Mart mail order bride Halloween costume, which featured a Philippines stamp on the dress, prompted her involvement in the organization and introduced her to an alternative worldview:

[The story] was talking about things that I’d already knew about but in a way that I didn’t think about it before. Like, with mail order brides, I really didn’t see it as a bad thing before. I just accepted it. Like, “Okay, well, like, my mom went to a mail order bride agency before she met my dad,” so I accepted it as, “Well, you know, the women are poor, and they want to get out of their situation, so they marry out of, you know, whatever they’re living in to better their situation.” I didn’t think it was a good thing, but I didn’t think it was a bad thing and just accepted it as a normal thing, and then when I read this story, and they talked about how, like, the statistics with women being killed and beaten and just these different stories of what would happen to these women like totally isolated from everyone and everything and how these men would treat them, really affected me.

Anna-Marie continued:

I started reading and researching on how these women were sold on different internet websites. You’d literally have a shopping cart icon, and they would market it as, “Oh, Filipinas do everything for you. They don’t complain. They don’t do this. They don’t do that. They make the perfect wife.” Like, totally feeding into all these awful stereotypes that make these men think, “Oh, these are just subservient women that will do whatever I say” … That really, really affected me.

For Anna-Marie, the social justice organizations’ literature on their protest of the mail order bride costumes provided an alternative outlook on interracial relationships. Due in large part to connections to her personal life, Anna-Marie's views began to shift on mail order brides, from a “common” means for Filipina women like her mother “to get out of their situation” to an industry that exploits them and often relies on hyperfeminized images of Filipina women as especially “good wives.”[11] However, as a mixed race individual, these alternative perspectives did not provide entirely satisfactory answers for Anna-Marie.

As much as Anna-Marie found the organization’s stories empowering, she confessed that, at times, their emphasis on the persistence of gender and racial inequalities made her feel as if interracial relationships like her parents’ could never be truly close. For example, she recalled how one of her peers vehemently “didn’t believe that in this society, a white person can love a person of color. That there was always some sort of degree of like exoticizing them or fetishizing them.” Anna-Marie explained that, while she felt these remarks were attuned to how racism and sexism can operate in romantic relations, as a person born to an interracial relationship she also felt she could not entirely embrace what she saw as simplistic beliefs that interracial relationships can never be based on romance. She explained, “It assumes that a non-white with a white has self-hate … It’s more complicated [than that].” Anna-Marie concluded, elaborating on this conflicted sentiment.

Toward the end of our interview, I asked Anna-Marie if she were presented with the opportunity today to respond to her peers’ claims that a white person cannot love a person of color, how she would reply. In her response, Anna-Marie provided her story’s ambivalent moral:

It would not be a short answer. I think it would be a discussion. To be honest, at this point, I understand where they’re coming from ‘cause I’m understanding, like, the concepts that they realized, but at the same time … [As mixed race] I’m definitely not against interracial dating, but I understand why people are critical of it, and I think if you are in an interracial relationship, as long as you’re understanding of those privileges and are willing to work that out and understand that, it’s fine, but when you’re not understanding of privileges…

Thus, in the end, Anna-Marie does not offer a clear-cut answer on interracial relationships. Rather, it is a subject matter that provokes hesitation and fluctuation because, in Anna-Marie’s words, “it’s more complicated.”

Anna-Marie's story offers a nuanced perspective often lost in popular discussions of contemporary interracial intimacy. Born to an interracial relationship, Anna-Marie finds herself caught between two conflicting yet, for her, equally compelling perspectives on the subject: one that zealously maintains the possibility of close interracial relationships and another that stresses persistent inequalities that severely impede them. However, rather than a case of mere indecision, Anna-Marie's resultant ambivalence illuminates the entanglements of discussing contemporary interracial intimacy, especially Filipino/non-Filipino intimate relations. That is, it shows how such analyses must be cognizant of the enduring inequalities (e.g. global, racial, gender) that can create the conditions of possibility for interracial intimacies today yet also must avoid the pitfalls of simplistic interpretations that reduce the discussion to celebratory proclamations of colorblind love or mechanistic assertions of racialized desire. Ultimately, Anna-Marie’s ambivalent narrative illustrates how contemporary interracial intimacy, particularly for those born to these relations, is a complex and often deeply personal topic, one, to borrow from Anna-Marie, that eludes “short answers” and requires much longer “discussions.”