Polyamory in Black: A Companion Justification for Minimal Marriage

Abstract

A number of Black writers have cast Black marriage in a state of emergency – Black folks are not getting (or staying) married like they used to. Yet in seeking to address the Black marriage problem many have left marriage's ‘monogamous‐only’ condition unexamined. In this article, I take a different approach. I draw on a long‐standing prevalence of de facto non‐monogamy among those marked Black and argue that the numerical constraint making marriage between two people violates equal treatment. To make the case, I show how anti‐non‐monogamy attitudes have been racialized in ways that are expressive of anti‐Blackness. In my view, the effects of this racialization include ongoing and disproportionate impacts on an already burdened group – Black polyamorists. A failure to reform the monogamous‐only condition of marriage tacitly endorses anti‐non‐monogamous attitudes of the past where Black intimate relationships were thought inferior and therefore deserving of an inferior social standing. Finally, I look to an account of minimal marriage as a site of possibility for establishing a marriage institution that is more just in relation to equal treatment and a site of repair for racialized non‐monogamists whose historical denial to accessing marriage has had the effect of accumulated social and political disadvantage.