On Interracial Dating – The South Asian Panel (1 of 3)

Welcome to the South Asian Panel on Interracial Dating.

Our panelists are:

RB, long time reader and friend of the blog; Anna John, Sepia Mutineer and friend of the blog; Honey Mae, friend of the blog; Lisa Factora-Borchers, blogger at My Ecdysis, Neesha Meminger, YA Author and occasional contributor; Harbeer, Racialicious reader and friend of a friend of the blog; and Rohin Guha, author of Relief Work and a blogger.

What types of messages did you receive about interracial relationships growing up?

Rohin: Well, it depends.

For heterosexual interracial relationships, there really were no messages. And that is probably for the best. When I was younger, I’m sure there was probably the expectation that I would date and ultimately marry someone who was not only Indian, but also Bengali too. But as I grew older and my interests diverged from those of friends I knew through cultural circles, it became more realistic to expect otherwise. I grew up around writers, musicians, and artists. This meant many of my friends simply weren’t Indian.

I also noticed that older members of my generation were then beginning to date and marry non-Indians. And their parents frequently appeared welcoming. I feel like there was a tacit agreement: My family and our relatives settled in a land where predicating the terms of marriage on a single race could’ve literally spawned a generation of spinsters. With a little time, many learned to curb their expectations.

But then I came out, so the stakes the changed. The more trying part became tackling the construct of interracial same-sex relationship. Nobody in my family spoke about it because nobody knew how to talk about it. There just too much “otherness.” While a heterosexual interracial relationship isn’t exactly the stuff of heartbreaking scandal, a homosexual interracial relationship apparently was.

RB (28-years old, South Asian American, Male Racialicious Reader): It wasn’t really something that was discussed much in our house, or dating generally. There was always the unspoken preference for one of “our people”, but what that meant exactly would be difficult to pinpoint. My parents are both South Indian, but speak different languages. Both sets of grandparents eloped and married out of their communities. So finding someone who has exactly the same background as myself would be fairly difficult to begin with.

With that being said, my parents never explicitly told me not to date any particular racial group. Our family doesn’t subscribe to some of the more antiquated notions like color prejudice so black or white amounted to basically the same thing. Interestingly, they seem to think North Indians are basically just as foreign as other Asian countries. Mostly it was emphasized to me that education, character and family background are far more important than someone’s ethnicity.

Anna: “Don’t even think about it.” I grew up in a very strict, Orthodox family; my parents were Malayalee/South Indian immigrants. Interracial relationships were forbidden, disrespectful, ungrateful and in the case of one of my cousins who married “out”, a sure-fire way to get disowned. My father railed for days about his disobedient, immoral niece. The subtext of his rage was clear: “this better not be you in a few years”.

Honey: I grew up in the Philippines. At the time, there seemed to be this understanding that interracial relationships had a certain kind of status, depending on the race of the spouse.

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