The “Unwanted, Colored Male”: Gendered Contested White Subjectivity Hailed Through Contemporary Racial Discourse

Abstract

The fear of race-mixing through sexual and romantic relationships has long plagued the psyche of the United States (Ferber, 2004; Frankenberg, 1993; Steinbugler, 2005), and has had serious consequences in terms of buttressing the racial order (Irby, 2014; Spencer, 2011). The college and graduate school years are times when individuals learn from a range of romantic and sexual relationships, and development along this interpersonal line is critical to growth and maturation (Patton et al., 2016). This chapter takes up a feminist poststructural perspective on the narratives of 20 multiracial and contested white postsecondary students at a predominantly white postsecondary institution, and delineates the construction of subjectivity for some cisgender men. Namely, some men are interpellated as the Unwanted, Colored Male through enactments of the discourses of essentialist anti-Black racism, normative whiteness, colorblindness, denial, and the binary discourse, sometimes separately and other times working together. It is important to flesh out how antiquated mental models around race continue to shape the experiences of current students at postsecondary institutions across the U.S. in order to better prepare for the higher education’s mixed race future. The chapter concludes with implications for research and practice.