Existing research on race relations between racial/ethnic groups in the United States highlights how personal contact can lead to increased harmony or conflict between groups and may reduce intergroup prejudice. This study engages this literature and draws from more than 20 months of ethnography and 66 interviews in a Spanish/English dual-language school in Los Angeles to qualitatively examine Latino-white relations in diverse settings. Interactions between Latino and white adults of varying class statuses are characterized by politeness and civility, yet parents segregate within the school and rarely form meaningful cross-racial relationships that transcend the campus. Despite regular interpersonal contact, a shared goal of bilingualism, and shared class status for some, divisions between Latino and white parents persist, and interactions between them are characterized by what the author terms symbolic integration. Symbolic integration refers to polite, but surface-level, interactions between racial/ethnic groups that are enjoyable, voluntary, and additive. This type of integration nuances our understanding of race relations and elucidates how sustained regular contact and the absence of negative racial stereotypes do not ensure lessened racial stratification between racial/ethnic groups.

Research suggests education is a strong predictor of interracial relationships yet few studies have examined the processes that inform partner preferences among the highly educated. We address romantic partner preferences via interviews with college-educated Latinas in the western United States. Among our findings, respondents stated a strong preference for dating "in" versus dating "out," even if it meant dating Latinos with less education, which we term dating "down." These preferences were shaped by limited substantive opportunities to date college-educated Latinos and a desire to find partners who shared their cultural values and experiences. The findings also point to racialized constraints Latinas experience in predominantly white spaces that limit prospects to date non-Latinos, especially whites. Examining how highly educated Latinas rationalize partner preferences helps us understand the mechanisms at play in romantic relationship formation and elucidates Latinas' agency in negotiating their idealized preferences in contexts where the pool of highly educated Latinos is small.

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The racial stratification literature is rife with examples of how color-blindness has become a dominant ideology among Whites to deny the continuing significance of race at work, school, and in everyday life. Less understood are the racial ideologies deployed by people of color. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews, we examine how college-educated Latinas acknowledge or deny the significance of race and racial hierarchies in decisions about whom to date. We find Latinas who stated an openness to dating men of all racial/ethnic backgrounds both acknowledged racism and its impact on their own lives and also held clear racial preferences. Additionally, participants used negative racial tropes about Black and Asian men to exclude them as romantic partners while also self-racializing to explain White men’s seeming reluctance to date them. To explain our findings, we apply the concept racial blind spots to show how participants simultaneously dismissed and drew upon color-blind ideology to justify patterns of racial exclusion. As we argue, racial blind spots explain how members of minoritized groups internalize aspects of the dominant racial ideology, involuntarily upholding the very system that oppresses them.