[1] Robert Segal, “Introduction” to Brenda Wilson's Sex in America, Final Installment, National Public Radio (January 1995).

[2] By discourses, we mean what James Gee terms Discourses with a capital “D.” For Gee, Discourses serve as identity kits, ways of being, doing, acting and believing in the world. See James Paul Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses, 2nd ed. (London: Falmer Press, 1995); James Paul Gee, The Social Mind: Language, Ideology and Social Practice (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1992). Sociohistorically determined and socioculturally variable ways of being that are deemed “ordinary” create a lifeworld, to use Habermas's term, a space in which claims to knowledge are not contingent on specialized methods or the Discourses they engender (also see Hannerz). Here, we understand personal ads as one of those Discourses that operates in and is operated on by a lifeworld. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1984); see also Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

[3] Scholars from a variety of disciplines have studied personal ads in terms of gender dynamics (Bolig, Stein and McHenry; Davis; Goode; Harrison and Saeed; Lance; Sternfirst and Moran); constructions of sexuality and sexual orientation (Davidson; Laner and Kamel; Harris); intersections between gender and sexual orientation (Deaux and Hanna; Caroll); intersections between personal and public (Blaize and Schroeder); cross-cultural constructions of gender and sexuality (Linlin); and (re)constructions of racial identity (Lester and Goggin). These studies are important in demonstrating the ways in which this kind of discourse (re)enacts and (re)negotiates social relations and identities. However, absent from these studies are examinations of interracial black/white personal ads and the ways in which they intersect with gender, perpetuating intertwined racialized and gendered sexual mythologies. Our paper fills this gap. Rosemary Bolig, Peter Stein, and Patrick McHenry, “The Self-Advertisement Approach to Dating: Male–Female Differences,” Family Relations 33 (1984) 587–92; Simon Davis, “Men as Success Objects and Women as Sex Objects: A Study of Personal Advertisements,” Sex Roles 23 (1991): 43–50; Erich Goode, “Gender and Courtship Entitlement: Responses to Personal Ads,” Sex Roles 34 (1996): 141–69; Albert Harrison, and Laila Saeed, “Let's Make a Deal: An Analysis of Revelations and Stipulations in Lonely Hearts Advertisements,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38 (1977): 604–17; Larry M. Lance, “Gender Differences in Heterosexual Dating: A Content Analysis of Personal Ads,” Journal of Men's Studies 6 (1998): 297–303; Susan Sternfirst, and Barbara Moran, “The New Mating Game: Matchmaking Via the Personal Columns in the 1980s,” Journal of Popular Culture 22 (1989): 129–39; Alan G. Davidson, “Looking for Love in the Age of AIDS: The Language of Gay Personals, 1978–1988,” The Journal of Sex Research 28 (1991): 125–37; Mary R., Laner, and G. W. Levi Kamel, “Media Mating I: Newspaper ‘Personals’ Ads of Homosexual Men,” Journal of Homosexuality 3 (1977): 149–62; Daniel Harris, “Personals.” Antioch Review 55 (1997): 6–24; Kay Deaux, and Randel Hanna, “Courtship in the Personals Column: The Influence of Gender and Sexual Orientation,” Sex Roles 11 (1984): 363–75; Traci Caroll, “Want Ads: Reading the Personals” in Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography, ed. Sidoine Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 156–73; Harold R. Blaize, Jr., and Jonathan E. Schroeder, “Personality and Mate Selection in Personal Ads: Evolutionary Preferences in a Public Mate Selection Process,” Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 10 (1995): 517–36; Neal Lester, and Maureen Daly Goggin, “‘EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it!’: Constructions of Heterosexual Black Male Identities in the Personals,” Social Identities 5 (1999): 441–68.

• [4] The unstated premise in Robert Segal's observation is that if these topics were brought to the fore, then problems concerning racism (and by extension all “isms”) could be resolved. Although we as authors share this sentiment to a large degree (we are after all directly tackling the topic of racism here and elsewhere; see Lester and Goggin note 3), we argue that the problem is a far more complicated discursive one. That is, until we better understand how racism and other “isms” are embedded, circulated, reproduced and perpetuated by all kinds of discourses, no amount of direct talk about these issues will erase them. Moreover, as sociolinguist Barbara Johnstone observes:

  • • The aspects of racism (as well as sexism and any other tendency to think of individuals as automatically representative of groups) that are embedded in familiar ways of talking are in a sense the most pernicious ones, more dangerous than overtly racist generalizations are, because they are relatively invisible and they are deniable.

• Barbara Johnstone, Discourse Analysis (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 52. For important discussions of the ways in which racism can be enacted even in discourses that do not on the surface appear to be about race at all, see Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism (London: Routledge: 2000); and Tuen A. van Dijk, Communicating Racism: Ethnic Prejudice in Thought and Talk (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987).

[5] Lester and Goggin (see note 3).

[6] Roderick P. Hart, Modern Rhetorical Criticism, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1997), 242.

[7] Hart, 242.

[8] James Paul Gee, “Quality, Science and the Lifeworld: The Alignment of Business and Education,” in Difference, Silence, and Textual Practice: Studies in Critical Literacy, ed. Peter Freebody, Sandy Muspratt, and Bronwyn Dwyer (Cresskill, NJ: Hamptom Press, 2001), 360.

[9] Cf. Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); and Brian V. Street, Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1995), 162.

[10] Of the eighty-two ads culled from these sources, 26 percent involve black males in search of white females; 20 percent involve white females in search of black males; 30 percent involve white males in search of black females; and 23 percent involve black females of white males. The distribution of ads is thus roughly equivalent across all interracial heterosexual pairings (i.e., roughly 50 percent involve black male/white female pairing, and another 50 percent involve white male/black female pairing). We reproduce these ads in the Appendix and refer to them in the essay by number preceded by the sign #. (For example, (#8) refers to personal ad number 8 in the Appendix.) Although there are many interracial dating Internet sites as well as publications such as Interrace Singles, edited by Candy Mills, also the editor of Interrace Magazine, we analyze only newspaper print ads because they are more accessible to mainstream consumers. Additionally, newspaper ads are presumably more rhetorically censored than some of the websites and less politically correct than the Interrace uplift publication.

[11] Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Torril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Given the scope of our project as we defined it, we have chosen not to tackle questions concerning vertical intertextuality. Yet, personal ads are certainly ripe for such treatment. Vertical intertextuality serves as a constraint on the genre insofar as these ads are paradigmatically related to other personal ads and are filtered through editorial decisions. Questions concerning the function, audience, and context of personal ads are vital ones worth pursuing.

[12] Hart classifies myths into four categories: cosmological myths that seek to explain where we came from; social myths that seek to teach moral lessons to guide behavior; identity myths that seek to explain sociocultural differences; and eschatological myths that seek to explain where we are going in earthly and metaphysical terms (see note 6).

[13] Johnstone 192.

[14] Harry A. Ploski and Ernest Kaiser, ed. The Negro Almanac (New York: Bellwether, 1971), 253–63; INXS, “Original Sin” on The Greatest Hits, New York: Atlantic Recording Corporation, 1994, 82622-Z. Since ideologies inscribe, circulate, and reinforce particular world views and ways of being in the world within particular cultural groupings, it may paradoxically be precisely the decades of efforts at integration that have sustained, by recirculating and thus reinscribing, (dis)abling attitudes toward black/white sexuality.

• [15] Sylvester Monroe, “Love in Black and White: Couples Who Confront the Taboo,” Elle (March 1992): 92, emphasis added. Such public reproach is not always unvoiced as evidenced in Jean Toomer's story “Becky,” about a white woman who has two children presumably by one or two black men. Public opposition is voiced toward both participants:

  • • Becky had one Negro son. Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white folks' mouths.…Common God-forsaken, insane white shameless wench, said the white folks' mouths.…Who gave it to her? Low-down nigger with no self-respect, said the black folks' mouths.…Poor catholic poor-white crazy woman, said the black folks' mouths.—Jean Toomer, “Becky,” in Cane (New York: Liveright, 1975), 5.

[16] Bebe Moore Campbell, “Black Men, White Women: A Sister Relinquishes Her Anger,” in Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues: Black Women on Love, Men and Sex, ed. Marita Golden (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 117.

[17] Julia Hare, “Black Women Who Marry White Men” in How to Find and Keep a BMW (Black Man Working) (San Francisco: The Black Think Tank, 1995), 28.

[18] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 29.

[19] W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South, Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 61–62.

[20] Brundage, 59, emphasis added.

[21] Candy Mills, “Mixed Couples: Popular Myths about Interracial Couples,” Interrace Magazine (May/June 1992): 20–21; Spike Lee, Jungle Fever (Universal City: Universal City Studios, 1991).

[22] William W. July, II, “The Ten Biggest Myths about Black Sexuality,” Upscale (May 1995): 44–47. See also Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Joseph R. Washington, Marriage in Black and White (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South, Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930.

[23] July, 45.

[24] Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 33–35.

[25] Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York: Dell, 1964), 167.

[26] Cleaver, 150–53.

[27] Richard Herrnstein, and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press,1994); and Lawrence R. Tenzer, “Is There a Sexual Difference?” in A Completely New Look at Interracial Sexuality: Public Opinion and Select Commentaries (Manahawkin, NJ: Scholars' Publishing House, 1990), 91.

• [28] A current manifestation of this conflicted public discourse runs through a TV ad for Hanes's briefs. In a thoughtful critique of the racist and sexual overtones of the ad, Rob Walker describes it well:

  • • The scene is a locker room, where four guys are yakking away in their white briefs. They spy [Michael] Jordan. He's fully clothed but unpacking his gym pack—and pulling out a snazzy pair of red Hanes underwear. The four guys fall silent and stare at possibly the greatest basketball player of all time and his undergarment of choice; several of them look down and seem to be contemplating some kind of…inadequacy. Cut to the same locker room, at some unspecified point in the immediate future. All four guys are now wearing the red underwear. Just like Mike. Just then their idol walks in again, and the group looks over with cocky glances. But Jordan pulls from his bag…a polka-dotted pair of Hanes. The others look chagrined and in various ways seem to be trying to hide their outdated undies. One (the only black member of the group; the others are all white), actually crosses his hands over his crotch. Jordan struts out, and as the Hanes logo appears on screen, he comments, “Hey, as long as they're Hanes.”

• In this ad, the phallocentric humor is contingent on an understanding of (though not necessarily belief in or adherence to) the myth of the black penis. For a thoughtful critique, see Rob Walker, “Michael Jordan's Brief for Hanes” in Ad Report Card: Advertising Deconstructed, at wysiwyg://3//http://slate.msn.com/?id+2067057. 11 September 2003.

[29] Cleaver, 171.

[30] Keith Sweat, “I'm Not Ready,” on Still in the Game, Beverley Hills: Elektra Entertainment Group, 1998, 62262-2. This mythic never-ending sexual performance of black men characterizes many hip hop tunes: Notorious B.I.G., “Nasty Boy,” on Life After Death, New York: Bad Boy Records, 1997, 78612-73011-2; Montell Jordan, “Let's Ride” on Let's Ride, New Def Jam Records, 1998, 314536987Z; LL Cool J., “Doin' It,” on All World, New York: Def Jam Records, 1996, 3145B4125-2; 2 Live Crew, “D.K. Almighty,” on As Nasty as They Wanna Be, Miami: Lil' Joe Records, 1989, XR101; Juvenile, “Back that Azz Up” on 400 Degreez, New York: Cash Money Records, 1998, UD 53162 (RE-1); Shaggy, “Luv Me, Luv Me” (featuring Janet Jackson) on How Stellar Got her Groove Back, Los Angelos: Slyte Tyme Records, 1998, MCAD-11806; Ginuwine, “All Nite/All Day” on 100% Ginuwine, New York: Sony Music, 1999, BK69598; Ginuwine, “So Anxious” on 100% Ginuwine, New York: Sony Music, 1999, BK69598.

[31] Keith Sweat, “Nobody,” on Keith Sweat, Beverley Hills, CA: Elektra Entertainment Group, 1998, 61707-2.

[32] McLean Greaves, “The Penis Thing,” Essence (November 1996): 90.

[33] Cleaver.

[34] Don Spears, In Search of Good Pussy, Living without Love: The Real Truth about Men and Their Relationships (New Orleans, LA: Don Spears, 1991), 159.

[35] Advertisement for “The 1959 Barbie Bride-To-Be,” Parade Magazine (10 February 1991), 10.

[36] Advertisement for the “Limelight Barbie,” Essence (March 1997), 149.

[37] George C. Wolfe, The Colored Museum (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1985).

[38] James Rado and Gerome Ragni, Hair: The American Tribal-Love Rock Musical (New York: Tams-Witmark Music Library, 1968).

[39] Ntozake Shange, Spell #7 in Three Pieces (New York: Penguin, 1982), 48.

[40] Ice Cube, “Horny Lil' Devil” on Death Certificate, Los Angeles: Priority Records, 1991, 4XL57155.

[41] Quoted in Rachel Blakely, “Dating White, When Sisters Go There” Essence (July 1999): 90–92; 148–49; 151–52.

[42] Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1973), 163.

[43] Ice Cube “Horny Lil' Devil.”

[44] Rosie Milligan, Satisfying the Black Woman Sexually (Ingelwood, CA: Professional Business Consultants, 1990), 7.

[45] bell hooks, “Continued Devaluation of Black Womanhood” in Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press,1981), 55.

[46] Zoal Maseko, “The Life and Times of Sara Baartman: ‘The Hottentot Venus’” (New York: First Run/ Icarus Films 1999) 1. http://www.frif.com/new99/hottento.html. See also Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus (New York: Theatre Communication Group, 1990) based on the life of Sara Baartman.

[47] Cleaver, 168–69.

[48] “The Interracial Dating Game: White Women Who Claim They Can Teach Black Women How to Love a Black Man,” Geraldo (15 June 1994), transcript, 6–7.

[49] Hare, 37.

[50] Cleaver.

[51] Ed Burley, prod., The Politics of Love: In Black and White in African/ American Perspectives, 1994–95 (San Francisco: Resolution Incorporated/ California Newsreel, 1993), 10.

[52] bell hooks, “Continued Devaluation of Black Womanhood” in Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press,1981), 63–64.

[53] Audrey Edwards, “Black and White Women: What Still Divides Us,” Ladies Home Journal (March 1998): 162.

[54] Brenda Wilson, Sex in America, Final Installment, Washington, DC: National Public Radio (January 1995).

[55] Dennis Rodman with Tim Keown, Bad as I Wanna Be (New York: Delacorte, Press, 1996), 157–58.

[56] bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 23.

[57] Wilson.

[58] LeRoi Jones, Dutchman. Contemporary Black Drama from A Raisin in the Sun to No Place to be Somebody, ed. Clinton F. Oliver (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1971), 223.

[59] Natalie Merchant, 10,000 Maniacs. “Jubilee” in Blind Man's Zoo (Los Angeles, CA: Elektra Entertainment, 1989), 9–60815–2.