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A right to family privacy is considered a cornerstone of American life, and yet access to it is apportioned by race. Our notion of the "racialization of privacy" refers to the phenomenon that family privacy, including the freedom to create a family uninhibited by law, pressure, and custom, is delimited by race. Building upon racial formation theory, this article examines three examples: the Native American boarding school system (1870s to 1970s), eugenic laws and practices (early/mid 1900s), and contemporary deportation. Analysis reveals that state-sponsored limitations on family privacy is a racial project that shapes the racial state. Performing an ideological genealogy with our cases, this article makes three contributions: it illustrates how the state leverages policies affecting families to define national belonging; it reveals how access to family privacy is patterned by race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and national origin; and it distills how Whiteness and a national racial hierarchy are socially constructed and maintained over time. With the racialization of privacy, we identify how the state seeks to reproduce institutionalized White supremacy and the effects this has on families. We argue that families are the linchpin in state-sponsored racial projects that construct the nation and that the racialization of privacy, as a form of inequality, is a defining characteristic of the color-line.

Reflexively analyzing interactions between myself (young adult woman) and 150 adult research participants, I explore how interviewees responded to the interviewer's perceived age in combination with other social identity categories. Addressing a gap in scholarship on adult-adult interview interactions, this article examines how age gradations, in combination with other axes of similarity or difference, affect researcher-interviewee rapport and data acquisition. Racial similarity, regardless of age, unlocked access to the topic of race/ethnicity. Age intersected with gender such that women within a decade of the woman interviewer's age assumed similarity and were communicative. In interviews with similarly-aged heterosexual men, awareness of sexuality inhibited answers around intimacy. With older interviewees, gender similarity bridged the age chasm with women. In contrast, age and gender difference inspired older men to act paternalistically and give unsolicited advice. Even among adults, interviewees' classification of the interviewer's age contours the interactional dynamic, impacts data acquisition, and reproduces social distinctions.

Drawing from 89 in-depth interviews with Latinos, this article asks how Latinos perceive their relationship to U.S. mainstream society. As regional location matters to racial identity, this comparative study focuses on field sites in California and Kansas—locations with different proportions of Latinos—to investigate how regional dynamics are embedded in racial meaning-making. Showing a region, race, and class intersection, Californians who were poor or working-class in their youth use social distancing strategies and “reactive Americanization” to avoid stereotypes fueled by a dense Latino population. By contrast, most Latino Kansans leave racism undetected, the smaller Latino population in Kansas deflating negative group stereotypes. Region also influences ideas about the mainstream: Californians pointed to local racial heterogeneity to argue for a multiracial mainstream, whereas most Kansans did not make that argument. Regional processes of class-inflected racialization are a contextual factor that shapes Latinos’ sense of mainstream inclusion and their incorporation trajectories.

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