“It Is Likely a White Gene”: Racial Voyeurism and Consumption of Black Mothers and “White” Babies in Online News Media

Abstract

Focusing on media reports of black women who give birth to “white” children, this study asks: What can we learn about popular understandings of race from the fascination with births of “white” babies born to black mothers? What racial discourses guide how such stories are produced and consumed online? We conducted a critical discourse analysis of media coverage and online comments about two contemporary cases. We found that three race-based assumptions underlie and are reinforced by these narratives. We argue that these births generate racial voyeurism because they violate deeply held beliefs about racial identity and the reproduction of race.

Keywords

intersectionality white supremacy media racial voyeurism race science

Personal Reflexive Statement

As black women, we are acutely aware of the continuing legacy of disparaging representations of black women’s bodies and the damaging impact on ourselves, our families, and our communities. We write this paper not out of a misguided notion that it is possible to “objectively” study these racist practices, but rather in order to reveal subjugated knowledges that contest them. The media often insist that love is the best way to deal with hatred. They frequently point to interracial marriages and mixed-race children to illustrate the possibilities of fighting racism with interracial intimacy. However, we also noticed that media stories about interracial procreation tend to obfuscate racial inequality while staying true to dominant discourses about the biological origins of racial hierarchies. We were moved to write a piece that elucidates this contradiction in hopes that better understanding both media literacy and new racial sciences will enrich scholarship on racialized bodies in the media and provide new tools for resisting devaluing ideologies about black women.

Scholars have consistently found that anti-blackness is a central project of the mass media. Racist representations of black people remain prevalent in television and film (Campbell 2016; Feagin 2010; Littlefield 2008). Still, there is a gap in the literature regarding why racialized stories remain so popular among consumers. In particular, media consumers vociferously seek coverage of interracial, transracial, and racially mixed families online. For instance, when reality star Kylie Jenner’s baby did not look brown enough to be fathered by black rapper Travis Scott, online news media launched articles and videos questioning the paternity of the child. Speculation centered on the baby’s light skin color and eye shape; there were claims that the true father was Jenner’s Asian bodyguard because the baby’s features appeared more “Asian” than conventional notions of what “black” should look like. As this example illustrates, societal fixation on race and reproduction is localized in biology and phenotype, and the stories reflecting this fixation are broadly disseminated online. Understudied aspects of racialized media include examining how ideas about racial reproduction are constructed and reified online. While many studies offer examples of racist representation, few consider how race is considered a natural by-product of birth, an inheritance that is evidenced through physical features.

This study examines media reports of black women who give birth to the so-called white babies—children who are racialized as white based on phenotypic features such as skin, hair, and eye color. Drawing on critical race theory’s frame of color blindness and black feminism’s intersectionality theory, we analyze how both producers and consumers of these stories rely on several core tenets of white supremacy to evaluate black women and their children. This study asks: What can we learn about popular understandings of race from the public’s fascination with media coverage surrounding “white” babies born to black mothers? Further, what racial discourses guide how such stories are produced and consumed online?

To answer these questions, we conducted a textual and discourse analysis of two cases of black women giving birth to babies identified as white, as well as the commentary responses from consumers.¹ We found that biological conceptions of race, color-blind discourses, and celebrating whiteness are the primary frames through which these stories are both produced and consumed. More specifically, we found that three race-based assumptions underlie and are reinforced by sensationalized media reports of black mothers and their so-called white children. First, race is believed to be a biological trait that is “in the blood” or genetic rather than a constructed sociopolitical category. Thus, a baby’s racial identity is presumed to be a natural by-product of the parents. Second, phenotypic features determine race. A baby with fair skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair is therefore racialized as white. The third assumption—which contradicts the second assumption in the cases we studied—asserts black people cannot produce whiteness. Long-held anti-black thinking about racial heritage claims that, because blackness is opposite and inferior to whiteness, black people are incapable of bearing white children.

We argue that media coverage of “miraculous” births of white children to black mothers generates racial voyeurism among consumers because these births contradict deeply held beliefs about racial classification, identity, and heritage. Such stories entice and disturb consumers because these seemingly mismatched families violate the tenet that race is a natural product of procreation. Thus, our study goes beyond examining racial representation in the media to illuminate how both media and consumers promote fictive, biological concepts of race that support white supremacy.

This study draws on scholarship that articulates a social constructionist approach to race to elucidate white supremacist logics embedded in racialized media. Critical race theorists have refuted the long-standing biological concept of race, arguing instead that race is a social category created and used to classify and govern people for the advantage of whites and at the expense of racialized or nonwhite groups (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Delgado and Stefancic 2012; Kendi 2016; Omi and Winant 2015). This view contends that the United States operates as a racial caste system which routinely denigrates black and brown bodies while privileging white bodies and whiteness. Further, whites have responded to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement with a color-blind ideology that claims racism no longer impedes minority progress (Bonilla-Silva 2014; Brown et al. 2003; Obasogie 2013; Taylor 2016).

The New Race Science

Critical race scholars have broken new ground by investigating how the biological understanding of race is being revived in multiple domains of public life. Roberts demonstrates the emergence of a “new race science” interested in gene-based racial differences, which relies on global DNA databases and statistical analyses to treat race as a genetic grouping. Genomic scientists use “gene frequencies among geographic populations as a more objective, scientific and politically palatable alternative to race, an approach that tends to repackage race as a genetic category rather than replace it” (Roberts 2011:202). Roberts asserts that this is a part of a larger biopolitical agenda that, by explaining race as natural, inherited, and fixed, provides a biological explanation for persistent racial inequality in a supposedly postracial society.

Global White Supremacy

Critical race scholars are also calling for studies of white supremacy to move beyond the borders of the U.S. racial order to show its global implications (Allen 2001; Bashi 2004; Macedo and Gounari 2006). As global empires, the United States and the United Kingdom share many of the same features of white supremacy, particularly in the vulnerability and repressed mobility of its black populations (Small 2018). Scholars of race in the United Kingdom show that similar white supremacist structures pervade British media (Andreassen 2017; Gillborn 2006; Kapoor 2013). Digital discourses in the United Kingdom and the United States reflect shared histories of racism and contemporary “postracial” denials (Anderson 2018:116). This study will examine racial discourses and rhetoric that extend white supremacy from a U.S. centric white–black paradigm to a global phenomenon in which European and American racial understandings cooperate.

Racial Voyeurism

The theory of racial voyeurism is ideal to analyze how contradictory postracial logics work to fuel interest in producing and consuming racialized media stories. Racial voyeurism refers to the surveillance and display of racialized bodies, especially black bodies. In this practice, race is treated as a spectacle, often at the expense of black agency. Scholars have traced the practice of racial voyeurism to colonial discourses that produced fictive truths about the essential inferiority of brown and black bodies (Hobson 2005; Lindfors 1999). These racial spectacles include the capture and exhibition of Saartjie Baartman’s body parts in 1810, widely known as the Hottentot Venus, public lynchings of black people witnessed by thousands of white onlookers in the 20th century, and worldwide slave auctions. Scholars have also used racial voyeurism as a global phenomenon to explain white people’s motivation for interactions with people of color today. Contemporary examples include white fascination with the highly publicized O. J. Simpson murder trial, consumption of rap, interest in minority pornography, and participation in “ghetto” tours (Appiah 2018; Bossenger 2017; Duffett 2013; Hartnell 2009).

The media play a key role in racial voyeurism by disseminating racial spectacles as objective fact while reinforcing stereotypical images of minorities. Yolande Daniels (2000) explains that negative media images of black life are so rife with “racial spectacle” that individual negative acts are thought to be proof of broad, racial failure. For example, the disproportionate portrayal of black crime in the news media relies on racist discourses about black people’s inherent criminality to attract white viewers’ racial voyeurism (Dixon 2017). hooks’s (1992) concept of “eating the other” illuminates how white embrace of multicultural diversity does little to displace preexisting white supremacist relations or ways of thinking. hooks argues that mass consumption of black culture and bodies represents deeply held white supremacist fantasies to be in contact with the “Other” along with a desire “that…such exploitation can occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo” (p. 367).

Intersectionality

Understanding racial voyeurism from an intersectional perspective helps to explain the production and consumption of sensationalized media stories related to black women and so-called white children. Black feminists developed intersectionality theory to explain how black women experience racialized and gendered discrimination because of their position in a matrix of interlocking systems of domination that differentiates their oppression from that of white women and black men (Collins 2000; Crenshaw 1991). Black feminist scholars have argued that the surveillance and control of the black female body constitute a tradition of racial voyeurism in the United States. From enslavement to modern forms of regulation over black citizens in the criminal justice, child protective services, welfare, education, and health-care systems, surveillance of black citizens is seen as both normative and necessary for the security of other citizens (Hunter 2017; Oeur 2016; Roberts 2012). Because of their marginal status, black women have been deemed entitled to less privacy and protection against surveillance, increasing their likelihood of maltreatment (Roberts 1997; Perry 2011). In addition, Collins (2000) points out that “controlling images” of black women in the mainstream media, such as “welfare queen,” “jezebel,” and “mammy,” deny them access to the entitlements of “true” womanhood and distinctively treat them as “Other” (p. 70). Thus, intersectionality provides a framework not only to examine the consumption and production of racialized media but also to explain how black women as mothers may be targeted for unique forms of disparagement.

We use this intersectional approach to racial voyeurism to analyze how media coverage of white babies born to black mothers employ oppressive understandings of race and reproduction to attract spectators. In this coverage, race is flattened into a one-dimensional identity that does not leave room for complexities, such as accounting for how phenotypes commonly vary in biologically related families or race as a socially constructed category. As consumers of these news stories use the comment section to debate the legitimacy of the stories’ racial logics, paradoxical results emerge. Some commenters are fixated on the phenotype of the child as proof of racial authenticity, while others point to the incompatibility of whiteness and blackness to determine the child’s race. Thus, we show that the racial voyeurism at play in the consumption of these sensational news stories does not disrupt, but rather reinforces, white supremacist logics about racial reproduction.

Method

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

This study employs CDA to investigate the framing and language used by journalists and commenters responding to the online news stories. CDA uses a social constructionist approach which understands that dominant discourses are direct reflections of powerful institutions in society (van Dijk 1993). For this study, we used the approach of textual analysis, identifying ideologies that reinforce and naturalize white supremacist logics about biological race and cultural stereotypes. We sought specific key words and phrases that aligned with broad assumptions about race and biology, underscoring which race-based assumptions were embedded in the text.

Data

We focus on two case studies of the so-called white babies born to black mothers rather than a random sample of numerous stories because of the dearth of popular news outlets that permit user commentary. Although numerous online U.S. news outlets published stories about one or both families, comment sections were limited or nonexistent.²

Therefore, to conduct a textual analysis of these cases, we selected two recent news articles that received more than one hundred comments published on the same media outlet—Daily Mail, a popular news site based in the United Kingdom. We randomly sampled 50 comments total from each article for analysis (N = 100).

The Igheboro Family

The first case involves the Igheboro family in the United Kingdom, a black Nigerian immigrant couple who gave birth to a “white” baby girl with blonde hair and blue eyes in 2010 (Johnston 2010). The story calls the birth of their third child “miraculous” because the first two children have dark hair, skin, and eyes like their parents. It devotes significant attention to explaining the baby’s features as possibly resulting from infidelity or albinism. The article received 212 comments before the comment section was closed.

The Howarth Family

The second case involves an interracial black–white couple living in the United Kingdom, the Howarth family (Smith Squire 2017). The mother is black and hails from Nigeria, while her husband is described as “completely white.” The news article, published in 2017, claims the family hit “a million to one odds” by having not just one, but two “white, blue eyed” babies. The mother was featured in similar sensationalized news stories after she gave birth to a “miracle” baby with light skin and light eyes several years earlier. The article received 274 comments before moderators closed the comment section.

While these stories do not focus on U.S. families, we analyzed the rhetoric used in the articles and comments to identify the assumptions about race and procreation that have broadly supported white supremacy in the United States and Europe. The commenters self-disclose their location. A significant number of commenters cited their location as the United States or the United Kingdom.

Findings

Our analysis of the sample found that the media coverage and comments reinforce three key assumptions about the biological reproduction of race: race is a genetic inheritance, phenotypic characteristics determine race, and black people are incapable of producing whiteness.

Throughout both the articles and comments, we also found strong color-blind racist narratives demonizing the discussion of race, as well as controlling images that evoked common stereotypes of black women. The most prevalent comment was about the miraculous beauty of the children, as evidenced by their light skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes.

The Articles’ Racial Logics

Biological race and atavistic white genes

Although the Igheboro parents are both black Nigerians and the Howarth parents are an interracial couple, the babies born to both black women were described as “miracles.” The articles use language that mystifies the birth of the babies while also conflating the race with genetics. In explaining why her daughter had blonde hair and blue eyes, Catherine Howarth quotes a geneticist as saying there must be “white ancestry” in the family’s background: “The only explanation seems to be there must have been a white gene in my family that has remained dormant for years until now. And now it seems to be very dominant.” The geneticist explains further, “it is likely there is a white gene somewhere in the woman’s remote ancestry and due to an evolutionary throwback—known as atavism—this trait has suddenly reappeared.”

The article about Angela Ihegboro describes her “white” daughter in the same terms: “Experts say that, in this extreme case, there would have to be history of white ancestry on both sides.” It quotes a genetics expert who says: “the hair is extremely unusual; even many blonde children don’t have blonde hair like this at birth. This might be a case where there is a lot of genetic mixing, as in Afro-Caribbean populations. But in Nigeria there is little mixing.” These explanations propagate the belief that race is “in the blood” or “genetic,” rather than a sociopolitical construction.

Phenotype determines race, but blackness cannot produce whiteness

In addition, the articles reflect the view that phenotypic features determine race. The journalists’ description of the babies as “white” was based in their physical features. Hence, a baby with fair skin and blonde hair is called white, so a child with darker skin would be deemed mixed or even black. Based on the biological concept of race described above, the authors therefore conclude that white family members who passed down “white genes” bear responsibility for the children’s features. A third racial logic—that black people cannot produce whiteness—reinforces this conclusion. Especially in the explanation of the black Nigerian family, the geneticists are convinced that fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes cannot come from a black woman’s genetic makeup because of the belief that being black means naturally producing dark skin, hair, and eyes, exclusively. In other words, being racially identified as black precludes one from having genes that carry phenotypic diversity.

The Comment Section’s Paradoxical Discourse

“Those children are not white”

The comments on both articles significantly pushed back on the claim that the children born to black women were white, using narratives that reflected racial voyeurism. The public evoked the assumption that blackness is incompatible with whiteness. The most frequent comment in both samples was that the children, regardless of how they looked, were not white (n = 18, n = 14). This conclusion reflected a core belief in the natural reproduction of race and the one-drop rule that a child with a black parent is irrevocably black and barred from white racial purity.

She is Albino. Accept it and do not [sic] try to make money out of her. She is to be loved and praised like all others.

This comment provides an alternative “common sense” view that the child has albinism, which removes pigment from the skin. The second part of the commentary evokes Collins’s notion of controlling images by intimating that the parents are attempting to make money from their child by appearing in the media. This aligns with stereotypes of pathological parenting in the black community by “bad black mothers” (Moss 2016).

2. Did she pick up the wrong baby, is there a white couple somewhere with their baby?

Disbelieving that the child could be born to a black woman, the comment denies the bonds between mother and child based on their differing phenotypes.

3. This is stupid, whilst they are very fair skinned, they still look mixed race. This is not a story, I don’t know why she keeps on appearing in the media, do her or her husband not have a job?

This comment denies that the children can be white while also insinuating that the parents are trying to take advantage of their children because they do not work.

4. I think the milk man may have paid a visit while the husband was away

5. Yeah we heard of black babies from white couples…its called cheating!!!! Lol

These two comments reflect disbelief that a black couple could give birth to a light-skinned child unless the biological father was white. Thus, race is a natural by-product of procreation. The comments also use humor to reinforce stereotypes about black female hypersexuality by alleging that the mother must have cheated on her spouse.

“Blue eyed, blonde haired gift from God”

Both articles describe the physical differences between the black mothers and their fair-skinned children, without accompanying scientific explanations for why children are born with a variety of skin hues. Instead, more attention is paid portraying the children’s physical features as positive. Scholars of race remind us that media typically consider physical features that are associated with whiteness as superior while considering features associated with blackness less attractive (Phoenix 2014; Wilder 2015). Thus, the lighter the hair, skin, and eye color, the closer the child aligns with white supremacist notions of beauty, innocence, and goodness. Despite the reality that the continent of Africa has the greatest genetic diversity, including alleles for phenotype, the articles underscore the beauty and presumed rareness of the children’s fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes.

“Her name means Beauty of God in our language, and we think it suits her so well.”

“And her hair! She looked like a doll.”

“Each time doctors and midwives have all commented on our babies” amazing colouring. People often get confused when they meet me with the children for the first time.

At just three weeks she landed her first modelling job.

The same degree of adulation is reflected in the commenters frequent compliments of the babies’ appearance (n = 11, n = 13). In contrast, commenters pointed to the “African features” as validation that the children could not possibly be white.

5. I could just eat them. Beautiful.

This comment reflects the most common type of compliment, celebration of the babies’ beauty. The writer specifically notes that the child’s beauty is her blonde, curly hair, and her blue eyes, the exact features which supposedly prove the inheritance of white genes.

6. Mixed race children are stunning.

7. The kids look mixed race African to me, not white Anglo-Saxon. Beautiful as they are, this shouldn’t even be an article.

8. She actually looks like their other daughter except has white skin (definite black features). Very good looking family though.

Like many of the comments, these view the children as an exotic and beautiful result of interracial pairings. They reflect the notion that the child is not white because her features are more “African” than “Caucasian,” as well as racialized standards of beauty. Inherent in these comments is the principle that racial purity exists, and despite proximity to whiteness, they are not granted access to whiteness.

All that matters is color blindness

Another important aspect of the articles and commentary is a strong commitment to color-blind narratives. Primarily, race does not matter and is inappropriate subject matter. The way the articles were produced and consumed contributes to an acute cognitive dissonance about the importance of race. Even though the very reason the articles were published with bombastic language like “the only Black woman in the world to give birth to two white children,” the comments emphasized the sentiment that race should have little bearing on the children’s lives. The racial voyeurism of the consumers and their eagerness to comment on the personal lives, genetic ancestry, and physical features of the black women and their babies is activated by their anxiety about color blindness (n = 4, n = 6).

What a lovely story! A beautiful baby with a loving family to welcome her. Skin colour doesn’t matter, you baby could be purple with yellow spots but you would still love it. If we all had different colour babies regularly, surely racism would disappear overnight.

Who cares what colour she is. She is absolutely gorgeous, simple!

Beautiful children, regardless what color their skin is…. They are a perfect mix of mom and dad, love their hair too

All that matters is the children are healthy and happy…enjoy your babies, they are Beautiful. God bless

These comments emphasize the importance of ignoring racial difference. The first comment reflects a commonly heard phrase reported by scholars of color-blind racism: proclamations that humans can be any color, even unrealistic colors, such as “polka dotted,” in order to further remove themselves from the realities of racism. The commenter’s argument that mixed-raced babies will reduce racism automatically is belied by other comments on the very same article.

The next three comments reflect different linguistic rhetorics of racial color blindness and a refusal to acknowledge how race is already playing a significant role in shaping the lives of the children. For instance, both black women report receiving strange reactions from loved ones about their babies. Mrs. Howarth reports her frustration when strangers stop to ask her whether she is the nanny of her baby. The commenters emphasis on the beauty of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed babies is contradicted by their racial anxiety that insists on the denial of “seeing” race.

Discussion

The findings of our study are significant for understanding multiple themes about the production and consumption of racialized media online. News stories about white babies born to black mothers reproduce narratives about race, biology, and spectacle. These narratives were guided by three underlying principles about the meaning of race.

First, the primary claim of the articles and the response of the consumers is that race is a genetic inheritance rather than a sociopolitical construction. Instead of treating these cases as examples of human genetic variation, the media sensationalized the births of light skinned, blue eyed, blonde haired babies as if it were an unheard-of phenomenon. Indeed, several of the commenters reacted strongly to the claim that Howarth is the “only black woman” in the world to give birth to “white” children by sharing a personal anecdote (n = 9). One person even states, “this is not rare. Go on Instagram.” There is an array of websites, Pinterest pages, and Instagram accounts dedicated to multiracial families with pictures of “white” children and black parents. Therefore, the articles are predicated on a false view of humanity that relies on shoddy science to explain the children as being recipients of “white genes.”

The second primary claim undergirding the articles is that phenotype determines race. Therefore, because the babies were born with fair skin, eyes, and hair, they were declared white even though their mothers identify as black. However, in one-third of the sampled comments in both articles, the consumers disputed this claim. The commenters often used terms that support scientific notions of race to validate their claims, like “African features” and “black features.” From the perspective of the consumers, the children did not look white enough to be considered white (n = 3, n = 15).

Finally, the most prevalent theme throughout the two stories was the assertion that “black cannot make white.” According to this view, it is impossible for black women to produce a so-called white child without a “distant white ancestor” or a “white gene.” From comments that declared the babies had “African” features to statements about their lack of “Anglo-Saxon” features, the greatest percentage of comments declared that the children were not white (n = 14, n = 16). There is a significant paradox in the commentary of the spectators: While the articles propagated the narrative that race is both biologically reproduced and determined by phenotypic features, commenters pushed back against describing the babies as “white” because of the core logic that the black race cannot produce the white race. It is this contradiction in stories of white babies born to black mothers that attracts consumers’ racial voyeurism. Finally, commenters applied stereotypical controlling images to the black mothers, implying that they were lazy, unfaithful, and opportunistic. While the focus of the articles was on the incredible births of exceptionally beautiful babies, the mothers were subject to consumer vilification.

Conclusion: Media, Racial Voyeurism, and the New Race Science

In mainstream discussions of race in the United States and the United Kingdom, the “epistemology of ignorance” is in full effect (Sullivan and Tuana 2012): despite the rise of overt white nationalism and racial hate crimes, whites still widely believe that race is a natural inheritance and racism is not a factor in determining one’s life chances (Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism 2017). Further, increasing numbers of whites in the United States and the United Kingdom believe that whiteness is a victimized or subjugated racial status. Although sociological analyses of white supremacy have tended to focus on the United States, these United Kingdom news articles indicate that white supremacy is a global phenomenon that is nuanced but relies on many shared assumptions—biological race concepts, assumptions of white superiority, anti-black stereotypes, and color-blind ideology that dismisses the persistence of institutionalized racism.

The consumer discourses of the two cases we studied reflect the continued popularity of antiquated beliefs about race as well as stereotypes of black women. By defining race as a natural grouping associated with differing genetic predispositions, this science casts race as a cause for racial inequalities rather than as a sociopolitical construction which arranges society unequally. It obscures the reality that white supremacy, not innate racial pathologies, is responsible for black people’s disadvantaged status. Our study shows that scholars should pay greater critical attention to media stories that promote false and dangerous assumptions about the biological procreation of race—assumptions that continue to support white supremacy in a color-blind era.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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