From “miscegenophobia” to the “rainbow”?: disclosure and concealment in selected UJ students’ interracial romantic relationships

D.Litt. et Phil. (Fundamental Communication Theories)Abstract: Despite romantic attachments being a pervasive and a universally shared pursuit it is surprising that there remain many unanswered questions about love and romance in Africa. The situation is even more complex in South Africa given the history and legacy of apartheid which made societal division along racial lines a norm, limiting intimate relations between the racial groupings. When we study interracial communication from the vantage point of romantic relationships, a clearer understanding of the extent to which progress has been made in interpersonal communication in post-apartheid emerges. As opposed to investigating the attitudes of society in general, I thought it more fruitful to investigate the attitudes of the friends and family of interracial couples from the perspective of couples themselves. The dialectic frameworks of Impression Management and Communication Privacy Management offered nuanced lenses from which to investigate the surveillance dimension in interracial romantic relationships in post-apartheid South Africa. Through qualitative in depth interviews, I set out to investigate how and why interracial couples experience tensions between expressing intimacy in privacy and having to disclose their relationship to friends and family. Findings suggest that although couples often negotiated rules to regulate privacy about their relationship, these rules were enacted through various communicative regimes and strategies. Because disclosing to friends about the interracial romantic relationship was less complicated, the privacy and disclosure tension as well as impression management strategies that followed manifested itself more with family. Partners’ acute awareness of the attitudes that their friends and family hold toward those of a different race meant that disclosing the relationship to the family was often seen as the next step in taking the relationship further. Thus managing disclosure and concealment patterns about the romantic relationship was a way of living with the stigma of the forbidden. Managing disclosure and concealment of the status of interracial romantic relationships cannot simply be associated with just the desire to nurture a newly formed romantic relationship. Race consciousness is an inexorable part of the management regime of interracial romantic relationships..