Interracial Dating: Grudgingly Heading Toward Acceptance

by Latoya Peterson

This is my second contribution to the interracial dating series. I originally wasn’t going to contribute after the intro post as my experience in this area is extremely limited. But, since we aren’t having the conversations I want to have, I’ll take a crack at it. I’m going to come off as a jerk, and I’m okay with this. Feel free to pose any questions you like in the comments, but I am going to ask that you refrain from making assumptions about my friends. If you want to know something, ask. – LDP

My best friend dates white girls.

It’s still painful for me to type that. Just the words, staring me in the face on the screen is like me pouring salt on a five year old wound. How the hell did that even happen?

Things weren’t always this way. Back in high school, I started kicking it with the guy who would eventually become best male friend (hereafter referred to as Bestboy). At the time, we bonded over a mutual love of reading, rock music, and dying our hair ridiculous colors normally only found in packs of Kool-aid. Bestboy was busy exploring his identity as a burgeoning black intellectual with a skateboard and back then his common refrain when it came to relations with the opposite sex was that he “dated the rainbow.” He found my insistence on dating within the race puzzling, I found his dating outside of it equally strange. But, as adolescents are wont to do, these minor disagreements were laid aside in favor of discussing more pressing matters like how many people could fit into a Honda Hatchback on the way home from HFStival.

Time passed, we graduated, and me and Bestboy kept in touch. Our hobbies grew in the same direction and we reunited around mutual adoration of art and anime. There was only one thing that became a quiet little undertone to many of our conversations. Over the last few years, the “rainbow” Bestboy spoke of had faded into one color: white.

Now, at this point, many of you may be wondering why I care about these things at all. Why do I care who my best friend dates? What does it matter the race of his partner as long as he is happy?

In a perfect world, these things wouldn’t matter. Love would just be love.

But the world isn’t perfect and these things do matter.

Love doesn’t occur in a vacuum.

Now, Bestboy still often repeats that he dates the rainbow – until I point out that the last three serious girlfriends over the last five years have all been white. And that most of the women he tries to pick up at bars are white. And most of the women he finds attractive and approaches are white. Specifically, tall, thin, and some variation of blond.

He’ll then point out some random three-night stand as proof that he still does and I’ll point out that his dating habits go beyond the paper bag test – these women could pass the manilla folder test. And since my friend is deeper in tone than I, I tend to look at him skeptically.

At this point, we have a low simmering feud on our hands.

Now, I have never been one to comment on the nature of other people’s interracial relationships. First of all, it’s just rude. I’ve often cringed in horror when I overhead someone suck their teeth at the site of a black man strolling around with a white woman. After all, generally speaking we do not know that nature of someone’s relationship from a quick glance. All that is revealed there are pre-existing stereotypes. So, unless a man is walking around with a tee-shirt reading “Just white girls for me, thanks!” we are not privy to what happened with this particular situation or how they hooked up.

But with this friend, I do know the history. I’ve been there. And as he frequently asks for dating advice, I frequently comment.*

As time passes, our discussions of interracial dating started to have a bit of an edge to them. Bestboy openly admires my relationship with my boyfriend, and I have to choke back a cutting response about black love being sweetest. After his most recent breakup, I found myself seriously considering my positions. It was a train wreck of a situation in which he found that his latest white girl was a closet racist after she made a “those people” remark after attending one of his family functions, which spiraled into a three week long fight about race, sex, and class ultimately ending in their demise. Boyfriend and I sat on the bed, listening to the whole sorrid tale before commenting.

“Stop dating white girls,” Boyfriend said, and I nodded in agreement.

A day or so after that, we were at brunch when he started eyeing the willowy blond waitress.

“She’s cute,” said Bestboy.

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