Taja Lindley is a full-spectrum doula, performing and tactile visual artist, and reproductive justice activist addressing the challenges of women of color through creativity, personal transformation and entrepreneurship. She is the founder of Colored Girls Hustle, an initiative that uses art as a tool to create affirming and celebratory images, messages and adornment for, about and by women of color. You can find her on facebook, twitter, tumblr and Etsy.

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid

I saw Shame a couple of weeks ago with my homie Sarah Jaffe…and, on the real, I wanted to check out the flick because I wanted to see Michael Fassbender’s full frontal nudity. (And, considering how quick the box-office attendant was asking for photo IDs for this NC-17 flick, I guess quite a few under-17 others were trying to see the younger Magneto’s full frontal nudity, too.)

MAJOR SPOILER ALERT after the jump.

Synopsis: Fassbender plays Brandon, a white, handsome, successful office-working something-or-other (the film never states what he does for a living or where he works) living the upscale–and rather white–NYC life.  Brandon also has a sexual addiction, which McQueen frames as Brandon lacking any emotional connections and/or the ability to go about forming healthy ones–even with his own sister–in tandem with a series of sexual behaviors: Brandon inviting and paying female sex workers of various races and ethnicities; constantly masturbating (you first see him jerking off in his shower, and later he’s shown doing it in his office bathroom; and his sister catches him jerking off in a toilet); getting paranoid about the IT department talking about his hard drive, only to have his boss call him into the office about the porn found on it (though the boss blames Brandon’s intern for it, not Brandon); hooking up with a white woman at a bar that his married boss initially tried to pick up; his picking up another white woman at a random bar and, after some consensual fingering, puts his fingers under her white boyfriend’s nose to sniff (which leads to the boyfriend assaulting Brandon); after the assault, Brandon following a racially ambiguous male sex worker into the backroom of a gay bar, where he kisses the sex worker and gets a blowjob; participating in a threesome with two female sex workers, portrayed by white burlesquer DeeDee Luxe and Asian burlesque star Calamity Chang (both links NSFW).

When Brandon attempts to form a healthy romantic connection–after his sister busts him masturbating into the toilet–he throws out his massive porn collection and a couple of sex toys and approaches Marianne (American Violet‘s Nicole Beharie), who works at his office. She is one of the few Black people (let alone people of color) at the firm. They go on a date:

Then Brandon invites Marianne for an afternoon tryst at a hotel. Hepped up on a line of cocaine and the sheer excitement at this opportunity to prove he’s conquered his sexual addiction by himself, Marianne and he engage in some foreplay, only for Brandon not be able to get erect. Ashamed, he sends Marianne away and later has penetrative sex with a sex worker, a white woman, in the same room.

All of this is to give context to this radio interview excerpt between film critic Elvis Mitchell and McQueen. Towards the end of the interview, McQueen says this about casting Beharie as Brandon’s love interest (unfortunately, KCRW doesn’t have a full transcript of the interview):

Elvis Mitchell: I found interesting, too…there are women in the film and the way you sort of develop what the women do from Brandon. They really are fleshly in a way that he is not. I mean, they’re sort of in touch with their bodies in terms of living in the world in a way he is not: both his sister and the woman he courts at the office want to use their bodies for a different thing than he does.

Steve McQueen: …of course, Marianne–she, of course, is played by Nicole Beharie–I like Marianne. She’s sort of willing to try to make something out of something, which may not be a good thing to do. But she wants to take a chance.

EM: She’s also the grown-up in the movie. She represents looking for a future, which neither Brandon or Sissy are capable of doing. They’re both about the immediate. I felt it was interesting to make the one African American woman in the movie, the one person of color, [as] the person looking for a future rather than trying to find a momentary satisfaction. Even [Brandon's] boss is like that–a person who wants to be immediately gratified.

SM: That’s interesting. [Laughs] I mean, other people saying to me when I came to America and I wanted to cast [Beharie]. Because when I came to research the movie, of all the people but for this one guy–I think he was from somewhere in South America–were white who were dealing with sex addiction. I suppose it’s a different kind of situation, I’d imagine, where you’d find one kind of ethnicity. But I found it fascinating.

But when it came to the workplace it was as you see it. It was one Black person. It was like, “Wow, that’s kind of interesting.” And this girl could be Brandon’s girlfriend. But what was interesting was there was all kinds of  objections about this, of saying, “Oh, that wouldn’t happen there. That wouldn’t exist.” I said, “What, I don’t exist?” It was a very odd thing, having these conversations about having a love interest that was a Black woman with Brandon. It was interesting, that. It was fascinating, that.

But then, what also fascinates me is you have a lot of white American filmmakers who never cast a Black person in their movies and they made quite a few movies. How can you avoid that? That’s kind of weird. It’s like walking around with blindfolds on. How can you make movies in this country–and consistently make movies–and not cast Black characters in the main leads? I mean, I made two movies–and they’re art films–and the feature film are 90 percent white and my art films are 90 percent Black. There’s no distinguishing the two; it’s just one thing–it’s not “art” or “film.” That’s how it is.

EM: I waited fifty years for someone to say that.

What Sarah and I chatted about over post-movie brunch is that we really appreciated McQueen’s decision to cast Beharie as Brandon’s love interest. As Mitchell observes, Marianne is an adult, a woman with her own relationship loose ends (she tells Brandon she’s separated, not divorced) and healthy sexual curiosity and appetite (she agrees to the tryst; she eagerly and sensuously kiss Brandon back as they’re hiding behind a patterned glass partition at the office). Brandon knows, regardless of his condition, he has to come correct with Marianne; his frozen face as he watches her through the window of the restaurant of their first date displays his terror. Even in the above clip, Marianne holds her own flirting with Brandon. More importantly, Marianne and Brandon are drawn to each other in the film because they’re interested in each other, not as a Very Special Episode of Interracial Dating in America. Unfortunately, their relationship is a very short one due to Brandon’s addiction — and you never see Marianne again after she leaves the hotel.

Yet, Sarah and I gave gasface to McQueen framing Brandon having sex with another man and a three-way to signify Brandon “hitting rock bottom.” Why, we rhetorically asked, does homosexuality and consensual multiple partners — neither of which are really respected in US society — have to be the film’s shorthand for “sexual depravity”? McQueen could have shown Brandon’s nadir when the boyfriend assaulted him. To show Brandon engaged with the partners as a sign his utter debasement smells of homophobia and anti-polyamory.

Is Shame worth seeing? If the frisson of finally seeing an NC-17 film (“Woohoo! Grown-ass flick!”) making it to your movie theater is worth the price of admission, then … well, maybe. But, like all frissons, it won’t last long. If you want to see an interracial couple that’s a couple and not a Big Social Statement a la Something New, then…well, maybe. The relationship is short-lived. But just to see Michael Fassbender’s penis? You’ll be wildly disappointed because you’re not going to see it for very long at all.

H/t to Shadow and Act

Photo credit: Filmofilia

MTV ruined my mom’s hope for the Good Black Life for me, she said: Black husband, Black children, Black neighborhood. All because of the pretty white boys dancing and singing before my eyes as my hormones coursed through my adolescent body.

She was right…sort of.

I’ve had lovers of various hues in my life, but my long-term partners were white—including my ex-husband. I just knew that my love life would not be monoracial. Duran Duran and Adam Ant simply sealed that fate.

When I tried to find advice to help guide me on that path—my mom certainly didn’t and couldn’t help, since she dated and married only Black men—I read Essence. No help there:  while I was dating the rainbow, Essence touted various admonitions on how to achieve the Good Black Life, including the Kente cloth-themed wedding. The advice and articles about interracial dating treated those relationships as, at best, aberrations.

Cosmo? Glamour? Beyond some “general” advice on “how to catch a man,” it was some variation of planning romantic evenings and Kegel exercises.

The first publications about interracial relationships—this was the Multiculti Late 80s and 90s–treated them as cure-alls for personal and institutional racism. I knew better than that, so that literature didn’t quite interest me. And I walked the other way — more like ran across the street and screamed down the alley — when Shahrazad Ali’s pro-intimate partner violence tome Blackman’s Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman became the dating manual and coffeeklatch topic du jour for Black women in the US. Nope, definitely not for me.

When I finally discovered Racialicious a few years ago, I finally found someplace that talked about dating and race, especially interracial dating, that wasn’t full of foolishness. About a couple of years the R ran a post about the racial implications–and racist assumptions–of dating-advice books. And we did a breakdown of how race and racism worked in the online-dating world. And, of course, we ran a series on interracial dating as a response to Essence trying to position them as the Next Cure-All for the Black Woman’s Marriage Crisis.

My biggest takeaway from all of this is—surprise, surprise—the media and some people in our communities deeply participate in the Dating Economics of Not OK. Part of that economy is advertising that having color is not OK, unless you’re planning to date and mate intraracially. (The logic: you’re all the same race, so you two should relate, right?) The realities are infinitely more intricate, but intricate doesn’t sell too well.

So, I’m hoping that Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s book, Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life becomes a best-seller. Because she not only takes inventory of all those dating-advice books cluttering bookshelves and e-reader lists, she also takes that rarest of inventory: an anti-racist feminist inventory of the whole dating industrial complex.

Mukhopadhyay reminds the reader throughout her book that these books consistently erase those who are not cisgender and heterosexual  and able-bodied and middle-class. She also says that the dating industrial complex is also rather unkind to cisgender men–all of this because they’re trafficking in narrow stereotypes based on gender binaries. And if we believe in some sort of feminism? Well, Mukhopadhyay analyzes, these books try to make that belief the reason why we’re not getting laid, let alone married. We, to paraphrase DuBois, are the 21^st century problem to be solved because, so says this literature, we dare to exist–sometimes caring about being in relationships and sometimes not.

Her take, for example, on how these books—along with communities and porn—and their net effects on dating and race:

The mainstream media is ripe with oversexualized images of women of color, and policy often stigmatized and shames this same group of people. Women of color and poor women are blamed for their inability to keep their legs closed and for having too many children. For marginalized groups of women, sex is not linked to pleasure and freedom; it is demonized and used as an example of all the ways in which these women lack self-control. As a result, a lot of conversation around sexual freedom discount the experience of people of color, failing to take into account how much sexual freedom is assumed to hinge on a woman’s privilege—be it because of her race, economic status, or social standing.

Of course, not all women of color are sexualized in the same way. For example, while black women are considered lascivious, always consenting and out of control, Latina[s] are considered exotic or overly sensual and Asian women are considered childish and prude. These particular stereotypes are reinforced through popular culture and pornography (just Google respectively “Asian women,” “black women,” or “Latina women” and then “women” and see what comes up). The common thread here is that nonwhite women’s sexuality is seen as outside the norm of white heterosexuality. It’s therefore something to uniquely desired, manipulated, exploited or controlled. Within this rather toxic climate, being a woman of color who’s in touch with her sexuality is an act of resistance. Pushing past the negative media depictions and still finding a healthy, healing, erotic, and functional sexuality is no small feat.

I have often felt trapped between discourses of sexuality. If I’m overtly sexual, I’m a threat to what it means to be a good, pious South Asian lady and to the white norms of sexuality. As a result, when I am sexual, I am confronting my ethnic community and the norms of white sexuality. Finding a more authentic sexuality that’s just me means pushing past what is considered the appropriate way for me to be sexual based on my race, ethnicity, and gender. This has meant a lot of experimentation, sometimes playing up how “bad” I am or being tremendously secretive about my sexual transgressions (well, clearly not after this book). And it meant sifting through partners and figuring out which ones are a little too obsessed with my being Indian.”

Then Mukhopadhyay breaks out a list on spotting an exoticizer.

Yes. She. Does.

But that’s what she does throughout her book…and that’s what I thoroughly love about Outdated. It’s a great, intricate mix of feminist thought, media literacy, and a couple of tips for dating while feminist (of color) from your you-ain’t-never-lied friend who’s that romantic realist. Mukhopadhyay lets you know that whomever you date—if you even want to do that—is perfectly OK.

Image credit: Feministing

There are plenty of other things I should be doing right now: finishing a book review which has already been extended, preparing for classes that start in a week, finishing another post I’ve been working on on gentrification, starting and finishing two other book proposal/chapter reviews that are due, and the list goes on and on. But, I just had to stop for a moment and briefly reflect on a recent trip home I made with my partner/girlfriend–we had a wedding ceremony so I’m trying to say partner now, but I really love saying girlfriend, something about it.

Anyway, we made a long, three week road trip from California to the Midwest to visit with and, in some cases, meet for the first time family and friends. It was a sweet trip: we saw lots of beautiful things, like the Badlands and Black Hills in South Dakota, canyons upon canyons in Southern Utah, and just the regular, lush greenery of Michigan and Missouri, where we’re from. The road makes us both happy.

And, it’s always a bit of hard trip to make, for both of us. We both love our families so much and, as two queer women, often leave a lot of things out about our lives when we go home. Literally, there were points in the trip where it was hard for us to even reach each other, we were so checked out.

It’s something we’ve practiced for quite a while, for various reasons. Some of it is based on people not always asking about the specifics. Remembering to ask about the boys in our lives (son and godson) that we see at least once, if not twice a week. Nor would they ever remember or think to ask what it’s like to suspend holding hands with your partner in public, something we do everyday at home. Not to mention never getting into a serious debate about gay marriage and whether or not that is something we’re interested in. And, in many ways, that’s fine. I understand, sometimes people don’t know how to ask. And, quite frankly, there is so little that I share about my life that I think it may just be difficult to talk to me,”Ani” (my childhood nickname), and/or I’m not there enough (once or twice a year) for those kinds of conversations to be developed. Plus, there is a nice big helping of internalized homophobia on both of our parts that structure these trips home.

So it was within this setting, this history, that Joan and I made the trip from her parent’s house in Michigan to mine in Missouri, where she was going to meet my extended family–my father’s side–for the first time. Just to give you a little history and more context for how I share, I took her home last summer for the first time, where she met my grandmother (Dad’s mom) and my mom’s side of the family, many of her seven brothers and sisters and their children. Also, for the purposes of history/reminder, my mother is white and my father is Black. And, this is only the second time in my adult relationship history that I’ve ever brought anyone home. I dated my white, college ex-boyfriend (who Joan also met on this trip), home twice in the 6 1/2 years that we dated. And we lived three hours away from my hometown. So, the fact that I’ve traveled over 1600 miles and have brought Joan home twice in 3 1/2 years is, like, a really big deal. Plus, you know, I’m 40 so I’m kinda grown, which means I should be doing this kind of thing anyway…

Still, I was nervous to take her home. How are people going to feel about her? How are my aunts (my dad has six sisters) going to respond to her? To us? What about my male cousins? All people I see every year, but have not mentioned her, the woman I love so much, directly once. Now, if asked, I wouldn’t lie, but I was never asked, so…But I couldn’t keep up my charade any longer, my grandmother was invited and my dad came out for our ceremony in May, so I had to come clean. My dad picked us up and we headed over. I brought my mom along who is still close with my dad and his siblings/my grandmother, just in case Joan didn’t have anyone to talk to. That was my plan.

We walked in and everyone was there, and I mean everyone, my four aunts, an uncle, my cousin and his wife, my grandmother, my other cousin and his girlfriend. I was greeted, but almost immediately pushed aside so that one by one everyone came up, introduced themselves to her (I’m aunt______), hugged her, and welcomed her to the family. No joke. Some even said the words, welcome to the family.

I was taken aback.

Not by the sweetness of my family: they are some of the most incredibly sweet, laid back, witty, funny, sarcastic, sh*t talking, and sincere people I know. They are my people. No, in the moment, I was taken aback by how they welcomed her, us, my life that I never talk about, into the family. Almost immediately, my aunt began correcting Joan when she said, “I don’t want to sit in your uncle’s chair.” “That’s your uncle, Joan.” It was great and, once I got over my fear, nothing short of what I would expect from my people. Since we’ve been home, three of them have become her “friends” on Facebook.

But that’s not the way we understand the relationship between the Black and LGBTQ communities. The overall assumption is that the Black community is homophobic (at the same time that the same sex marriage movement equates this struggle with the Black civil rights movement).  The Black community was blamed for Proposition 8‘s failure in California, anti-gay leaders exist and are well publicized, and there is an ongoing discussion of homophobia in hip-hop. Often, it looks like straight Black folks are more homophobic than any other group, especially white people. But, that has rarely been my experience. Inquisitive? Yes. Inappropriate questions at times? Of course. A “girl you nasty,” once or twice? Sure. But I don’t think that constitutes a more homophobic community, which is what I take issue with.  The assumption that Black people are the culprit in the ongoing fight against homophobia and gay oppression. And, I don’t write this to deny other Black folks’ experience, but rather, to put out there a time when this was not the case. I think we need to highlight these experiences more often to remember and think about the Black community as a community, who looks out for, loves, and trusts one another. It doesn’t negate the Eddie Longs or Tracy Morgans, but is intended to open up and broaden the conversation a bit more. I am eager to engage in them.

Peace, family.

Welcome to the Outside of the Constructs panel. This one is a little strange as compared to the others. Originally, this was to be the panel for Indigenous people, but then I expanded it to include people who are normally outside of U.S. racial constructs. But then, we didn’t get very much response originally, and I asked for help recruiting. Cecelia responded, but she invited a mess of folks – but who didn’t fit the original idea for this panel. I was going to move Lyza, Julie, and Richard’s responses – but then I realized their experiences probably fit a bit better here, since they were radically different from other responses on the White and Asian panels. So, it all worked out.

Our panelists are: Cecelia, friend of the blog; Julie, friend of Cecelia; Brandann, friend of the blog and occassional contributor; Lyza, friend of Cecelia; Andrew, blogger at KABOBFest; May, blogger at KABOBfest and Sawaha Sumra; Fatemeh, Racialious crew and Editor of Muslimah Media Watch; El, long time friend of the blog; and Richard, friend of Cecelia.

Cecelia: My parents are an interracial couple. My Dad is Ojibway/Anishinaabe (enrolled tribal member in the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community) and French and my Mother is various European heritages, the majority of her is Scandinavian (Norwegian and Swedish) and German. When my parents started dated my Mother’s Father said to her, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Despite the one negative message from my Grandfather my parents tried their best, with all of the complications, family issues and life stresses, their overall message on their interracial dating was a positive one. My Dad grew up in Highland Park, MI which was what he called “mixed” and not diverse. He once described the neighborhood he grew up in by having “all the colors.” My Mother grew up in a working class, product of Ford and auto industry, mostly white inner ring suburb of Detroit. They moved to a more lower middle class neighborhood of an inner ring suburb and the compilation of their upbringings gave me a positive message about interracial dating, even despite our struggles as a family and individuals inside the family unit. Because of our various struggles from generational trauma, historical trauma and PTSD from being survivors of genocide on the Native side, I came to the conclusion that most relationships would be a struggle. This struggle can change as well heal. If our liberation and return to culture, language and traditions as Native people means feeling our ancestors pain then it may manifest in struggle within our family and therefore the interracial relationship of my parents.

My family on my Dad’s side is multi-racial, so mixing was already in the family and our family gatherings had all of us mingling which was most always a positive space for me. I am really thankful for my family being so awesome and open-minded! Some messages I received from my Dad (which he said weekly, if not daily): “the white man messed up everything,” and/or “don’t trust whitey.” Therefore, I wasn’t very trusting of white males in relationships, although I have had my share, I have retired dating white males because my Fathers statement that was ingrained in me since I was a child has proven true in the dating world. Sadly, I had to test the waters to prove his statements to be true.

Julie: Light-skinned = good. Dark-skinned = bad. Gay/lesbian also = bad. The races fell into those guidelines.

I grew up Vietnamese in a predominantly white area where they pulled eyes at me and made fun of my parent’s height and accents. As a displaced people who were just trying to survive, and as we watched other PoCs in our neighborhood/family turning to drugs and guns, assimilation seemed like the key to our well-being. I was surrounded by the ‘goodness’ of white people (some were pretty nice, but ignorant) and was brought up to appreciate them and to adopt their ideas, including their racist ones.
I may have received these messages, but more than what I was ‘sold’, was the fact that I was a target for racism (Seventeen Magazine was definitely not written with PoC in mind) and thus differentiated. I grew wary of white people and started gravitating to other races for my friendships (mostly latino and asian) in my late teens.

Brandann: I grew up mixed-race, and only slightly conscious of what that meant. I am assuming that my being a product of a mixed-race relationship meant that my family didn’t frown upon the idea of interracial dating or relationships.

I’m Ojibwe/Anishinaabe and European by descent, registered with the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. If there were problems with such relationships, there was no indication of it from my immediate family. Though, as I got older and understood racial identity better (things such as the endearing nickname my father’s father gave me, which was a bit of a jab at my mixed-heritage but meant to be affectionate), I noticed that other people within my own community had ideas about what was right and what was less-than. Relationships between two Native people, at least in my own limited experience, were looked upon more favorably than those between Native and non-Natives.

The only time race ever arose as an issue was when I met my husband, who is Asian. My grandfather is a Korean War veteran, and I personally had fears that it would be an issue, however right or wrong that fear was. Turns out, it was never something I needed to worry about. He was accepted with open arms.

Lyza: Growing up in a rural farm community, where my mom grew up in a suburb of Grand Rapids and my dad grew up on a farm in Rockford, MI(which back when he grew up there it didn’t have the reputation it does today), allowed me to have a simple growing up experience that was for the most part homogeneous(white working class to middle class) in nature of where we lived. My mom was very intentional(coming from a Civil Rights and Feminism background) when it came to making my brother and I aware that the world was not homogeneous in nature she would yearly take us out of class to walk downtown Grand Rapids during the Martin Luther King Jr. day parade, as well as have literature and different avenues where we would be challenged with how we viewed the world from where we lived.

I thank my mom for being so progressive and going against the norm of ignorance that was prevalent in the community that we grew up in. My dad came from another generation where rural was rural and the only people of color in town were generally from the city and didn’t plan on staying any time soon. When I was in my early twenties I dated a Latino man that I worked with and after a date where he dropped me off at the home and met my family my dad sat me down and asked me what my intentions were with him and if I planned on dating him seriously. This comment disturbed me because of the undertone of racism that happened to ooze out of the comment. That was when I realized that there was a standard when it came to dating, and I was at a point in my life where I decided that was not acceptable. Within the past 3 years my father has changed his world view considerably with some hard life lessons that have come his way as well as my consistent challenging of how the world really “is” with all of the double standards.

My Grandpa (mom’s side) has been very adamant that interracial dating is unacceptable, however his deep seeded racism comes from generationalism and growing up in Benton Harbor pre and post WWII era. I constantly challenge his worldview by giving him an opportunity to explain why he has these views towards specific groups of people and offer him a different POV. Bringing some of my friends with diverse backgrounds to family events has allowed him to be around people that challenge where his fears and racism hold so closely to his belief system.

Andrew: I grew up in Ann Arbor, MI after having spent the first four years of my life in New York City. My mother immigrated from Lebanon in the late 70s and my father’s family, also Lebanese, has been in the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. On a personal level, both of my parents have always disregarded cultural traditions in favor of their own interpretations of what’s right and wrong or how people should and should not behave. For example, my mother was 31 when she married, which is virtually unheard of in a culture that pressures its women to marry young, and was the first woman to leave her village in Lebanon. Although there are far fewer social expectations imposed on men than on women in Arab culture, my father seemed to buck the trend by maintaining an air of humility despite his charm, intelligence, and professional success.

As a result, despite the fact that my upbringing was definitely defined by my Arab identity, I was always encouraged to challenge and confront cultural norms and traditions, and push social and personal boundaries within reason. When it came to sex and relationships, my parents never shied away from having conversations with me about relationships and sexuality, yet they rarely came off as nosey or intrusive. They have always encouraged me to view dating as a process through which I develop a better understanding of myself and what it is I’m looking for in a partner. Although I haven’t seriously dated a woman that isn’t Arab, I am confident that my parents would support an interracial relationship.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about my extended family. My grandmother (father’s mother) enjoyed being racist and would regularly claim that she was no Arab; she was Phoenician. She never missed an opportunity to obsess over the kinds of people her grandchildren would date and eventually marry, regularly encouraging all of us to date within our Arab Orthodox Christian community. Such attitudes are reinforced by the rest of my father’s family which, interestingly enough, embrace culturally traditional values and lifestyles despite being third and fourth generation Arab Americans.

On my mother’s side, I grew up knowing that interracial relationships were frowned upon and not taken seriously. This obviously did not extend to Europeans; my cousin was once married to a French woman. I should add, though, that my family is definitely more concerned with religion than they are race when it comes to relationships. This is because they assume that their children will not marry/date outside of the Arab community, and so they focus on religious identity. My Shiite Muslim (now ex) girlfriend definitely ruffled a few of their feathers, but I was never openly confronted about my relationship with her. As a man, I recognize that I enjoy significant privilege and am not subject to the kind of scrutiny Arab women must endure.

May: As a US born and raised to Syrian Sunni Muslim parents, I grew up watching both sides of my family interracially/ethnically marry—it was almost exclusively my uncles though, and to mostly white European women. As Syrians are regarded as the white people of the Arab world, I would venture to say that these kinds of unions were not only considered culturally acceptable, but a reinforcement of an aspirational whiteness.

Further complicating the fact that both my parents are Syrian (my father with a Bedouin background) was the culturally enclavish way I was raised. We lived on a cul-de-sac with all my father’s family populating the six model homes that the track housing in the sleepy Southern California suburb was based on. Thus not only was I encouraged to maintain a link with my “roots” but I was also expected to only have my cousins as my friends. As my father once retorted when I asked to attend a schoolmate’s sleepover party, “Friends? why do you need friends? You have cousins!” So you can imagine the jingoistic way marriage was regarded/viewed.

Because some of the aforementioned interracial/ethnic marriages failed, this led my father to come to the conclusion that his children would be best suited to marry someone who was culturally similar to us. Or in his words “another Arab.” Knowing very well the narrow definition my father was operating under with such an assertion, I pressed him to share his criteria for entry into this marriageable “Arabness” with series of annoying Socratic questions. Here is how that delightfully uninhibited conversation unraveled: The Match-making Chronicles: Race/Ethnicity/Nationality of Ideal Husband.

I never understood how I was to meet or even respect this imaginary husband in my father’s mind who, as illustrated above, should be Syrian from my father’s city of origin and from “a good family,” when I was never raised with Arabs or Muslims who did not bear my same last name. In fact, my father was known in the Southern Californian Syrian community as “The Syrian who doesn’t interact with Syrians” and kept company with a Benetton ad campaign circle of friends—Mexicans, Cubans, Salvadorians, Jews, African Americans and many more non-Arabs.

But I never shared my dating history with my father—neither did he have any desire to know. My mother, mapping together conversational glimpses of my dating history understood the geographic stretches of my past relationship partners, only had two criteria for me. The man I was to marry should 1) make me happy and 2) be a Muslim. Also knowing the narrow definition my mother thought fit snugly into her “open-minded” views on cultural diversity, I pressed her. “So you would be okay if I married a Chinese Muslim.” She paused…for a while, took a breath and asked “you would want to marry a Chinese man?” For my mother, although she and another aunt advised me against marrying an Arab, there was still a cultural closeness or familiarity she associated with being “Muslim.” To my mother’s credit, she finally released the emo-cognitive tight grip she had on notions of being Muslim.

Fatemeh: My father is Iranian and my mother is from Scottish and Irish heritage, growing up Mormon in Utah. Growing up, their racial differences seemed minimal to me, which probably normalized the idea of dating someone different than I. The most exposure to their differences I’d get is when they’d tease each other about polygamy on both sides of the family (my father comes from a Muslim family, my mother comes from an LDS [Mormon] family). They’ve been married over 35 years now.

Thankfully, my parents don’t push me about marriage. They want me to be happy and economically stable, and I don’t think they could care less about who I marry as long as I’m financially independent–when I was growing up, both parents stressed that I should get an education, get a good job, and then worry about marriage.

El: I’m full Persian and there are some pretty general taboos in Persian culture: don’t marry a non-Iranian, but if you must, at least bring home a white boy. The biggest taboo would probably be marrying a black or perhaps an Arab man (depends on how nationalistic your family is, I suppose). This was never really expressed within my immediate family, but when your culture has some closed-minded views, the messages will find a way to seep in somehow. For Iranians, it’s mostly about preservation of culture, of being able to pass down the language, customs and traditions onto your offspring. Interracial marriages can be seen as a threat to that.

Contrasting to that, I also came up in (and am still a part of) a religious community (the Baha’i community) where unity of mankind is a central principle and interracial marriages are quite common. We even have scripture that touches upon the topic! It’s seen as a positive thing in this community. I had a lot of half-Persian friends growing up and I was able to witness, firsthand, a variety of family dynamics in Persian-and-“other” pairings.

My day-to-day surroundings growing up were much less diverse. Almost all of the kids in my school and small town were white, so you really didn’t have any other choice BUT to interracially date. Even still, there was a weird dynamic in the town. Some other minority kids and I developed these weird complexes – we felt we were almost “too ethnic” to be dated there, and became every guy’s best friend who happens to be a girl. But then we went off to diverse colleges where guys hit on us, asked us out – we had to work out our issues and it took some time to see ourselves differently.

Cecelia: The only fears I had were dating a white male because of privileges and abuse of power. I have dated Latino, White, Native, Black and African. My worst relationships were with white males because of how their privileges brushed up against my multiple oppressions. My best relationship was with the Latino male who was half Peruvian and half White. We had a balanced relationship, would take about oppression, race, class, gender and do things such as hike, drink tea and enjoy meditation.

Julie: My worst experiences were with white males. My best ones with asian males. I was hesitant going into relationships with white males as a teenager (I was already wary of them but didn’t know better), where I suddenly became visible to the white peer world (it takes a white man to bestow the honorary white badge, I suppose). Disliking that, I got out of those relationships, lickity split.

By the time I was dating asian/mixed-asian men, I was hanging out with other diasporic asians, re-learning my heritage, and actively avoiding white people. I became more visible to the asian man, as he could feel safer with me and not have to worry about my throwing racist asian male stereotypes at him. My only fear was that I would ‘slip-up’ with my whiteness-upbringing, show my ‘whiteness’, oppress somebody.

By the time I married a Taiwanese-American man, I was comfortable in my skin and very tired of seeing asian girls with white men (the ‘accepted’ norm). I had no fears going into our relationship, whatsoever. I had an ally, flesh and blood. People from my hometown were generally surprised, but were used to being surprised by me, and I no longer feel like I belong there.

Brandann: I almost feel it is unfair to say “my worst relationships were with white men”. I have very little experience otherwise, and it is easy, I think, for me to dismiss any of the problems that occurred as things I did wrong. I too easily dismiss the idea that any of it could have been a result of an imbalance of power due to varying axis of oppression, but I have a tendency to feel responsible for anything, which, again, is probably a result of some of my relationships with mental illness.

My best relationship, obviously, is with my husband. I am not sure if it is because it feels like the power balance is more equal between us, or if our personalities just work well. It could be coincidence, but I’m not exactly naive enough to dismiss the idea that race affects it outright.

I’m read as “white” though, frequently, which further complicates my thoughts on the issue, because I am ascribed privilege and status that were not the experience of my upbringing or background. It is often presumed that I carry white privilege in our relationship, and it may be true to an extent, but my history definitely does not match that perception. I am not “white”.

May: Not really. I think one of my fears is related to my own judgments, especially when it comes to the courting process. This fear is that I would judge a man for not meeting the gendered expectations I had indoctrinated into me from childhood, ones that I had challenged at some points and now I see the value of upholding. I expect a man who is interested in me to approach me with expressed intention and—500 steps later or so—if serious about marrying me, obtain my father’s blessings before proposing to me. This is where an understanding of cultural sensitivities become fundamental—a man who is interested in me needs to be fully cognizant of the fact that he will probably not interact with my family, and mostly especially my father, unless his intention is to propose to me. Sometimes socioeconomic status and divergent educational background put more of a strain on the relationship or the potential budding of a relationship than race or culture.

As for the peers…

Most of my close friends are not Arab or Muslim and come from diverse racial, class, educational, and professional backgrounds. And because I have a tendency to self-isolate outside of the comfy boundaries of trusted friendships, I rarely confront the ire that comes from a homogenuous community’s concern about one’s interracial dating or mating practices.

And as other participants have broached the “dating or ‘talking’ to white men” topic:

I rarely attract white men, and when I do, there is this underlying fetishism quality to the attraction (and the probability of white men approaching me is usually heightened when I am on the thinner side!). The “specious informant” has never been a legitimate fear of mine, but I will say I have received the attention of far too many white men interested in learning Arabic or at that moment enrolled in Arabic classes. I brusquely joke that war and the Kardashians have made my kind more popular—and even wrote about it: The Kim Kardashian Effect On Arab and Middle Eastern Women.

Andrew: I haven’t really dated interracially. I’ve had a few one or two week flings with women of different races, but don’t know what it’s like to have a serious romantic relationship with someone that isn’t Arab. I know that my family’s disdain for interracial relationships affects me subconsciously, and it is definitely more difficult to feel comfortable in the context of an interracial relationship knowing that my extended family will react negatively.

Hooking up with white women has, however, been a little stressful, but not because of my family. Many of my peers, including some of my closest friends, consider it a betrayal for a man of color to pursue a relationship with a white woman. As a result, I remember several occasions during college in which I made a concerted effort to make sure that if a white woman and I were to spend the night, she would be back at her house before any of my roommates were aware of her presence. To this day, I go to great lengths to keep any romantic relationships I may have with white women an absolute secret (although, admittedly, they don’t happen very often).

Fatemeh: Since there aren’t a lot of other white/Persian hybrids like myself to date, I’d say all my dating has been interracial. And I always assumed it would be–growing up in a majority-white Utah made me assume I’d never find anyone like me to date. Living in a different majority-white state shores up this assumption, though I’ve met other biracial Persians like myself.

I don’t date much, but when I do, one of my biggest worries is that the person I’m dating won’t understand my ethnic and religious identities. Trying to figure out how to be together is hard enough without trying to educate someone on privilege, oppression, and gender issues. It’s really important to me that the person I’m dating understand these issues and is sensitive to them.

El: I’ve mostly dated interracially and I haven’t had many fears or misgivings going into it; overall, that aspect of it has mostly been positive. I honestly don’t care about my partner’s background and I don’t really have a moratorium on dating Persian men. When it comes to race, all that matters is that he’s race-conscious. And for a number of reasons, there aren’t many Iranian-Americans who are and vibe with me on that level.

If I had any qualms it was probably with dating white men because of how I grew up. I used to feel as if white men just weren’t attracted to me, and for whatever reason, I don’t often find myself attracted to them. Chicken or the egg?

Even still, I’m slowly bracing myself for the day when I bring home a non-Persian, non-white man as someone I want to marry. I don’t know if this is what will actually happen – I joke with friends that after all this, I’ll end up with a Persian doctor. But even still, it’s good to mentally and emotionally prepare. I’m not sure what the reactions will be, and the uncertainty is probably the hardest part. Family is very important to me and I want my partner to become a full part of it, I want there to be true joy and love to go all around. I’ve heard some horror stories from friends or their parents about when they brought home non-Persian mates – for some, acceptance took years. Others were shunned. But, in the end, many of them say their families grew closer through the trials and the prejudice within their families was slowly being eradicated, particularly when children and grandchildren arrived.

Welcome back to the final Black panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Damon Young, better known as The Champ and one of two VerySmartBrothas; Ashley – longtime reader and friend of the blog; Cheryl Lynn, Digital Femme extraordinare, rabblerouser, and longtime friend of the blog; Andrea Plaid – our own Sexual Correspondent; Dani – long time friend of the blog; Sewere – long time commenter, one time contributor, and friend of the blog; Tami Winfrey Harris, long time contributor and editor of Love Isn’t Enough and What Tami Said; Kadian Pow, friend of the blog and occasional contributor, and Helena Andrews, author of Bitch is the New Black.

N’jaila: Having tried to relate to the white guys in my history classes I think the above statement is bullocks. I mean, you can take me and my brother, same racial, economic and social background and we have very different views on race, relationships, religion and myriad of other things – and we grew up in the same household. So I’m not a very firm believer that you will automatically have anything in common with anyone you meet based on perceived shared experiences. I think what a white male experiences in college and what a Black woman does could be so vastly different that some might even argue that its not a shared experience at all.

I’ve had white student look at me in shock when I told them that I was working to pay for my college education, they actually believed that most Black people got in for free and the government paid my tuition or assume that I was accepted into the college not on academic merit but because the school needed to fill a quota. I went to Rutgers University the most diverse campus in the country and I still had White students that did their best to stay away from anything and everything Black. So what would I have in common with one of those people? Am I to believe that because we sat next to each other in History of Western Civ that that White guy has ever thought of bringing home someone that looked like me to his mother?

Also, being college educated doesn’t stop a person from sharing opinions and beliefs with someone that did not complete the same level of education as them. I think that statement is just plain class-ism.

Andrea: Yep, it sure is. And that’s exactly what this article is getting at: maintaining class privilege. In essence, everyone should stick with their socio-economic kind. But it’s also good to remember that Essence, in its racial-uplift efforts, for a good long time promulgated the message that its middle-class, college-educated readership date Black working-class men. The “dating outside the race” pieces they ran generally side-eyed IR relationships, as if the women doing it made good copy but were doing bad by The Race™. But, as the “Black male shortage” became the mantra (“all the good Black men are taken!”), the IR stories Essence ran became more “lenient” in its attitude towards interracial relationships. And now, we have this piece, which is Essence offering its Negro Imprimatur by calling such relationships “practical.” Nothing about love and/or desire…”practical.” The subtler message is Black women not deserving of wonderfully wildly heart-stopping love except from Black men, if at that–in all of the homophobia dripping from that idea.

Ashley: I don’t agree [with Bank’s statement.] Asking me to switch to Cheerios – just because the corner bodega ran out of them – when I’ve been eating Raisin Bran my entire life wouldn’t work either. This binary solution for black women – stay single or date outside of your race – approach needs to stop.

Also – can we please STOP acting like Tyler Perry’s version of the blue collar brother actually exists! It’s just an awful fantasy.

N’jaila: Espeically because you might end up just as miserable, men are men not matter what the race. I think its more likely for me to end up with my pink rabbit than a white, black, or whatever race man.

Andrea: You have one, too? ::daps::

N’jaila: Oh honey , I have quite the collection.

Andrea: Gurl, we got each other’s email addies. We’ll chat later.

Tami: Classist nonsense! My husband does not have a degree and yet is one of the smartest men I know. We both love history and politics and British sitcoms. Anyone who knows us knows we are compatible, despite his spending time in the military rather than a college classroom.

You cannot judge compatibility by the academic degrees anymore than you can by skin color. It’s interesting that in telling black women to broaden their choices they also tell us to narrow them.

Cheryl Lynn: I know that guy driving the UPS truck! He’s one of the smartest and nicest brothers I know and he’s also taken. Not by me, but another black woman has swooped him up and she is not sharing. And guess what? I have a lot in common with him–more than I have with the upper-class white guy who sat next to me in history class. I may be a college-educated black woman, but I still grew up working class. I have a lot in common with blue collar men because I was raised by one. “Give a blue collar brother a try” is misguided advice? Um, we are dating them! Happily! Right now! With good results. Who wrote that? Why do we have to put down one group in order to open ourselves up to another? What’s wrong with blue collar men of any race? I’m sorry, that just hit a sore spot with me. Perhaps the writer meant “no collar” instead of “blue collar”? I’m not dating the dude on the corner–’cause he’s the dude on the corner. But the guy who drives around the corner in the UPS truck? Fine with me. I just wish there were more of them.

Helena: Banks assumes that you and your fancy pants degree are making more than the UPS man. Um no. I have two fancy degrees and my uncle who drove a truck for 20 years could buy and sell me in day. True, money is an issue in any relationship. It creates a power dynamic that can be either destructive or supportive. But degrees don’t make direct deposits.

Sewere: Like everyone has said, this statement is just stupid, there are so-called blue collar workers who own their own businesses, who have all the trappings for a stable relationship that to assume that just being blue collar disqualifies them from being partners. Furthermore, where is the data that shows that such pairings are likely to result in divorce? And why the bloody hell is the white guy the default rather than the latino guy? Also, what about the other side of the equation, how many white guys are sincerely interested in dating black women?

Kadian: Firstly, that statement presumes that there aren’t any “blue collar” white guys or Black guys in college. Huh? Anyway, as a college educated Black woman, I have dated that “blue collar” White guy. It did not work out specifically because of those differences (and personal reasons as well).

N’jaila: I think it has to do with the long complicated history of the vilification, sexualization and comodification of Black men. The mainstream has gone through so many versions of the Black man. I think they feel they need to keeps tabs on the Black Community because we’re the “White Man’s Burden”. I think a lot of the time Black men are seen as sexually virile but morally bankrupt and good for labor but not able to really achieve higher education

Of course these are just ugly stereotypes, there’s no natural force that keeping Black men’s “market value” low. Its an ugly White supremacist attitude that refuses to acknowledge Black men’s value. The mainstream isn’t trying to discuss situations and attitudes that show their ugly side.

Cheryl Lynn: “The mainstream isn’t trying to discuss situations and attitudes that show their ugly side.” That pretty much hits the nail on the head. Anything that involves a serious look at institutionalized racism isn’t making the six o’clock news.

Sewere: Because outright pathologizing of black men has always been in the fabric of US narrative.

Damon: The (non)value of black men is never really the focus of this discussion for the same reason that the weatherman on the evening news doesn’t feel the need to point out that the sky is blue. Everybody already assumes it to be true, so there’s no use in pointing out the obvious

Ashley: I pretty much agree with Damon. Because we feel like most of those stereotypes are true.

Helena: It’s like beating a dead horse. Nobody wants to be the last to kick it. Instead these articles rather vilify black women since we’ve been living too high on the hog. Clearly, we got too hype about ourselves.

Helena: Because this story is so easy. It writes itself–repeat the same tired numbers, get a few quotes from some single black girl who works for NASA (they’re everywhere) and then tack on a kicker that provides no concrete solution because there isn’t one.

N’jaila: Like I said before, stories like this make the mainstream look more “normal” and why would anyone not want to hear more about how other groups should be like them?

Damon: ***Taken from “The Bottom Line: Why The Media Cares So Much About Black Women’s Dating Habits” — something I wrote up last night***

“Why the hell is the media so gotdamn worried about what’s going on in black women’s bedrooms?”

Depending on who you ask, the popular answer ranges somewhere between “White men are preternaturally obsessed with black booty. The recent release of “The Help” didn’t make it any better, as the thought of black mammies in tight white dresses stirred a primal lust that made the WSJ’s editors decide to go with that topic” and “It’s a conspiracy to destroy the black family and ultimately ensure that Sasha Obama never has a prom date”

But, while both of those theories have some merit, I believe the answer is much, much simpler:The media is obsessed with who, where, and what black women date because we’re obsessed with reading and talking about it.

That’s it. No conspiracy. No subterfuge. No byzantine plot to permanently sabotage black love. You aint going to get murked by any albino monks for finding out the “real” answer. The media gives a shit because we give (approximately) 100,000 of them, and us giving 100,000 shits means more links, more Facebook likes, more comments, more page views, and, most importantly, more ad money.

They’re not idiots. They’ve seen the oft-shared articles and features their colleagues have written about successful and single black women and how the church is holding black women back and how an urban black woman has a better chance of finding Lebron’s hairline than finding a man, and they want an invite to the orgy of easy page views too.

Cheryl Lynn: It’s profitable. It sells books, ad space, tickets and more. I wish it was something that could be discussed “in house” without millions pressed up against the glass gawking–but that’s not an option in this age. There is no “in house” anymore.

Ashley: The mainstream is tired of talking about how broke, uneducated, and criminalizing we are, so they looked at their one black unmarried employee… and some young, budding journalist had an “ahhh haa!” moment. It’s as simple as that.

Andrea: There’s an old adage that racism makes Black men feel stupid and Black women feel ugly. All of this copy and these ads and books and whatnot continues the centuries-old racist meme of “Black women are unmarry-able,” which is another way for Black women to feel ugly.

Sewere: As I said above, pathologizing black folks has always been part and parcel of this country’s history. To do anything otherwise, would be almost revolutionary.

Dani: I think the last sentence in the sidebar Q&A with Banks is really telling: “If White women want to understand what’s happening in their own world, they need to understand what’s happening with Black women now.” But reinterpret what he’s saying, so “what’s happening” becomes evolving beyond marriage rather than continuing to yearn for some yesteryear ideal. These authors who have so much advice for black women suggest that we contort ourselves any kind of way to fight our way into marriage, into coupledom as the key organizing principle of adult life. I think there’s a concern (clearly among Christian conservatives and other right-wing forces, but also in the mainstream) that black women may start refusing to accept the terms of the debate. And once we do that, it’s a wrap. Because other women will, too.

Kadian: Dani makes a good point about coupledom and marriage being the central institutions of adulthood. If the statistics about Black women and marriage are looked at differently, perhaps Black women are pioneers railing against the establishment of marriage rather than being victims of racism. As a married Black woman whose is not classed as “married” by homophobic/discriminatory US laws, my marriage has more to do with legality and protection than participating in the hegemonic institution of marriage.

Sewere: No one is discussing black intra-ethnic relationships. For hetero-relationships, data has consistently shown that black intra-marriage has been on the rise and that it far outstrips black and non-black marriages. In fact, black and non-black marriages only account for less than 5% of all black hetero marriage, intra-black marriages far more prevalent than black interracial marriages. It would be really interesting to see the dynamics of these kinds of relationships. The little data I’ve seen of hetero marriages shows that African-American women marry non-African-American black folks at a higher rate than African-American men. Now I think the complexities (stereotypes and realities) involved in these relationships are more interesting than the usual black-interracial relationship discussions.

Ashley: I would love to see mainstream black media to pay more attention to black lesbian relationships. I also agree with Sewere and I would love to see more attention devoted to intra-ethnic relationships.

Welcome back to the Asian panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Elton, long time commenter and friend of the blog; refresh_daemon, blogger and occasional contributor; Christina Xu, friend of the blog and occasional contributor; Eric Zhang, occasional contributor; and Holly, contributor at Feministe.

N’jaila: I only know the perspective of the “forbidden” partner. My skin is brown and my hair is curly, my breasts are large and my booty is big. For many of my partners I was something sexually alluring and “dangerous” that was my main selling point. I was forbidden fruit.  I think a good number of my sexual partners took me as a conquest to prove their virility.  Asianness and Blackness is almost synonymous with sexual deviancy for many people.

Growing up I think that white partners felt the most off limits because they were so outside the realm of what was familiar to me.  If they were so alien to me I couldn’t imagine them looking at me and not seeing a laundry list of stereotypes either a dragon lady, mammy , Jezebel or otherwise.  I guess you can say I did not trust white men to make the distinction between genuine attraction and fetish exploration.

Eric: This may be a little bit contradictory to what I said above, but I remember one specific moment, the only moment I had where my mother specifically addressed interracial relationships. She told me and my brother that we were not allowed to marry a black or Japanese woman. My brother took it as a challenge, because he is very much involved in Japanese subculture, but I really just refused to say anything about it. To some extent, my mother’s racist beliefs about black people may have affected me subconsciously, because I remember one time mentioning to my friends that I had a crush on a black classmate, and that he was “the first black guy I’ve ever liked,” which in retrospect was not entirely true. As soon as I said it, though, I realized that I had been brought up to believe that I should not be attracted to black people, whether because of my mother or media representations.

The Japanese part is a result of long-standing resentment in many Chinese of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations towards the Japanese during WWII. I think on an academic level this type of discrimination fascinates me even more, because I have a friend who is half-Chinese and half-Japanese, and she would talk about how her grandparents were scandalized when her parents got married. These kinds of interethnic hostilities are often unspoken about, I think, but many of us who grew up with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean parents have these beliefs instilled in us, so my Chinese friends understand more personally why I was surprised about this girl being half-Japanese than, I think, many of my white friends do.

I often do explicitly wonder what my parents think about interracial relationships, and in particular about my interracial relationships. However, I try to keep them as separate as possible from my dating life, because I think they are uncomfortable with the idea that I date men in the first place, although I believe they accept it on an intellectual level. The only time I’ve told them about my partner was when I came out to my mother, and she was more concerned with the fact that he was a boy than that he was white.

On the other hand, I think many people expect me to date outside of my race, probably because of this common perception that Asian men aren’t sexy, or that they’re not my “type” (which is odd because I don’t think I have a “type,” but I believe that people expect gay Asians to be twinky feminine boys, and rarely think of them as more “straight-acting,” and that, in turn, my preference would be for a more masculine, non-Asian boyfriend, which is untrue). I think my friends especially would be surprised if I were to have an Asian boyfriend, because so far I have only been with non-Asians (though not for lack of interest). I secretly suspect that my parents similarly expect my brother and me to end up with white partners, but hope we will marry Chinese.

Holly: I’ve definitely had the experience of being the “weird, unexpected” partner, because sometimes people (and I guess I tend to think specifically of partners’ families) don’t know how to categorize me racially, and sometimes haven’t been able to make sense of my gender either. Sometimes I think the weird mixture of things has actually helped throw the radar way off: I had one partner whose mother was really upset that her daughter was gay and dating me (and I was her third girlfriend) but was also super-interested to talk to me about my family and Japanese background, plus the fact that she saw me as a “successful professional” relative to the lower-middle-class white surroundings of her family — I don’t know, maybe it was an exotic package that was both good and bad? I’ve had experiences of being seen as too masculine for some partners and too feminine for other partners — and those kinds of things always intersect with race in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Asians are stereotyped and unconsciously perceived as “more feminine” and that sets people’s expecations, which in turn means that they can disapprove of you because you meet the expectations, or be confused and dismayed that you don’t.

Elton:  I have not dated.  A perspective missing from the interracial dating conversation is that of Asian men raised not to date and to focus on education.  Not having a girlfriend deeply troubled me as a teenager, but now I look at the modern Western pressures and expectations regarding romance with much more skepticism.  Am I less of a man because I’m Asian American?  Hell no.  Am I happy being single right now?  Hell yes.

Latoya: I’m going to break the mod wall for one hot second, since you brought up something often not represented in dating conversations, which is not participating. To speak personally for a sec, one of my close friends is Korean American – she’s been on exactly one date, and its one I set up for her. (She expressed interest in dating a few years ago – we are all in our late 20s now.)  She has a lot of trouble picking up dating signals – in our conversations, she told me that a LOT of her friends have never been on a date and never had a boyfriend and were now wondering about marriage as we approach 30.  I have no idea how to cover that though, its so far from my experience…

Elton:  It’s a big unspoken issue–not everyone conforms to the modern Western romantic “plan” for dating and marriage, which is a very, very recent invention.  So how can we deal with intercultural dating when different cultures have different concepts of dating itself?  We can’t just assume that assimilation (Asian men need to ask more women on dates, problem solved) is the only way.

Latoya: True. But in that case, that raises more questions. (And perhaps this needs to be its own conversation, in another post.) So exactly how large of a factor are cultural norms, even in framing this conversation? And how widespread is this exactly? Last time I checked, there was something like a 15% outmarriage rate among Asian Americans; do we need to do an “opt-out” rate as well?

Elton:  I would be very interested to see a post on this topic.  I think many young people are skeptical of traditional concepts of dating and marriage–not because we want to be promiscuous, but because we want to be independent and possibly childfree, we’ve seen how much misery the institution of marriage has caused our parents and others, and the conservative “defense of marriage” agenda has made us wary (and weary) of marriage, period.

Besides, who can afford to date or get married anymore?

refresh_daemon: Like Elton, I’m a non-dater and in my youth, it was because my parents strongly discouraged (but didn’t outright prohibit) me from dating so that I can focus on my studies and getting into a good college. And likewise in college for getting a good job. I was always a bit of a straight arrow, so I complied with their desires.

However, why I am not actively seeking a relationship at the moment is simply because I don’t have the time to invest in one: I have more projects than I can handle at the moment on top of my day job and I’m very aware that were I to engage in a relationship with someone, I would very much be a boyfriend only on paper, which is something I would rather not be.

Were I to actually start dating, despite my parents preferences, I am not opposed to interracial and cross cultural dating, although I would personally also prefer to be in a relationship with someone who can relate well to my parents and someone who would be willing to adopt and learn some elements of Korean culture if they don’t already have it, as well as learn or know the language. Note, it’s just a preference, but I foresee the possibility of working in Seoul as well as the US and so an ability to navigate both worlds is important, as it’s also important to me that a potential spouse would be well integrated into my family.  And, I would likewise be willing, if she is of another culture, to learn and practice critical elements of her culture as well as learn the language of her parents in order to foster deeper communication with them and become a better integrated part her family as well.  Of course, this is an ideal scenario and I understand that in real life, you can’t get everything you want.  And I know that pragmatically limits me primarily to Koreans in terms of an ideal, but I’m probably more than willing to overlook these considerations if I meet a woman of another ethnicity or culture of great character that I share mutual attraction and compatibility with.

N’jaila: My parents forbade me to date when I was younger, it wasn’t until I was 17 that I was allowed to have a boyfriend. Of course my parents didn’t know that I was dating since I was 14 years old. I think It just taught me be secretive and feel a bit shameful about having relationships. Almost ten years later and I still can’t imagine taking a man to meet my parents.  I can talk to my mother about going on dates, but never my father. Its just not spoken of.

refresh_daemon: I am kind of curious as to those who are unwillingly single versus those who choose to be single.  It does explode my brain to think that someone (particularly women, given mainstream dating paradigms) could stay single into their 30’s without willfully choosing to do.  It can’t be for a lack of interested partners, right?  But, I do think that this is a bit off topic and more suited to a separate discussion about singleness.

N’jaila: I actually think that the similarities with Asian men and Black women have been emphasized by grossly oversimplifying issues. I think most people think we are in the same boat because of the disparity that supposedly caused by Asian women and Black men choosing White partners. I think that how each group sees the “problem” is very different.

I think for a lot of Asian men , this is more of an annoyance than a life altering issue. Statistically speaking most Asian American men get married. Do they marry less whites than their female counterparts, no. I think there’s a very vocal minority of Asian men that make attaining a white woman a sign of manhood and belonging. Asian men on the Internet and the Asian men that are in my friends and family seem to see this issue very differently. Of course I grew up in Bergen County NJ where seeing mixed marriages and couples is nothing shocking or of note. So I might have a skewed view of this.

I think many Asian men are angry about being excluded from the white dating pool because they’ve been fed the line that they are the “white minorities” and if anyone was the most qualified to marry into whiteness it would be them. They’re finding that not to be the case. So I think for Asian men its more of a ,”Hey where’d my privilege go?” than with Black women.

I think the much hyped “Black Male” shortage for Black women has a lot more to do with Black women’s reluctance to marry non-Black men. A man of color with a White woman is seen as progress, a Woman of color with a White man is seen as regression. I think many Black women also see marriage and the need for a “traditional on paper” home as something a bit passe. Black women also seem to get married a lot later in life so when people talk about that figure that 42% of Black women are not married they fail to ask what age demographic these numbers came from , usually they are talking about women 18-25 , when you raise the age to 35 the amount of unmarried Black women drops dramatically.

refresh_daemon: The position exists simply because the rates of out-marriage (or it just out-relationships?) mirror each other between Black women and Asian men (in comparison to Black men and Asian women). And I do think there is some correlation in terms of how the mainstream views Black femininity and Asian masculinity in particular, but I think that some Asian men and Black women unfairly take shots at their intraracial counterparts for some kind of perceived betrayal, rather than direct their attention to the overwhelming and subtle messages given by mainstream culture about what is desirable in a partner and who that partner should be.

In terms of cross-cultural discussion, I do think that, at least on the internet, this kind of discussion does tend to happen, but only in hotspots where people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds collide, like on Racialicious. Otherwise, the bigger question that’s begged is: why aren’t we all in more cross-cultural discussion altogether?

Holly: I have a tendency to see this as intrinsically linked to gender stereotypes as well. With white people as the hegemonic “norm” against which everyone else is measured in a white-supremacist society, all the “others” are either seen as more submissive, feminine, smaller, weaker, but maybe smarter (asians, generally) or as more dangerous, threatening, bigger, more masculine (black people, generally). (Of course with the way stereotypes work, contradictions operate simultaneously and manage to both deny and reinforce these things — as with the “angry asian misogynist business-samurai” stereotype and the “emasculated submissive ass-kissing black man” stereotype.) But generally, I think that the hegemonic view is that asian = “more feminine” and black = “more masculine.” Maybe it’s too simplistic, but this also handily explains why asian men and black women have lower rates of out-marriage. Black women are too loud, threatening, angry, big, belligerent, masculine. Asian men are too small, weak, feminine, hairless, whatever.

Eric: (I am going way off topic with this!!)

Within the gay community, which has historically and still presently does at times reproduce many of the same kinds of roles as in heterosexual relationships (perhaps the biggest point of contention being topping/bottoming, which some activists have argued reproduces heterosexist views that one partner must be the “masculine” top and the other the “feminine” bottom), I believe Asian men are often seen as automatically the “woman” in the relationship. Nguyen Tan Hoang’s work “Forever Bottom!” documents the tendency in gay pornography, for example, to cast Asian men as the bottom. There have been exceptions, particularly in amateur gay porn, which seems more open to casting masculine Asian men as tops, but for the most part in mainstream gay porn, the Asian man almost always bottoms. Of course, we can get into a whole discussion about whether bottoming necessarily equates to feminine, and the gendered/sexualized questions about that, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that, at least in mainstream porn, the bottom represents the more feminine partner. Similarly, the fascination and exotification around the phenomenon of the ladyboy, or Thai transsexuals/feminine boys (depending), has created a market around Asian men as feminine.

Although Asian men historically have been marginalized and desexualized, I see that a lot of attitudes have been starting to change. Aside from gay porn, I also mentioned earlier that K-pop has become increasingly popular, to the extent of turning a particular type of Asian men into sex symbols. Obviously there’s still a far way to go, but with the success of actors like Daniel Henney, Daniel Dae Kim, or Harry Shum, Jr., I think people are beginning to see Asian men as sexy. In a way, we’ve always been sexy in the gay community the way that Asian women are marketed as desirable to white men, but the stereotypes persist. In the most basic way, I have noticed that talk about Asian male sex symbols often tend to make mention of penis size (like on Glee, did we really need Tina to say that about Mike Chang? There was also a minor controversy about an amateur gay porn site that described a mixed-race model as getting his exotic facial features from his Asian genes and his “big dick” from his Polish side).

I can’t speak that much to the experiences of straight black women or even gay black men, but while gay Asian men are often cast as effeminate, submissive bottoms (an obvious analogue to the geisha figure), black men in gay porn are often the complete opposite. They are large in all senses of the word, they top more often than not, and usually they do not conform to stereotypes of the fairy fag. More often than Asian men, black men (and white men) are cast as “gay-for-pay” actors to fuel stereotypical gay fantasies about “turning” straight men. What does this say about non-effeminate, straight Asian men?

refresh_daemon: Eric, I know I’m answering a rhetorical question, but I believe that would mean that non-effeminate straight Asian men simply don’t exist. I think you are Holly are on the same track in noting the feminization/masculinization of race in mainstream culture, with white people being “normal”, Black people being “masculine” and Asian people being “feminine”. (Where do all the other people fit on this spectrum?) But I have an issue with the masculine/feminine binary to begin with, especially as many modern cultures are exaggerating these aspects to cartoonish degrees and overemphasizing femininity and masculinity in identity and perhaps how the problem relates to Black women and Asian men having a dearth of relationships is connected to the hyper-masculinization/feminization issue when combined with those racial perceptions of gender.

Holly: Since white people get to be the unmarked, assumed-ordinary norm and actually experience subjectivity and individuality… who do you think has to play the roll of “cartoonishly overemphasized icons” in the cultural formulation of gender? Black people, Asian people, everyone else. It’s part of being the other.

Welcome back to the Black panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Damon Young, better known as The Champ and one of two VerySmartBrothas; Ashley – longtime reader and friend of the blog; Cheryl Lynn, Digital Femme extraordinare, rabblerouser, and longtime friend of the blog; Andrea Plaid – our own Sexual Correspondent; Dani – long time friend of the blog; Sewere – long time commenter, one time contributor, and friend of the blog; Tami Winfrey Harris, long time contributor and editor of Love Isn’t Enough and What Tami Said; Kadian Pow, friend of the blog and occasional contributor, and Helena Andrews, author of Bitch is the New Black.

N’jaila: I’ve dated mostly Asian and Asian American men, which apparently makes me a freak of nature.  Even my Asian and Indian girlfriends have made me feel like there was something wrong with me for dating Asian.   Black women and Asian men are not supposed to date and my mom didn’t get the memo and passed on her strange mutation to me.  There are times I feel especially alienated  when my friends or coworkers ask the race of one of my dates and laugh at me when I say “Asian”.

There is a fear that I’m too Black and too Asian to be anything than an exotic romp. Black women’s sexualities’ are either way over amplified or completely disregarded.  Mammy or Jezebel, either situation leaves me out of the dating pool for many men.

I think for me its also more complicated because I work in the adult industry. A lot of people assume that I’m dating a non-Black man because no Black man in his right mind would want to “turn a ho into a housewife”. I think sometimes you can get so wrapped up in how you assume or fear a man will see you that it ends a relationship before it can begin.

Cheryl Lynn: I date interracially, but I often forget when I am. My friends and family don’t make it an issue at all. The neighborhoods I reside in don’t make it an issue. The only time it was an issue was when I dated someone who passed for white. We accidentally stumbled through an Italian festival in NYC and a white woman looked at me, rolled her eyes , and loudly asked “Why’d he bring her here?” We got the hell out of there pretty fast. I went to a rib joint with the same guy and got a few weird looks from a group of black guys. When I started speaking to my date, one of the dudes actually said “Oh, it’s okay. He’s Puerto Rican!” Seeing some of the nonsense that my friends who are in black/white couples have had to deal with makes me a bit wary of dating white men. I actually told a friend that I couldn’t be bothered with dating interracially after seeing the trouble she went through. My friend laughed and said, “You are in an interracial relationship right now!” I’d completely forgotten! He wasn’t white.

Andrea: I’d be lying if I said no. In quite a few of my past IR relationships, especially with White men, I was “their first time” or some validation of how “not White” (meaning “not boring/status quo/racist”) they are. It’s gotten to the point were I simply ask if this is their first time dating interracially, especially dating a Black woman. This lets me know what I’m getting into or am up against. In my current relationship, I’m dating a White man who I met at an interracial-dating site. In his profile he said (and I quote): “ I’ve dated a number of, and have always been most attracted to, black women–so interracial dating is not a try-out or a new experience for me.” Which heartened me. We’re still working out some stickier points about race and racism in our relationship, where I have to do some gentle anti-racism conversations around humor, for example–but we’re getting along so far.

As for my peers… ::shrug:: They pretty much know how I roll as far as dating and mating. Quite a few of them have dated/mated interracially or are doing so now, so they just look at me.  I think they’re more amazed I’m into polyamory and burlesque than into interracial dating.

Helena: I went to winter formal with a Korean guy and I went to prom with the quarterback who was Filipino. I asked him because I’d had the hugest crush on him for more than a year. My aunts and cousins came over to house before prom to help me get dressed (we call this a “champagne party” in Cali) and they weren’t at all shocked that my date was Asian. They were impressed that he rolled up in a Beemer.

But once I got to college it seemed as if dating outside your race was much more taboo. I mean you couldn’t even kick it with other folks without being seen as a fake. I was used to eating kalbi and calling my Chinese best friend’s mom Auntie Diana, so the self-segregation in college threw me for a loop. It got so bad–me hanging with white people–that a friend, who’d eventually pledge a black sorority with me, pulled me aside to tell me that word on campus was that I “wasn’t black.” Like, huh?

Then sophomore year I actually dated a white guy for a hot week. We joked about race all the time. I think it made us feel mature and so over it. Once he asked me if I’d like to be the roast beef in his white bread sandwich. Seriously. We held hands and ate at a campus cafe together maybe two times and the streets started talking. One of my older guy friends, who my mother asked to look out for me, pulled me aside and told me that it wasn’t cool for me to date the white dude. We broke up, eventually. Because he played air guitar and it was college not because folks had a problem with it. But I still remember thinking that black men had a problem with seeing me with this white man. That was in 2000.

Tami: I dated white and Asian men casually and also had a yearlong relationship with a white guy. Like Andrea, I’ve had the experience of navigating relationships with men who have never dated black women–sometimes wading through stereotypes and exoticizing. I also connected with some really good guys. None of them ever met my parents. That wasn’t by design, though.

Ultimately, the greater barrier in my longest IR relationship was class and not race. He was raised in and continued to identify with white, ethnic, working-class Chicago. I grew up the child of degreed black professionals in a suburban environment. Our outlooks and our goals were too far apart, no matter how much we liked each other. But, as someone mentioned above, I’m not sure class would have been as much a barrier, if we had race in common. That feels strange to say.

Sewere: My general concern around interracial dating has always been having the patience to deal with a privileged partner. I realize the older I get the less willing I am to go through racism 101 with a partner, to explain to someone why I don’t want to be around racist family, why I wouldn’t want my kids around racist family members. I’m not even sure I have the patience to break down the deeper level racism or intersectional stuff, just because I think I expect that someone who wants to have a relationship with a person of color, should have already done some heavy lifting. More important, this doesn’t just apply to white folks, it applies to people of color as well, i.e. I expect that a Nigerian should be aware of intersecting discrimination and privileges vis-à-vis other folks of color.

The funny thing is I expect the same of African-American folks regarding approaching the diversity of Africa and Africans. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to break down attitudes influenced by colonial racism (starting with the Africa as a country misconception). I know this might seem like an unrealistic level of expectations, but honestly, I think people should be capable of treating others as full humans. If I get the impression the person I’m dating isn’t willing to understand how privilege works and isn’t willing to challenge herself or be challenged, then I end it.

Dani: I can’t say I’ve really had fears. When I’ve been with someone who’s not black, I’ve been living in places where I have a kind of anonymity. It’s not like I’m in my hometown and people who’ve known me my whole life are offering their opinions of my dating choices. More importantly, my family and longtime friends know that being open to people of different races is part of who I’ve always been. It’s how I was raised. When I took a boyfriend who is Latino but kind of racially ambiguous home to meet my family, I remember one of my cousins asking, “What is he? Mexican?” But it was out of genuine curiosity. It wasn’t like some veiled slur. But I have to admit, one of the many reasons I have a lot of pride in my family is that we’re a strong *black* family. I struggle with what, if anything, this phrase means as some of my cousins and I partner with non-black people. And it makes me parse the phrase and think hard about the ways in which the “strong” and the “black” have been connected in my mind all these years.

Kadian:  I can’t say that I have ever been fearful about entering a relationship due to differences in “race”. I have only had three real relationships in my life. Two of them are white, one is a woman to whom I’m currently married. My first relationship was with a “wigga” type (why, God, why?). Anyway, I knew his parents because they went to my church and they were cool. The fact that my ex-boyfriends former wife was also Black encouraged me further. However, I was a bit disconcerted once in the relationship because our connection to Black culture was very different from a class perspective. I was in college at the time, so it was also a long-distance relationship. My friends did not show shock that I was dating a White guy, but they were displeased with the type of White guy. It was as if they were saying “If you’re going to date white, you should have picked up something better than that”. The relationship ended after six months, not because he was White, but–to be frank–because he was  poor, lacked ambition, and wasn’t that great in bed.

Dating a white woman came with all kinds of complications, but the “woman” part actually trumped the “White” part for most of my friends and family. The fact that she is not from the US also added an element of allure. Because she’s British and I am Jamaican, we are culturally more on par than the White “wigga” I dated previously. My family also seemed to find relief in the fact that she is British for similar reasons…after they got over the fact that she’s a woman.

N’jaila:  That’s pretty much my calling card. I think a lot of my partners and boyfriends felt like I was something dangerous and unattainable. When I was younger I was a complacent fetish object. I figured “at least he likes me until he finds something Blacker, kinkier or more like Beyonce.”

I remember when I was a freshman in college I was dating this Japanese man, a foreign student.  He had a very odd fixation on all things Black.  From a almost cult-like obsession with rappers and basketball players to an extensive collection of “vintage” Black pornography.  I felt like I was just the interactive part of his collection. Looking back I’m pretty ashamed that I put up with that for as long as I did simply because, “he liked me” and well at least he liked Black people instead of looking down on us.

I think the only group of men I’ve felt alienated from was White men.  Many of my Black male friends would make jokes that my college campus was an “elephant’s graveyard” because there were so many Black women with White men. What they meant was White men on my campus were taking the Black women that no one else wanted.  To be seen with a White man in their eyes was to accept that Black men had given up on you and you just had to scavenge for what ever you could find.  I always felt there’s a bit of true feelings in jest.

I’ve always felt the perception was a Black man was with a non-Black woman because she desired him so, a Black woman was with a non-Black man because she was desperate.

Cheryl Lynn: Nothing is off-limits. Still, if I brought home a white man? There would be jokes. Oh, how there would be jokes! The only limits I have are self-imposed. I like the men that like me. At first that limit was set to black and Latino men. Then the limit was changed to allow Native American men and Pacific Islanders as a broader selection of men started asking me out. Now that I’ve moved to a white/Asian neighborhood, I occasionally find South Asian dudes checking me out. I’m still trying to get used to that! The limit might change again.

Helena: I agree with Cheryl. If I brought a white man home there would be jokes for days. I mean they’d talk about him to his face and expect him to either laugh it off or join in. The crazy thing is that even though all I’ve ever brought home in my adult dating life is black men, if anybody were to date a white man in my family it’d be me. Or at least that’s what they think. It’s part of me being “east coast” now I think. They assume that every college educated person north east of the Mason Dixon is mixing it up. But since college all I’ve dated is black men with the occasional Nuyorican, which weirdly I never counted as “interracial dating.” But in Los Angeles if I dated a Mexican man it’d be very interracial.

Andrea: I don’t recall any men of color being “off-limits” to me. As I said earlier, other men of color were/are simply seen by my family as not fitting into the Black/White schema that’s set up as the standard for IR relationships. So, it really wasn’t “off-limits” so much as “not considered”–other men of color were/are invisible to my family, especially my mom. My friends…like I said, they know how I roll, so they wouldn’t be surprised by any race or ethnicity of man in my life.

Sewere: The first strong reaction to dating a non-Nigerian I got was from my mother who was opposed to it. The funny thing was that it started out with a picture of me and a great friend of mine, who is Thai-American. We weren’t even dating but my mother saw a picture of us together and immediately assumed we were dating. I didn’t dissuade her of the dating part but I quickly tore down that misconception as soon as it raised its ugly head. I basically took the time to explain to her why such views were abhorrent and why she sounded almost the same as the people who mistreated her children because of our ethnicity.  It wasn’t an easy job and I know it isn’t entirely over but I do know dating someone who isn’t Nigerian is going to be an uphill battle.

Now the rest of my family think I’m Mr. United Nations because I’ve dated a diversity of women but I was really heartened when my sister noticed that the common thread with all the women I’ve had serious relationships with is that they’ve all been compassionate and kind women. Unfortunately, the only other negative reactions I’ve had have been from a co-worker and a friend of a cousin (which I’ve discussed here before), and I think I’ve said before although they were both black women, I think I can appreciate the complexities of black women’s experiences of being rejected by the world and the sense of betrayal (if I can use that phrase) of being rejected by black men.

Dani: I was recently in Latin America with my boyfriend, whose family is from the country we were visiting. He spent a lot of his childhood there, goes back every few years, etc. In terms of phenotype, he is white – white ethnic, yes, but white. His parents immigrated to the States as adults and he identifies as Latino. Talking with him about race and ethnicity and language and culture and access to passing has been a real eye-opener for me, and it’s clarified for me the way in which “blackness” continues to hold its own distinct place beneath the “people of color” umbrella. We live in the Bay Area, where pairings of black women and white men are common. But when we were on vacation, I got what Paul Mooney would call my nigger wake-up call. We were detained by a military police officer who had observed my boyfriend smoking what he was convinced was marijuana (it was a cigarillo) and in turn responded by trying to prove I was either selling drugs or a prostitute. (Why else would the two of us be together?) The day before, he had gotten a knowing laugh and a “That’s not your girlfriend” when he told a black woman trying to sell him mango on the beach that he wanted to wait till his girlfriend got back to see what I wanted. We were stared at — especially while on the Caribbean coast where black people comprise upwards of 70% of the population – simply because the way we interacted confused people. We both look like we could be from that country. But there, people who look like him and people who look like me don’t often have open, intimate relationships unless the person who looks like me is getting paid for her time.

Kadian: My current partner and I always illicit strange reactions. We’re of different racial backgrounds; from different countries and cultures; and we’re also two women with an age gap of 24 years. So yeah, unless we’re at a gay event, people usually don’t assume that we are together, certainly not romantically. I am most frustrated when we are in a predominately White or upper class environment because some people tend to address my partner rather than me. This has happened to us both in the US and UK. A few months ago, we went out to eat in the UK. I went up to the maitre’d to let him know that I had made a reservation. The maitre’d then proceeded to address my White partner. Even after she told the maitre’d that I made the reservation, he continued to speak to her rather than me.  It’s like I wasn’t there. We’ve also been in stores where we’ve been treated as if we are two separate strangers who happened to come in at the same time. It doesn’t matter how close I stand to her, how much I smile at her or make googley eyes. I’m getting tired of saying “I’m with her.”

On a lighter note, I had an amusing experience walking down the street with my partner as we approached a group of good-looking Black men.  As we passed, one of them stopped me and started to ask for my name. Before I could answer, my partner turned around to look at him. He noticed the look and said, “oh, are you with her?” I smiled and said, “yes”. He apologized and joined his friends. That’s one of the more respectful reactions I have had. On the streets of DC, this kind of thing happened frequently, but was often filled with more hostility and cursing. A lot of it is about gender as much as it is about race. I constantly wonder how many of those men would have approached me if my partner was a White man rather than a White woman.

As for minorities that are “off-limits”/”forbidden”–pretending that I’m not married–I would be less likely to pursue a relationship with a South Asian man. Having a deep understanding of many South Asian cultures (even being part Indian myself), the cultural differences and racial perceptions of Blacks is too much of a headache to deal with. The impression that I have received from friends is that Blacks are acceptable as friends, but we don’t become family members.

Want more? Jump to part 3, or view all conversations.

Welcome to the Black panel on Interracial Dating.  Our panelists are:

N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Damon Young, better known as The Champ and one of two VerySmartBrothas; Ashley – longtime reader and friend of the blog; Cheryl Lynn, Digital Femme extraordinare, rabblerouser, and longtime friend of the blog; Andrea Plaid – our own Sexual Correspondent; Dani – long time friend of the blog; Sewere – long time commenter, one time contributor, and friend of the blog; Tami Winfrey Harris, long time contributor and editor of Love Isn’t Enough and What Tami Said; Kadian Pow, friend of the blog and occasional contributor, and Helena Andrews, author of Bitch is the New Black.

N’jaila: I always thought that interracial meant when a non-White dates a White person.  I think there were a lot more positive representations of Black men with White women than the other way around.  

Damon: It’s possible that Pittsburgh, Pa is a cultural vacuum. Actually, “possible” isn’t the right word. “More than fucking likely” fits a little bit better. I’m bringing this up because, while I’ve always been aware that people of different races could date, sleep with, and marry each other, it never really entered my consciousness as something that people actually did until I got to college. I even remember having a slight crush on a white classmate in 8th grade, but never approaching her or even mentioning it to anybody because, well, that’s just not what people did.

What made this feeling even weirder was that it wasn’t rooted in any racial hang-ups and/or neurosis. It — interracial dating — just didn’t compute as a possibility because I never saw any of my peers do it. I guess it’s kind of like the KFC Double Down in that way. I wouldn’t have fathomed that you could make a chicken/meat/chicken sandwich until I actually saw it done.

Ashley: I always joke that I didn’t “discover” race until I attended Howard University. Sure, I knew the different colors of the ‘racebow’, but I didn’t know what it meant for me or my peers.  I grew up in a predominantly white suburb in Michigan (right outside of Detroit and not too far from 8 mile…). There were a ton of interracial relationships in my family. For the longest time I assumed my white aunts were just fair-skinned black women. Our family didn’t talk about race, but we were still “black” (if that makes sense). Meaning, you could catch anything from B.I.G to Bill Withers on the stereo on any given day. So the messages that I received were that it was, “all good.” I don’t recall any funny looks or whispered conversations about the interracial couples in our family. My uncles didn’t run to the family bbq expecting an award for bringing a woman of a different race around. It was something we were just all used to seeing.

Cheryl Lynn: The topic of interracial relationships wasn’t (and still isn’t) a topic that is discussed in my family. Still, I definitely got the impression that that there were interracial relationships that weren’t an issue and interracial relationships that were. Romantic relationships between blacks and Latinos were/are so common in my family and community that I often forget that they actually are interracial relationships. My family and friends have never frowned upon romantic relationships between blacks and whites…but it is a thing. It’s an elephant in the room.  I remember the raised eyebrows when I went to the prom with a white guy. It was the only time I dated a white guy and the only time I ever got those raised eyebrows. Once I brought home an ethnically/racially ambiguous Asian guy. My mom was really sweet, but as soon as he left asked, “What is he?”  I told her “He’s not white.”  And that was all the answer she needed.  But if you bring a white person home, there are little jokes, little looks. Nothing mean, but your relationship is marked as different. The one exception? If your significant other is gay. I guess there’s a minority requirement…but they don’t care what minority!

Andrea: My maternal family–especially my mom and aunts, who were the last two generations to see that “whites-only” sign racism in the US–let me know that it was not OK to get with the ofay. Other men of color were seen as “not quite” what the fam wanted to see me bring home to them. But my mom also said that, if she had her preference in seeing an interracial couple–like you, N’jaila, she thought of “interracial” as PoC and White pairings–she’d much rather see a Black woman with a White Man than a Black man with a White woman. In her mind, the Black woman is “getting hers.”

Mind you, none of these opinions mattered to me. I’ve been interracially dating and mating since my senior year in high school. My senior prom date was a White guy who asked me to go. I told my mom, and she adamantly said no. Determined to go to prom, I told my date to meet me there. I lied to Mom about going with anyone, insisting that I was going with my girl crew. She bought me the dress and accessories. I went and had a great time.  Only when I casually displayed the prom photo did Mom figure it out. By then, what could she say? ::shrug:: My first kiss was with a White guy. My first sexual partner was a White guy. My ex-lovers have spanned and still span the “racebow” (love that phrase, Ashley!). The only person I ever loved deep down–and who loved me back–was a White woman. My long-term relationships, including my marriage, have been with White men. And no, I wasn’t moving up any socio-economic ladder with these pairings.

Dani: I went to a predominately white school, K-12. Of the maybe three boyfriends I had in high school, two were white and one was Iranian. I went to prom three times – twice with white boys and once with a Korean-American guy. This was all in the early- and mid-90s. No one in my family commented on this, as far as I remember. Neither did friends, as it was understood that the dominant culture at my school was not black. I can only remember one black boy in my grade the whole time I was in that district. In terms of family, my aunts who were married or otherwise attached to men were with black men, so that was presented as the norm. Being single was modeled as a normal, healthy thing, too. I remember looking through old photos with one of my aunts and coming across a picture of a white guy. She told me she had dated him in college. That would have been the 70s and she wasn’t talking about it in hushed tones or anything, so it didn’t seem particularly taboo. My mom and her sisters had grown up in the same predominately white school district I did, so having close friendships with white and non-black people wasn’t considered strange. Of course, dating people from school was something that I could do (though it wasn’t completely without problems) that wasn’t accepted for them in the 60s.

Tami:  I’m not sure that I received any messages growing up about IR dating. There are some IR relationships in my family, but the assumption likely was that I would eventually marry a black man (and I have), but in my youth I was a kid with an obsession for New Wave and English boys, so I doubt anyone would have been surprised had I brought home someone of a different race. I always grew up open to the idea of IR dating and did date people of various races when I was single.

Sewere: I didn’t grow up in a multi-racial country but a lot of the messages I got about interracial relationships were very similar to the messages I got about inter-ethnic relationships, which was “Don’t. Ever.” The reason was always the same, cultural differences are too difficult to overcome.

N’jaila:  I think there’s sometimes an assumption that dating White equates dating “up”, obviously this isn’t the case. I’ve heard a lot of non-Black people say that they don’t date Black people because of “cultural” issues which are usually racist assumptions that they can’t find a Black of the same educational background or in the same tax bracket.  Some non-Blacks also assume that especially Black women will be loud , crass and a walking Rap video 24/7.

There are so many ways that people decide what is of “high class”  and most of those definitions exclude Blackness even down to body types.  “Ghetto Booties” “Bamma Black”  are a few examples I can think of where Black bodies are degraded as innately low class.  I think certain looks and types can date out a lot more easily than others.

I’ve always found it funny when non-Black men give examples of the Black women they would date. “Oh well, if I would date a black woman she would have to be like Beyonce” as if to say the run of the mill Black woman wouldn’t cut it.  Apparently even though they work at the shoe section at Sears, a black woman would have to be a light bright millionaire to get with them. Puh-lease#

Damon: From the common (and completely off-base) stereotype that black men sprint to non-black women the moment we sign up for our 401k’s to the fact that all of the recent discussion about black women “dating out” seems to be targeted towards upper-middle class black women living in major metropolitan areas, the class elephant has been present for each of the last, I don’t know, 250 interracial relationship conversations I’ve been involved in. No one seems to give a damn about who non-degreed and/or working class people date (well, no one seems to give enough of a damn to have a multi-layered discussion about it).

Also, as N’jaila touched on above, there’s (reportedly) a strong correlation between a man’s social class and the physical features he desires most in a woman. Basically — and this is argued to be true among all races of men — the more money a man makes, the more likely that he’s going to be more attracted (and more likely to marry) taller and thinner women. Apparently, the theory states, lower status men tend to desire “thicker” women more because their thickness suggests a fertility than will allow her to have more children to help them work on the farm or some shit.

This may in fact just be some evolutionary psychology gobbledygook, but this theory might have relevance when trying to understand how class, race, sex, and dating are intertwined.

Ashley:  I think class plays a huge role! It seems that the more money a black person has, the better their options are of dating outside of their race (if that’s what they want to do). I’ll argue, though, that non-blk folks can generally date outside of their race regardless of class. It seems like it’s just much easier.

Sewere: Definitely, there were implicit messages regarding interracial dating based on the false hierarchy of races i.e. white at the top, black at the bottom and everything else in-between. The general idea from what I can recall, was that dating someone white was generally better than someone who is black even though non-Nigerians were generally viewed as lacking grounded culture (whatever that meant).

Andrea:  I completely agree that class plays a role in these conversations. I think it plays out largely, though, in terms of educational privilege (getting a bachelor’s degree and beyond), if not in terms of financial privilege (like working as a VP in a corporate environment and the disposable income that goes with that). That’s what Ralph Richard Banks meant by, “the reality is, if you’re a college-educated Black woman, you have less in common with the guy you grew up with from the neighborhood who’s driving the UPS truck and more in common with the White guy who sat next to you in history class in college.” Banks is, in arguing for (middle- and upper-middle class) Black women to “date/marry out,” for, really, keeping the social classes as they are. To him, that glue and gateway is that bachelor’s-and-beyond education. Wrapped in that is the idea the IR couple with similar educational backgrounds would “have more to talk about” and find out that they have more in common, which is seen as the basis of a possible relationship.

Tami: A magazine like Essence seeks to preserve the black middle to upper class. While there is plenty of disdain for the dating and procreation habits of the working and lower class, I’m not sure the “powers that be” really give a rat’s ass whether a single mom in Englewood, Chicago, gets married. This marriage thing is a “crisis” because it impacts the middle and higher classes and our ability to assimilate into the majority-white status quo.

Cheryl Lynn: Honestly? It doesn’t factor into the conversations I have at all. It’s funny. I’m surrounded by people in interracial relationships, but there’s very little dating outside of one’s socio-economic status–if any. And women who date outside of their class–who date “up”–are mocked as trophies. I’d feel a little awkward and out of place dating a very wealthy person who wasn’t black or Latino. But I feel like there would be enough of a shared connection culturally with a rich black or Latino man that I wouldn’t feel strange. But I’m coming from a very strange place. I was raised working class, went to private school with rich kids (scholarship), and in later years watched my parents “move on up” to “comfortable.” Long story short, I’d feel strange dating someone poor or rich that isn’t black. I can relate to working class or middle-class men.

Latoya:  To break the mod wall for a sec – Class is huge for me, and it’s one of the reasons why I generally don’t get involved in these discussions.  The “Educated Black Woman” they keep talking about isn’t me.  I’d like to think I have some kind of gray matter up there, but I’m a college drop out. If it weren’t for grace, luck, and the internet, I’d be just like most of the folks in my fam and friends circles, clerking it for an hourly wage at some day gig and making it up to myself on the weekend. And the guy I am partnered with is also a college drop out (though he intends to finish),  so we don’t fit the paradigm.

Helena: The class issue can be huge. I grew up partially in South Central, Los Angeles but went to a very diverse private school in downtown LA. I remember my cousins warning me not to bring home an “head bangers” which I assumed was code for crazy white people? Iono. But we only had ONE white kid in our class and he was from like New Zealand or something. My class was black, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, etc.

The issue also comes up with my family because we are acutely aware that my great great grandmother’s children were fathered by a white man. My great grandmother, who lived to 100 and who I knew well, looked white to white people. I remember visiting her in her “assisted living” facility and her telling us about how the old white man down the hall was bad-mouthing “those people” and she’s all like, “what people?” Anywho despite being very fair she married very dark skinned men, which I’m assuming was somewhat intentional on her part. Once she passed a family member called my grandmother to ask about my great grandmother’s father, who we know was white and who most likely owned members of our family. My grandmother was livid when this other family member said something to the tune of, “you can’t help who you love.” Love between master and slave was unthinkable to my grandmother.

Dani: In my experience, age and geography have been bigger factors than class, though I guess it’s all related. Through college and most of my 20s, all my serious boyfriends were black. As I’ve gotten older – in the last five years or so – that’s changed. In my late 20s and early 30s, I’ve moved a lot for work and have been part of several cities’ transient class, in which I’ve tended to spend time with people who are also not native to those cities and who do work similar to mine. In these circles, it’s been less likely that I meet black men, at least black men who aren’t colleagues. I also realize that a large part of not dating black men in recent years is related to having ended up on the West Coast, where interracial dating – especially among people who aren’t from here – is apparently required. During a phone conversation years ago, a black man who I had dated and who had moved to the Bay Area from the East Coast boasted about how much access he had to non-black women now that he was out west, and how much he was enjoying that. I remember asking who black women were with if black men were scrambling to be with white and Asian women and Latinas. He kind of snorted and said, “I don’t know. Each other, I guess.” He was going out of his way to be an asshole and I get that, but now that I live here, I see what he meant. Black men and women to seem to have a kind of aversion to each other out here. I still haven’t figured it out.

Kadian: I can’t ever remember my family discussing interracial relationships or even voicing an opinion. Perhaps because no one in my family ever dated outside their “race”? My family is Jamaican, and they pretty much have an issue with dating outside the culture. So even Black Americans are seen as culturally very different. However, the message that I received from the wider society/culture is that “interracial” pretty much means the romantic mixing of Blacks & Whites with no other real attention to other “racial” pairings.  I do remember finding such pairings in film and television exciting, but somehow doomed to fail.

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