Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
This research was funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, Grant 88-01-06. We thank Marie Ralstin-Lewis, Ken Hudson, and Jim Elliott for assistance with identifying literature, sample construction, and statistical analysis, and we are grateful to Dina Okamoto, Michael Aguilera, Julie Novkov, and participants in the Faculty Seminar Series of the Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Oregon for comments on earlier versions of this article.
INTRODUCTION
Two indicators of race relations in the United States are interracial marriage and transracial adoption (Root 2001; Simon and Altstein, 2000). The rising prevalence of both phenomena suggests to some that barriers between racial groups have eroded in recent decades; however, others have challenged this optimistic interpretation, noting it is the continuing significance of racism, anchored in historically rooted beliefs about racial groups, that surrounds and even motivates these interracial crossings (Collins 2004; Dalmage 2000). These discourses inform individuals' attitudes toward racial and ethnic groups and thus potentially influence individuals' behavior, in this case, their engagement in social intimacy across racial lines (Bobo and Tuan, 2006).
In this article, we examine the salience of race in the romantic involvements of Korean adoptees who were raised in White families, and we empirically specify the role of racial discourses in influencing romantic involvements. We view romantic involvements as an inclusive classification of the range of activities associated with dating, from casual interest to courtship, including marital and nonmarital unions--rather than as a measure of their "romantic" intensity. While scholars have closely examined interracial marriage, they have not paid equal attention to interracial dating, despite its important role as a precursor to interracial marriage (Joyner and Kao, 2005; Kalmijn 1998). Interracial marriage has been a legalized type of union since the 1960s (Rosenfeld and Kim, 2005; Spickard 1989; Williams-León and Nakashima, 2001); however, interracial romance and sexuality retain an air of mystery and taboo, as evidenced in both popular culture and subgenres of pornography (Childs 2005). Our central argument is that racialized assumptions and beliefs, what we refer to as racial discourses, are salient for romantic involvements in ways that are independent of variations in personal dating experience and even in the structural location of those experiences.
Scholarship on race...