CeCe and several friends, all black, were walking to the grocery store on June 5th, 2011 when white adults standing in the patio area of a South Minneapolis bar started screaming racist and transphobic slurs at the youth. CeCe, who is only 23 years old, approached the group and replied that she and her friends would not tolerate hate speech. In response, one of the white women said “I’ll take you bitches on” and smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. The broken glass sliced all the way through CeCe’s cheek. A fight ensued between the adults and the young people after this initial attack and one of the attackers, Dean Schmitz, was fatally stabbed.

As if it were not sufficiently tragic that a group of young people were subjected to such severe violence and that Dean Schmitz lost his life, police arriving at the scene arrested CeCe, denied her adequate medical treatment, interrogated her for hours, and placed her in solitary confinement. In the aftermath of being attacked, she was not treated with care, but launched into another nightmare. The only person arrested that night, she has since been charged with two counts of 2nd degree murder. Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman has the power to drop these charges, a choice he made in multiple other clear instances of self-defense this year, but he has not yet done so.

CeCe’s story is a portrait of the United States Criminal Justice System. Her story is what is meant when we are told that transgender people, especially transgender women of color, experience disproportionate rates of police harassment, profiling, and abuse. She is living one of the stories rolled into statistics like: trans people are ten to fifteen times more likely to be incarcerated than cisgender (not transgender) people, or nearly half of African American transgender people have spent time in jail or prison.

These statistics are the result of the all of the ways that transgender people, especially transgender people of color, are denied access to the resources and opportunities that we need to live healthy lives free of violence, discrimination, and oppression. Transgender people consistently experience high levels of harassment in school, extreme levels of unemployment due to discrimination and lack of education, denial of competent medical care, inability to change identification documents, and disproportionate violence and harassment. Nevertheless, for generations transgender people, especially transgender women of color, have been at the forefront of movements against police brutality, white supremacy, economic injustice, and for queer liberation and gender self-determination.

CeCe is one of these leaders. She is the everyday hero that is the college student, working her way toward the career of her dreams. She is a femme icon, reminding her many friends and loving community that it’s never the wrong time to look fabulous, even as she is unjustly held in jail and awaiting trial for unwarranted charges. She is the center of a growing community of supporters in Minneapolis and nationally, inspiring action and solidarity in our joint struggles to (in her words) “be able to help and comfort someone who is unsure about his or her own sexual identity and preference…eliminate people’s fears of being victims of hate crimes and domestic violence…[and] help someone to accept and be comfortable as whomever they choose to be.”

Today, we are faced with the opportunity and the obligation to challenge racism and transphobia. Locally, we have and will continue to support CeCe every step of the way- from ensuring she has access to hormones in jail to packing the courtroom at every one of her hearings. Nationally, an increasing number of support groups and individuals are following CeCe’s case and demanding that Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman drop the charges against her. In Minneapolis and the rest of the country we aren’t only watching Freeman; we are standing up beside CeCe, a leader in our community, and waiting for him to do the same.

For more information and new developments: http://supportcece.wordpress.com
To tell Michael Freeman you support dropping the charges against CeCe
call: 612-348-5561
email: citizeninfo@co.hennepin.mn.us
fax: 612-348-2042

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.

The videos are poignant, and sometimes painful recollections of what it meant to come out. Siblings waiting for a moment of discussion that never comes; mothers wrestling with their religious beliefs and the love of their children; and children not coming out to their parents – or waiting for one parent to die to share the truth with the other parent.

There’s a great quote from Kevin: “It’s not good enough to be supportive of these things in general, or supportive of people in general. We tend to think the absence of hostility or the absence of negativity is support; but that’s not true. That’s nothing, it’s neutral. We, straight people, have to take responsibility for providing support.”

The video focused on Latinos (which is in English, subtitled in Spanish) featured Gisella Imar Contreras, a young woman who started life as male. Gisella’s story starkly differed from the others in the series, in that she was unable to reconcille with her family, and ultimately had to sever her family ties after coming out. Melanie Davis, also featured in the video, talked about how trying to conform to a heterosexual lifestyle drove her to alcohol addiction.

In the African-American focused video, Beryl “BJ” Jones talks about coming out in the 80s, and being challenged for the custody of her daughter. She lost custody – her daughter was raised by her mother, and she currently has a grandchild she isn’t allowed to visit. But most of the stories here focused on love, and the idea of creating “a beloved community.”

Happy Coming Out Day, all. Please love yourself – and let someone else know that they are loved.

My name is justin adkins.

I am a transgender man who was arrested at the Occupy Wall Street Protest October 1st on theBrooklyn Bridge. This was my first arrest. This was the second weekend I participated in the Occupy Wall Street protest. I have been coming down on the weekends because I work 2 full-time jobs to make ends meet. One of those jobs is as Assistant Director of the Multicultural Center at Williams College in Massachusetts. The other is as a website developer.

I was toward the front of the march and after being trapped by the police on the bridge; I was able to watch as they arrested people one-by-one. I went peacefully when it was clear that it was my turn. My arresting officer, Officer Creer, found out I was born female when I yelled that information to the legal observer on the bridge. My arresting officer asked what I meant when I told the legal observer that I was “transgender” so I told him that I was born female. He asked what “I had down there”. Since it is a rude and embarrassing question to ask someone about his/her genitals no matter what the situation, I simply told him again “I was born female”. He asked, appropriately, if I wanted a male or female officer to pat me down. I told him it was fine if he patted me down. He then turned and asked a female officer, I believe her name is Officer Verga, to pat me down explaining to her that I am transgender. She patted me down and then preceded to refer to me as “she” even though I kept correcting her that my preferred pronoun is “he”. Luckily she disappeared after about 40 minutes, as I sat cuffed at the apex of the Brooklyn Bridge with hundreds of others.

Once we arrived at Precinct 90 in Brooklyn, the male officer taking everyone’s belongings asked if it was ok to search me. I said. “yes” and he proceeded to respectfully empty my pockets. I was arrested with a group of 5 other guys, and once they got us to the precinct, they initially put me in a cell with those same men. They asked if that was ok with me and I said yes. About 5 minutes after they took the cuffs off and shut the cell door an officer came back to the cell to move me. When he opened the door and looked my way, I was aware of what was happening. I knew that my transgender status would potentially be an issue once at the jail, which is why I told the legal observer that I was transgender. The officer glanced at me motioning to come out of the cell and then told me to put my hands behind my back as my fellow protestors looked on in bewilderment.

As we walked out past the other protestors waiting to have their pockets emptied, one woman looked at me with a puzzled look, we had connected on the long drive around Brooklyn as they tried to figure out where to take us. I told her that it looked like transgender people got “special treatment”. Within the first 15 minutes of being at precinct 90 I was being segregated and treated differently from the rest of the protestors arrested.

They took me away from the cellblock where they had all of the protestors locked up and brought me to a room with 2 cells and a bathroom. One small cell was empty and the large cell had about 8 men who had been arrested on charges not related
to the protest. Unlike me, these men had been arrested for a variety of crimes, some violent. When I entered the room they had me sit down in a chair on the same portion of the wall as the restroom, and then handcuffed my right wrist to a metal handrail. I thought that this was a temporary arrangement as they tried to find me a separate cell as part of some protocol regarding transgender people, which I later discovered does not exist in New York City. After about an hour I realized that they had no intention of moving me. I remained handcuffed to this bar next to the bathroom for the next 8 hours.

The cells, on the other side of the precinct where they had locked up the other 69 protestors, did not have working toilets. Every person who had to use the toilet was brought to the one next to where I had been cuffed. This was not only disgusting, but also embarrassing. The smell of urine was so strong that I, and the men locked up in the cell in the room that I was in, mentioned the odor on more than one occasion.

Once they started bringing women in to use the bathrooms, a short young female officer, who was in charge of people locked up in the same room, harshly turned my chair around with my arm still locked to the railing but now pinned behindmy back. She said that she knew it hurt but that they were bringing in women to use the restroom and she could not have me watching. I had no interest in watching anyone use the bathroom, and every-time a male had come into use the restroom I had respectfully turned away. This process of people coming in and out to use the restroom went on for the full 8 hours.

I was distinctly treated differently than the other protestors during my entire time at Precinct 90 in Brooklyn. At one point in the night, all of the protestors were given a peanut butter sandwich and water. I asked for a sandwich three times but no one acknowledged my request. I do not know when or how long those men were being held but I was there for eight hours and had sat on the bridge for about 2 hours and was never once offered water or a sandwich as my fellow protestors received.

At one point the woman I had spoken with earlier was brought in to use the toilet. When she entered the room she looked over
at me, shocked, and asked why I was attached to the railing. I told her again that it was the “transgender special”. She clearly understood that I was being discriminated against because of my transgender status. She asked the female officer in the room why I couldn’t be given my own cell and the officer said “you don’t know why he is locked up here” the woman said that she did know and that I should at least be given my own cell if they were not going to house me with the male protestors I was originally arrested with.

Throughout the night it became clear that they wanted my fellow protestors to think that I did something criminally wrong. That I had done something different from them. That I was not just a peaceful protestor exercising my rights on that bridge. That I deserved to be handcuffed to a railing on the side of the precinct with violent criminals. Everyone seemed to wonder why I had been separated. When other officers chatted amongst themselves about me, one officer suspected aloud that I was a “ringleader”. The woman officer stood a few times outside the glass wall with the door open as male officers asked about me. It appeared that she told them that I was transgender as they gawked, giggled and stared at me. This was embarrassing and humiliating. Only I have the right to out myself as a transgender person. She was using my identity to get a laugh with those she thought would find me curious and freakish.

At one point in the night a young man who had participated in the earlier NYC Slutwalk march to protest against explaining
or excusing rape by referring to a women’s clothing, came into use the bathroom wearing a mini-skirt. He was one of the protestors arrested with me on the bridge in the Occupy Wall Street March. The officer escorting him started poking fun at his mini-skirt at which point I explained that he looked good and the skirt was fine. When he sat down to go to the bathroom the officers laughed even more saying that they had “seen everything tonight”. The attitude of the officers made me realize that as much as I needed to urinate it would not be a good idea to do so. The space did not feel safe. By the time I was released I had not gone to the bathroom for 11 hours.

I was more than comfortable and safe with the 3 men I was initially put in a cell with. They were nice and we had a lot in common. If the officers concern was about my safety, I perceived I was in much more danger in the accommodations they gave me–away from my fellow protestors. Additionally, I was made fun of and treated differently throughout the entire process.

At about 2 am I was released with a desk appearance ticket and charged with disorderly conduct. To my knowledge I was the only one out of 70 processed at Precinct 90 who only received one ticket. The rest received 2 or 3 tickets, most including refusing to disperse and blocking a roadway. Why was I treated differently than the other 69 protestors? The only reason that I was treated differently was that I was transgender.

The NYC police department needs to have a written protocol and train its officers on how to treat transgender people. Most trans people who are arrested are trans women of color. Without a protocol all of us have a tough time fighting against the systematic oppression of the militarized police. A written protocol would help all of us. No one should experience the blatant discrimination and embarrassment that I did as I practiced my constitutional rights as an American citizen.

Solidarity,
justin adkins

http://justinadkins.com

Welcome to the Beyond Marriage Panel.

Our panelists are: LM, long time commenter and friend of the blog; CV, LM’s partner; Andrea Plaid, our sexual correspondent; Tami of What Tami Said and Love Isn’t Enough; Nonso Christian Ugbode, friend of the blog and occasional contributor; and Lisa Factora-Borchers, friend of the blog and blogger/author at My Ecdysis.

LM: Marriage is a byproduct of a healthy, committed relationship — at least in the life I’m trying to live. Of course people get married for all kinds of other reasons too, some of which don’t even include that notion. No matter what, for a marriage to have legs, work is going to be involved… and to the extent that happens, it’s a healthy phenomenon. But people can do this without being married, per se, and I fear too many people focus on a wedding ceremony or piece of paper instead of building a healthy relationship based on shared values and goals.

Andrea: Considering that marriage isn’t a legal option for some women–I’m thinking of cisgender lesbians and trans women–it’s certainly can’t be considered a solution for all women. That’s what these articles about Us Negresses and Our Marriage Problem™ seem to conveniently forget. Another inconvenient truth these pieces continue to forget is the concept of agency: some of us man-loving Black women may not want to marry. A simple phrase would do the trick: “x% of Black women who want to marry and are able to marry have yet to do so.” So that takes out those of us who can’t or just don’t want to. A third inconvenient truth is marrying another Black person isn’t the solution for Black communities, either. A majority of married couples in Black communities are monoracial–and that’s still not working out as far as fighting poverty, getting better schools for Black children, guaranteeing better sexual and reproductive health for Black people, and the rest of what plagues Black communities. On a microlevel, Blackness is no guarantee that two Black people will get along. Perfect example: my mom. She very much believes this narrative of Black Love Conquers All™–and has only dated and twice married Black men. She’s just divorced my now ex-stepfather. However, marrying interracially is no panecea, either: I have a white ex-husband.

CV: Merriam-Webster defines marriage as “the state of being united to a person of the opposite sex as husband or wife in a consensual and contractual relationship recognized by law”. Of course there are nuances, specifically with regard to whether the person one is united to is of the same or opposite sex. The marriage ceremony, for me, is just that-a ceremony, and I don’t think that alone will solve any issues with black women and our community. However, there is something to be said for that actual marriage and the work and commitment it involves towards the fulfillment of shared ideals and goals, which I believe does go a long way.

Tami: I think there is too much talk about marriage going on and not enough talk about building healthy relationships and how people get their romantic needs met. As Andrea points out, not every black woman can or wants to get married. And black-on-black coupling is not a guarantee of marital success. So, I think a more productive conversation for a magazine geared at black women to have is how black women can build healthy romantic lives within traditional marriage, as well as outside of it. Or perhaps we could simply stop viewing anything short of traditional marriage as a woman’s failure. I do understand that many black women do want to get married. I did. But this hyper-focus on walking down the aisle seems unhealthy. It preferences a ceremony over personal well-being.

Nonso: There’s not a lot of talk about the effects of bad marriages; both on the couples in them, and the potential offspring of that marriage. The logic perhaps being “even if the union was incompatible at best, at least the kids started in a ‘complete’ home.” Being the offspring of a marriage that only kinda worked and then collapsed, I have always actively dismissed marriage from a very young age. And of course add the same-sex loving angle and the journey to that altar just always seemed liked too much work to me. I’ve never really seen marriage presented as a solution, so much as that final key you need to make it into society. Once you had that key you were the Jeffersons moving up, or any number of pop culture definitions of family, for the most part marriage is presented as a prerequisite for family.

LM: Not in my perception. My wife and I were together more than four years before we got married and anyone who was around us for any length of time could see that we were committed to each other and living as partners, a la a married couple. So the wedding itself was just an event — not an unimportant one, but not one that altered our standing in the eyes of others. The fact that our relationship was interracial had no bearing before or after — once people had been around us. There may have been a few raised eyebrows early.

Andrea: By the time my ex-husband and I married, I just started speaking to my mom. I think it was my ex who encouraged me to speak with my mom again because he wanted to meet her. They hit it off rather well: she felt comfortable to ask those “racial” questions about the inner workings of white privilege. And he found a kindred conversationalist.

My interaction with his family after we married was fraught with unspoken tensions, especially from his younger sister who, I suspect, harbored a secret fantasy of reuniting their own divorced family–and my Black self played no part in that fantasy. Also, for a while, I didn’t go to his family gatherings because he knew how openly racist quite a few of his extended family members were. (”I can just feel the n-word on the tip of their tongues,” the ex-husband would say.) They were polite to me when I finally went to the gatherings, but the ex-husband and I had our Racist Senses on high alert around them.

CV: I don’t think so, at least not that I noticed.

LFB: Our families treated us the same, but strangers treated us like a delightful home-cooked experiment. His German-French-Irish background and my Filipino-Spanish heritage caught the eye of friends and strangers alike who would stop and ask if we were married. And then we’d hear, “Oh I wonder how your children will look” for the millionth time. It wasn’t discriminatory, but it was certainly annoying to deal with our interracial marriage as fodder for small talk.

Welcome back to the final South Asian Panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

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

Rohin: I think you’re right, in that there’s a notable scarcity of accurate depictions of South Asian Americans, with Mindy Kaling’s character on The Office serving as one of the more accurate depictions.

I also think you’re on-point with those observations. And I think the reason South Asians are presented as “hopelessly single” is because making them asexual makes them an easy fit for the model minority archetype. “She’s too busy for love because she pursuing her M.D.!”

But maybe all of these representations are sending any number of irresponsible messages to the effect of, “You might not be American enough unless you fit either of these prescribed roles.” Scarier: There are South Asian Americans who are currently buying into these characterizations.

RB: First of all, I would disagree that depictions of South Asian Americans are rare. Considering the fact we constitute less than one percent of the population, I would argue that we’re increasingly well-represented in the media industry. With that being said, the quality of those depictions is still open for debate. Yes, many South Asians on-screen still end up in the arms of white folks, especially attractive women. It seems obvious that this is because 1. Most American TV shows and movies are marketed towards white people and 2. Indians are slowly being viewed as one of the more “acceptable” candidates for interracial relationships with whites, likely because of our generally above-average socio-economic status.

But I don’t think you can blame Hollywood for the fact most Indians would prefer a white partner to one that’s black or Latino. Preference for fair-skin is deeply ingrained in Indian society, a remnant of thousands of years of occupation and a lasting colonial hangover. Watch any Bollywood movie and the actors could pass for Persian, Latin or even white in some cases. I’m sure there are Indian kids sitting at home watching these shows and thinking that finding a hot white guy/girl would constitute success. That is tragic, but sadly also brings them in line with most of the U.S. population.

Anna: Well it certainly benefits the fair and lovelies. The female protagonists are never as “black” as I am. It’s interesting, in Bollywood, female stars are pasty. On “E.R.”, when they finally got an Indian doctor on that show, Parminder Nagra was fabulously brown. I love America. Incidentally, I believe her character married a black doctor, not a white person.

Honey: I really think it depends on generation, geography, and community. And I don’t agree that the depictions of SAA are always partnered with White people. I often see them partnered with another Asian person — which is just as annoying as seeing them patternly partnered with a White person.

In my communities and family, there is no “ideal partner.” It’s understood that our diaspora is complex, our dreams our complex, therefore dating is tremendously complex.

Neesha: See, dating is a huge issue in the South Asian community as a whole. The big question is still, “Are you allowed to date?” whether you’re an adult, or a teen still living at home. More parents are okay with dating, I think, now than ever before, but the dating – as far as I know (it’s been ages since I’ve even had to think about dating) is still pretty monitored and the parents still have a lot of input. But I do have a younger brother and he is dating – mostly white women because of where he lives. My parents are surprisingly okay with this. It could be because he’s the youngest of three and they’re getting older and mellower. Because for my middle brother it was still a colossal battle to date white women.

Harbeer: I ignore pop culture and people who are heavily influenced by it. (I’m old! And I like nerds who’ve lived wild lives.)

Rohin: Honestly, people like who they like. Sometimes that might be you, but most of the time, probably not!

RB: I think a lot of South Asian people come to the dating issue with a lot baggage. When you are young there are only so many opportunities to interact with large group of your brown peers and after a certain age those interactions inevitably come accompanied by a certain amount of appraisal and sexual tension. Being rejected from a group you expect to accept you as you are is probably one of the most traumatic experiences one can go through.

Still, my general experience is that most Indian people seem to prefer to date within their race but are sometimes held back by their perceptions of what “other” desi folks are like. Almost every Indian kid thinks they are somehow “different” and that other Indians would never “get them.” My experience is that those are the people who 1. are mostly like to date outside their race and 2. have the least experience in India or among large groups of Indian people, which are inevitably more diverse than one would ever expect.

Neesha: Like Anna, a lot of my partner choice all throughout my dating years had to do with the way I grew up. The light/dark thing. I hated feeling like the ugly dark girl. I was that in my family. I was that in my community. I didn’t want to be that with my partner. The first time I ever even considered the possibility that I might actually be attractive to anyone was when I visited Jamaica. The first time anyone ever told me I was pretty was there – an immigration official. And he was looking at a picture of me as a little girl, when I was facing the most hostile racism I’d ever experienced in Canada from white folks, and when I was feeling the ugliest within my family and community. I think partner choice is incredibly complex – who we’re attracted to and why is based on so, so many factors.

Harbeer: I think Desi parents who want their offspring to partner up with Desis do themselves and their cause a big disservice by having us all grow up with this conception that we’re all each other’s de-sexualized “brothers and sisters.”

Our panelists are:

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

Rohin: Well, it depends.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• marrying white/fair-skinned leads to social/class mobility. This seems to be the most desired combination. Probably vestiges of Spanish & American colonization. You can still see this in the current obsession for skin whiteners and pop culture celebrities endorsing these products, or looking white in the Philippines.
• marrying foreigners can lead to opportunities to leave the country (Philippines), and earning currency that is at least double that of the Philippine peso. Remittances to the Philippines via migrant workers/immigrants to family is a billion dollar industry.
• hapa children have a kind of cache, esp bet. Filipino/White couples. They are the standard of beauty esp. in pop/celebrity culture. Fair skin, more caucasian features, etc.
• alternately, filipino/black hapa children (esp bet filipina and black “G.I.’s”) are discrimated against. This is consistent with a pervasive internal racism in the culture that considers dark skin as lower class. I’ve had to deal with all sorts of discriminatory remarks for having dark skin.

I am not aware of discussions around interracial relationships within the Filipino culture that examines these messages, except in academia and outside of the Philippines.

There is also discrimination towards “those women” that choose to marry foreigners.

When I moved to Canada as a teen, I didn’t meet a lot of Filipinos. We lived in a predominantly white suburban area.

Lisa: I was raised in Catholic schools and in predominantly White areas. There weren’t messages because there weren’t any alternatives or options. You had one choice and one choice alone. Same sex crushes or even curiosity was unheard of. As a brown girl, I didn’t see any other options – not in school, not in media, not in peer circles. It was the same face for me growing up – from celebrities to the boys who made my heart flutter : they were White because I wasn’t exposed to other alternatives. There were such strong messages about race, religion, status, class and education and, as a young girl, I believed them to be true. I didn’t question it despite that tiny voice inside me that knew something was wrong.

Ironically, it wasn’t until highschool and a mentor told me that she didn’t believe in interracial dating that I woke up. She said she just didn’t see it as right, good, appropriate for any person of one race to be with another person of another race, no excuses. I looked at my Brown skin and felt humiliated. I wanted to ask, “What about me?” I could count the number of non-White students in my highschool and they were all friends, but no one I wanted to date. It was my breaking point. I screamed inside and knew that there was more to life, and dating, than what was around me, but I had to figure it out on my own. The message was that interracial dating was countercultural and to do that, I’d have to do it on my own.

Neesha: I was not allowed to date. Period. I was expected to have an arranged marriage to an Indian, Punjabi, Sikh boy of the appropriate caste. Interracial dating/marriage never even entered my parents’ radar*, never mind forbidding me from it. They were so worried I might actually TALK to an Indian, Punjabi, Sikh boy of the appropriate caste who was not related to me by blood, that they couldn’t even fathom the idea of me dating a girl, or dating a boy who wasn’t even Indian, let alone of an entirely different racial category.

(*The only time/s it did were as cautionary tales: “Gurpreet [not her real name] ran off with a white boy and her father and uncles hunted her down and shot her in the face.” I heard many of these sorts of “honor” stories growing up. And the stories were always about Indian girls and white boys. It was almost as if there was no expectation that I could possibly date a black boy/girl – because you’re supposed to move up on the social ladder, right? Why would anyone want to move down? And in places like the Caribbean, parts of Africa, Britain, etc., where South Asians and black people are often in close quarters, there is a lot of trying to differentiate between “us” and “them” to the powers that be.)

Harbeer: My experience was much like what Neesha describes. My parents had an arranged marriage and assumed that they would pick (with our input) spouses for my two older sisters and me. We were expected to study, do our chores, have a little wholesome fun like sports or TV (but none of those kissy shows like soap operas) and study some more.

There were a couple of uncles who’d married white women in our community–one, a German immigrant, and the other a Jewish American. I bet those two aunties would have an interesting perspective in this forum…but to us kids, at least in our family, there were regular aunties (and even a bit cooler than “authentic” aunties because they were a little more laid back). They made efforts to assimilate and, as far as I could tell as a child, were treated as full members of the community. The kids from those two families were fully integrated into our community, but I have no knowledge of their lives in their respective German-immigrant and Jewish communities or their mothers’ sides of their families. I know that at least some of those kids have gone on to marry South Asian spouses from various parts of South Asia, but I can’t tell you about all of them (lots of kids in those families!)

There were other uncles who married Chicanas and African-American women–for love or for papers or both, I couldn’t tell you, because those women were not present in any public spaces that I can recall, nor were any aunties who may have married outside the Punjabi Sikh ethnicity present. There were some inter-caste couples, to be sure, but that’s about as crazy as it got.

Oh, wait! There was another couple that sometimes came to our gurudwara–but they were a special exception altogether! They were a Punjabi Jatt Sikh man and a white Sikh convert woman–both followers of Yogi Bhajan’s branch of Sikhi. Because they were so orthodox in their beliefs and practices (not to mention their all-white clothes, including turbans on both!) they were almost mythical, idealized creatures. Theirs seemed to be held up as an angelic, holy union.

There was always some kind of background noise about how it would be hard for your children if you married out. I had one secret girlfriend in high school–she was from a different state in India. My mother found out about her later and acts now like she knew all along–she still asks about her and regrets that we hadn’t lasted and will still say things like “She was such a nice girl,” even though she made no effort to get to know her when we were “friends” (i.e.dating).

Rohin: There definitely is the preference among Bengalis to settle down with other Bengalis. But again, growing up in the U.S. has made it so narrowing my dating pool down by cultural background, caste, religion, or any other attribute that a person really has no control over counterproductive to my end goal of not wanting to end up like Little Edie in Grey Gardens.

I always count it as an added blessing if I’m dating a man who I can converse with in Bengali, but never a dealbreaker otherwise.

RB: Like I said above, we view South India as basically its own country. North Indians are OK, but no more preferable most other Asian countries. There is an exception for Hindus, since my family is fairly religious. Faith would likely take precedence over race with regards to a future partner. I have an uncle married to a Sri Lankan Tamil lady and her background fits almost perfectly in Chennai, given the similarities in language and food among other things. I was warned by my grandmother to never marry a Muslim, but I think that would be more of a problem for a woman seeking a husband than myself.

Anna: My parents were very specific about what they wanted for us– Malayalee, Orthodox Christian husbands. Not Catholic, not Protestant, Orthodox. Considering the granularity of their religious preference, someone outside of our community was out of the question. Other South Asians were not an option. Other Indians, especially North Indians were not an option; “what do we have in common with them?”, my parents would ask. The four states which make up South India are linguistically, “culinarily”–yeah, I totes just made that up– and culturally similar, but that was irrelevant. My parents wanted someone exactly like us. Their respective families had been endogamous for centuries. Who the hell were we to deviate from that?

Once my father passed away, a hierarchy did emerge. “Orthodox Malayalee” was still top-gun, but Catholics and Protestants (Mar Thomas) came next. Pentecostal Christians were last. Interestingly enough, Tamil or other Christians from different Indian states were never considered.

Now that I’m ancient for an Indian girl and in my mid-30s, any Indian person will do. South Indian is preferable to North. Indian trumps all other South Asian nations except for maybe Sri Lanka…they “feel” a bit South Indian, especially the Tamils. The two taboos are (and always have been) African-Americans and Muslims.

Honey: It depends who you ask. Some of my Filipina friends in Canada would never date foreigners. It’s a shared values & culture thing. Filipinos have a very different approach to relationships that can be seen as conservative by white “mainstream”, western culture. My parents taught me that what is important is how the guy treats me. Who I dated depended on the various subcultures I ended up in in various stages of my life.

Lisa: It’s a slippery slope. In my Filipino family, all my cousins that lived in the Midwest fell in love with and married White women and men. My cousins on the coasts married all different kinds of people: White, Chinese, Filipino…It’s not so much ethnicity or one thing, it’s a combination of values that makes someone right/acceptable. I also think it’s about geography. What groups you submerge yourself in will have an enormous factor on who you are attracted to.

It’s especially different for Filipino Americans who are born in the United States but raised by Filipino standards. Marrying another Filipino was seen as ideal because it was parallel to marrying someone who would understand the racial and cultural factors of marriage. There wasn’t a hierarchy, but it certainly was a case by case basis of what was deemed acceptable or not.

I married a German/French/Irish man raised in a small country town in western Ohio. Despite my urban loving, Filipino blood, I have more values in common with him than anyone I’ve ever met.

Neesha: To my parents, dating even among South Asians, there were may hierarchies. Religion was a big one. Class, caste, region, language – all of these were factors. The ideal mate for me would have been a Punjabi, Indian, Sikh boy from the same caste. God forbid I ever dated a Muslim, for instance, and that meant I couldn’t ever date a Pakistani, a Bangladeshi, or anyone else from a predominantly Muslim country. Even though we’re all South Asians in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Caribbean, etc., there are definite no-nos when it came to dating and marriage. Even in terms of culture, my brother married a South Asian woman from Barbados and my mother is still grumbling about “See? She’s not really Indian – how would she know our customs and culture? If she were Indian, she would treat her mother-in-law with more respect.” Which, of course, is sheer crap because there are plenty of Indian women who treat their mothers-in-law with disdain and plenty of Bajan women who treat their mothers-in-law like gold. But it’s this idea that somehow the culture is preserved–that there’s some sort of purity–if you marry “in.”

Harbeer: Are we still talking about our families’ ideals when we were coming up, our families ideals now, or have we moved on to our own, actual experiences?

Within my family–well, at this point I am ancient and my parents are desperate for grandchildren (I mean, they want me to be happy!) so they would accept any woman who is capable of bearing children. Growing up, the hierarchy would have been Jatt Sikh, non Jatt Sikh, South Asian other, East Asian, then “Americans” (white, black, latina) on a case-by-case basis. My mother has suggested, in the past five to ten years, suggested that I find an East Asian wife because they are submissive and she’ll take good care of my mother’s darling son.

Culture was and is a big consideration–ideally, you’d want to bring someone into the family who would understand the jokes and the rituals. But my parents are hard core social justice activists and community leaders in their own right, and that is another facet of my partners they have taken pride in.

My two sisters were held to completely different standards. Being not just a son but the only son gives me extra leverage. And I’m still talking about marriage, not dating. There is no dating, except maybe (now) as a first step towards marriage.

As far as my own experiences go, I am so ornery and idiosyncratic that if some unlucky woman passes all my other tests (intelligence, politics, humor, kindness, courage, generosity, spirit, conviviality), well, there’s really no room left for any kind of ethnic discrimination. I am attracted to (very few!) whole individuals, not to any particular attribute, but I was really surprised to learn recently (at 35!) that hearing spoken Punjabi makes my ears perk up and my heart skip a beat. As for my history, like Honey, the people I’ve dated has depended on the various subcultures I’ve inhabited over the course of my life. They have all been individuals rather than members of an ethnicity to me, but only one has been an active part of my family life (and I part of hers) and differences in cultural background certainly became apparent in that case, but it was never anything insurmountable.

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 to the Mixed Race panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

Phil Djwa, technologist; Jozen Cummings, creator of the Until I Get Married blog; LM, long time commenter and friend of the blog; LB, friend of the blog; Jen Chau, Founder and Executive Director of Swirl and co-founder of Mixed Media Watch and Racialicious; N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Holly, contributor at Feministe; Ken, friend of the blog; and A.C., friend of the blog.

Phil: My mother was white from Canada and my father Chinese-Indonesian. It was a funny combination of totally being normalized and also sticking out. My family was interracial, but no one else was. It seemed totally normal inside the family, but I couldn’t see any other examples of it locally. I remember meeting the only other Chinese family in the neighbourhood and realizing they were “like me”. I learned later from my parents that they had quite a bit of turmoil in finding a home to rent at first and had received funny looks etc. My mom, who is white, would go to meet the realtor and my dad would only come later after they had agreed to rent it. For myself, dating white women as opposed to Chinese was pretty natural as there were not a lot of Chinese people at my school at the time. There was a lot of casual racism, “Hey Chink” and that kind of stuff, but my extended family was supportive of my mother’s choice, so it didn’t seem to matter.

Jozen: It felt normal in my family. My mom and my uncles who raised me grew up with a Puerto Rican father and a Japanese grandmother. So my family was in on this whole interracial relationship thing early, like dating back to the 1940s. My father who was never around was Puerto Rican and Black, but soon after I was born, my mom married the man who would adopt me as his son and he was white and they had my sister, so she’s mixed. All my uncles married and had children with women from other races, so if there was any type of message about interracial relationships it was that it was not only okay, but kind of normal. There was no beating of the chest about the diversity within the family, it’s just how we live our lives. More than interracial relationships, we all were different people, different values, and I think culturally there was some disconnect within the families, but that’s more of a generational thing than it was a race thing. My Korean cousins were never called out for acting Korean, Filipino cousins weren’t treated differently than our black cousins. It was all mixed up but the conflicts resided in other things outside of race, like most families.

LM: I didn’t, at least not out loud. I came from a white father and Puerto Rican mother, and that background was viewed as “mixed” by anyone who asked about it. But my mother, though she identified strongly with Puerto Rican heritage, looked “white.” So did I. Furthermore, her last name came from her straight-off-the-boat Irish father and she was fluent in both English and Spanish. (To speak English fluently and look white with freckles, as she did, was to have her Puerto Rican-ness doubted — by white people.)

There was enough of a stigma tied to being Puerto Rican — not in our house but what I picked up from muttering cabdrivers and pop culture — that I suspected a) if my mom and I didn’t look white, we might have been treated differently, and b) within my family at least, the concept of inter-group relationships was OK. On this second point, I understood that in reality, there might be opposition to such relationships based on more obvious surface differences. But even as a pre-teen, I figured no one but the two people in a relationship ought to have a say in the matter.

LB: I’m half Black, half-Navajo, however I was raised culturally in a Black home, as my Navajo mother was adopted by a Black family and removed from the reservation. That being said, I definitely received some mixed messages regarding interracial relationships. My mother is a an evangelical Christian, and so I was taught to love everyone equally, that there were no races and we were all God’s children. However, there were messages communicated to me that anyone dating white people thought they were better than other minorities. There would be discriminatory comments made in my family about other races. So, it was a bit confusing at times to reconcile these mixed messages.

Jen: I didn’t receive the most positive messages about interracial dating growing up, which was a shame given that I am the product of one. I received messages from peers, messages from my parents and family, and messages from the communities to which I was attempting to belong. Peers asked questions all the time. They didn’t quite understand how I could be both Chinese and Jewish at the same time. They asked a lot about my parents and how they met. I got the feeling that my parents coming together was a strange thing. An abnormal thing. If it was normal, then there wouldn’t be so much interest and intrigue, right?

My family – my Jewish grandparents in particular – used to tell me that I would marry a “nice, Jewish boy.” Funny – the first boy I really liked was black and Jewish, but somehow they didn’t quite mean that brand of Jewish. It was clear that white was right when it came to whom I should be dating. This felt invalidating and made me wonder if anyone in my family truly understood my experience – both as a mixed women and a woman of color. I kept wondering and stayed single right through college. I knew that the boys to whom I was attracted, would not do. In hindsight, I don’t think that I was ready to fight that fight with them.

And then, the Jewish community – while there were many diverse and accepting synagogues out there, mine was not. Even though we rehearsed for my Bat Mitzvah with my father up on the bima (the altar), the night before my big day left my mother in tears. She got a call from the Rabbi. He told her that the Ritual Committee had had a special meeting and decided that the three of us – me, my mom, my dad – could not be on the bima together. They did not want to promote intermarriage.

I grew up knowing in my heart that there was nothing wrong with interracial relationships (again, I came from one)…but got message after message that they were not approved of, and probably more trouble than they were worth.

N’jaila: I’m a Caribbean American Blasian mutt. My parents made more of a issue of them being from different islands than them being different races. My mom was brown, my father was lighter, but still brown so I never felt “mixed”. Mixed was for people that were part white in my head growing up. I really did think that it interracial was code for “White”. There’s so little discussion of Black and non white/non blacks marrying and dating. Even less about intercultural relationships within races.

When I got older there was a feeling like both my parents did this whole mixing thing wrong. One of them was supposed to be white. I remember when my first serious relationship abruptly fell apart he solemnly said “if god wanted us to be together your mother would have been white.” So a lot of times I felt like I was a double cast out. Black people were only allowed to be Black and nothing else.

Holly: I grew up in a proudly multi-racial household, although when my sister and I got older it became clear that there would still be problems if either of us wanted to date “beneath us” in terms of class, and of course overlapping that in all sorts of ways, race too. My mother, who’s Japanese, always had much more mixed feelings about being in a multi-racial relationship than my father did. For my mother, it represented giving up her heritage in a lot of ways, and having kids who were “Americans” at heart, instead of “actually Japanese” like she would have had if she had stayed in Japan, or maybe if she had married another Japanese immigrant. I don’t know if she actually would have followed that path, though, despite her misgivings! I’ve always had a feeling that my father thought that being in a multi-racial family made him cooler and more politically with it than other typical white guys, which became a thorn in my side as a teenager, naturally. He eventually characterized one of the most enduring problems of his relationship with my mother as being about cultural differences and lack of acceptance — from his family, and from the two of them trying to adjust to each other. So in the end… I got a lot of overt messages when I was younger about how multi-racial families and kids are great, but a lot of more subtle messages about how it didn’t work.

Ken: As my parents are Southern and things of their generation were very black-white, no acknowledgement of mixed-race ancestry ever took place until I started researching genealogy. I do remember my mother saying when I was a pre-teen, however, that she would prefer I not bring a white girl home. (Since I’m a gay-but-open-minded male, really no worries there!) She did acknowledge a few years later that I would likely bring home ‘a foreigner,’ and she seemed to be alright with that. So now I’m a good-ol’ American mutt (black/white/native) in a relationship with a dark Spaniard.

A.C.: I never spoke explicitly with my parents about interracial dating. As a mixed-race kid, though, my parents never really just talked with me about how I felt about being Latino, Irish and German. I was raised partly, though, by my father’s aunt, who came to live with my family and help with me and my sisters while my parents worked. She had a real problem with black folks and it scared me off from ever asking out nonwhite or non-Latino girls, since I knew I’d have to bring them by eventually. It was only years later, when she finally moved back to San Antonio, that I brought home an African-American girlfriend to watch a movie. My dad came down to say goodnight-and I hadn’t told him I had been bringing anyone over, which was pretty ordinary, really. But I do remember a look of surprise on his face. I can’t rule anything out but maybe it was because I was in the basement watching a movie with a girl. Maybe not.

Phil: I think the white side was the strongest as we were living in a white community. A lot of the Chinese Indonesian side was a little forced, with sometimes going to the Lions club (Chinese) or my mom making Chinese Indonesian food. It seemed a little like play-acting. Still, my mom was concerned that I have some exposure. My parents never made any comments that I could remember about dating. I do remember not being able to go on a high school trip to South Africa with my girlfriend at the time because of my skin.

Jozen: When my dad and mom divorced, my mom met the man I would call “Pop” for 11 years.. Essentially he raised my sister and I and he was black and Filipino, but culturally, he was like a lot of brothers who lived in our small town of Seaside, California. He raised my sister and I to be conscious of being a person of color, but it was never something was pushed us. I wasn’t raised to embrace being black, but I don’t speak Spanish and I don’t speak Japanese. One of the benchmarks of any culture is it’s language, so not speaking either of those tongues made it appear as though I was not trying to identify them. But the fact is, my mom’s parents never taught her and my uncles their languages, largely because my grandfather was a Puerto Rican in the U.S. Army and they were all raised on military bases in the 50’s and 60’s. There was none of this holding onto language and such going on, so my mom and uncles don’t speak Spanish or Japanese either. I think, culturally my family identified as people of color and Seaside is a black city, and we were just looked at as part of that mix. It never impacted messages I received about dating. I was bringing home black girls who I liked to meet my mom when I was way too young to be bringing any girls home (a point my Mom made clear). We could date whoever we wanted, but I do think it would shock anyone in my family if I brought home a woman who wasn’t black. I went to an HBCU, Howard University, and as one classmate of mine jokingly told me, “You didn’t come here to not date black girls.” I laugh at it, but it’s kind of true because like most men, one of the factors I considered in choosing a college was the girls, and well, you can only guess Howard was my idea of heaven on earth from a social standpoint.

LM: While there were no overt messages, my mother’s celebration of her Puerto Rican heritage, plus practically annual visits to my grandparents on the island and a three-year stint there due to my father’s military assignment, led me to identify significantly with that “side” of me. I thought of myself as white because that’s what I looked like but saw no conflict between that and being Puerto Rican. Meanwhile the Irish “side” — though it came from both parents and my mother’s stepfather — came across to me as lip service. From Ireland I got pale skin, freckles and soda bread. Guess which two I didn’t much appreciate.

After several moves due to my father’s military service, I eventually came of age in New York City, where from eighth grade on I felt an immediate connection to many Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean islanders — and by the time my consciousness was raised in college, people in other communities of color.

LB: Culturally I was raised Black with very little connection to my Navajo heritage. My mother lives her life as if she is a Black woman, with a footnote that she’s Navajo whenever questioned about her ethnicity. I often have conversations with her reminding her that she can’t really speak about the “struggle” to others when she looks like a Native American woman. I think I was raised to ignore the Navajo side of my culture if only because it reminded everyone that my mother was not the birth children of my grandparents. Nobody discussed the adoption, ever. It wasn’t until I was 8 years old did I realize my mother was adopted, as pointed out by my cousins who taunted me for not being our grandfather’s “real” granddaughter.

Jen: For all intents and purposes, I was raised as a white, Jewish girl with little to no Chinese cultural influence. However, my Chinese father was probably the more vocal parent when it came to communicating expectations around whom I should be dating. He came to this country in order to receive better opportunities and always stressed the importance of success to me and my brothers. He always talked about choice of partner influencing this success. Partnering with people who “didn’t struggle” in this country was ideal. Partnering with others would only put us in danger, bring us down, hold us back. Of course, this was very hard to hear, as I knew he was applying practicality to a matter that didn’t always feel that cut and dry. He made relationships sound like business propositions. I remember nodding at the dining room table as he lectured on, knowing that I would do what I wanted to do in the end.

N’jaila: I used to be a firm believer in the one drop rule racially, but I identify strongly as West Indian. No matter what race a person is if you are Jamaican or Trini no matter what race, where you move or who you marry you’re still West Indian and your kids are West Indian. I came from a more inclusive culture.

My parents have their prejudices , ironically I think my father would be much happier if I did not marry or date Asian, my mother is a lot more fluid, for her education is more important. She doesn’t care what color the man is so much as he pedigree.

My parents were very passive with race, this might have to do a lot with my father’s own issues with his race, they always made the conversation about culture.

It is a little odd for a mixed race person that looks Black. I think many people expect us to only think , act and identify as Black and the assumption is that we will greatly favor Black or White partners. When I started seriously dating I found myself looking for the men that I “should” want to be with and not the men I wanted to be with regardless of who had anything to say about it.

Holly: I was raised to believe that I was both “Japanese” and “Welsh/English/Irish/Scotch,” which looking back I can see as an attempt on the part of my dad’s liberal, middle-class family to be more specific about “their half” of our identity than just homogenous whiteness. But that half of my family is… well, really white. And the very fact that I was raised on the west coast of the US meant that my sister and I were raised in their cultural context, not my mother’s. My mother felt alienated and we were perpetually aware that “her side” was very far away, especially because she didn’t have strong ties in any local Japanese community. She made us go to Japanese language school during our junior-high years, and we went to the Japanese grocery store, took aikido and kendo lessons at times, but we barely knew any of the other kids and families. So I was always aware that I was mixed and was “half-Japanese” — it was the most significant and visible marker of difference, otherness, outsiderness in my childhood — but we also felt extremely far away and cut off from the source of that. Thinking back, I feel really lucky that I did get to visit Japan and my relatives there a few times growing up — if I hadn’t, I would have felt even more like a solitary alien from a long-lost planet.

Ken: Definitely raised to identify more with the black aspect of my heritage as both of my parents grew up in the Civil Rights Era south. And as N’jaila said, if you outwardly appear as black to most folk, that’s all you are or have a chance to be until you assert yourself as other.

I didn’t know any mixed couples growing up, so my messages were from pop culture. Essentially that interracial dating might make for a nice Hallmark moment, but otherwise it’s likely too difficult of an option to entertain.

A.C.: Culture factors in big. My dad’s pretty explicitly encouraged me to date Latinas in the past, and though I have, it’s simply never worked out to be a lasting relationship. In spite of the fact that I’ve been exposed to a lot of Irish, German, and South Texas culture about equally, I identify a bit more as Latino for several reasons. I’m much more attached to that side of my family, and was raised on southwestern food. I’ve always enjoyed visiting Texas more than rural Illinois, where my mother’s from. There are two things important to me in a potential partner that have filtered down: speaking Spanish and cooking food I enjoy. But those can be learned.

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

Megan Carpentier, friend of the blog, formerly of Jezebel, now executive Editor of The Raw Story; Sam Menefee-Libey, friend of the blog, one time contributor, and blogger at Campus Progress; Jill Filipovic, friend of the blog, and Editor of Feministe; Porter, technologist and friend of Latoya; Lauren, founder of Feministe and long time friend of the blog; Allison, long time friend of the blog; and DC, Allison’s brother.

Have you ever been considered a race traitor for flirting with/dating/marrying someone outside of your race? Or, have you observed that behavior from others?

Megan: Back in 2007, I went out on a couple of dates with an African-American man that I met at a bar that was (at that point) on the front of a wave of DC gentrification — on our second date, we went to a decidedly interracial party in a then-gentrifying part of town: we left to “take a walk” (i.e., make out absurdly against various trees in between hand-holding and talking) and we got hollered at by two women on a porch who strongly felt that I shouldn’t be jacking “their” men — let’s just say they used some words that I won’t repeat and hadn’t ever had directed at me before, and which definitely killed my mood. Then they called him, effectively, a race traitor. It felt shitty all around, though I think he was madder at them for what they said to me than vice versa.

As Sam and I both hinted at above, in many white communities, expressing that thought is simply unacceptable and thinking it is even beyond the pale, really. So my sole experiences with it have been as the partner of the person to whom it’s been directed (the guy I just mentioned, my HS ex I mentioned earlier, a college boyfriend who was Latino whose mother was quite upset about my race). So while I understand the roots of the sentiment more as an adult than I did as a teenager, it still seems like a crap thing to say to anyone, regardless of their race.

Sam: I think most of us on this post are urban-dwelling twenty-something professionals, unlikely to encounter that kind of sentiment. It’s probably a question worth asking, it may just require a different sample set.

Jill: I’ve never been called a race traitor for dating someone non-white — at least not to my face. The closest I’ve seen is women expressing frustration with men from their same racial/religious/cultural groups routinely dating women who are outside of their racial/religious/cultural group — with the idea that those men are rejecting women who share their racial/religious/cultural characteristics (and to be clear, I don’t think that’s anywhere in the ballpark of calling someone a “race traitor”). Interestingly, most of the examples I can think of where there was some discomfort or critique of interracial dating have come from women — I don’t know if that’s because I just tend to socialize more heavily and more intimately with women, or because dating is still cast as a game where men hold most of the power and get to pick what “kind” of woman they want, or a little of both. But it seems notable.

Porter: To my knowledge, I haven’t been considered a race traitor. Perhaps it’s occurred but went unexpressed. Not having to worry much about that does feel like a fortunate case, at least somewhat. Not sure if that is white privilege. Probably, in part. Also, I think moving so much has made me a bit more immune to what most groups think of my demographic traits (even if I worry about being boring or uncool), except my parents, which may have taken me longer than many to be more detached from.

The Korean gal I dated in high school definitely got some race traitor pressure, for which I felt a bit guilty, and also, rather angry. Notably, the tight group of Korean kids (mostly male) didn’t coordinate behavior towards me. They weren’t exceptionally cold to me, nor particularly embracing. She heard it, not me.

I think I’ve witnessed more criticism of interfaith dating than interracial dating from my friends and social networks at an earlier age, which is a bit more surreptitious. While one’s faith, especially at a younger age, is inherited from parents like race is, a faith has the appearance of being more of a choice, and thus, easier to criticize some for and be scandalized by. Or, another take: since I was in largely white communities, they had to find SOMETHING to discriminate by!

Daniel:  I’m not entirely sure who I would be a traitor to! Again, perhaps the answer may be because I grew up in a bubble where interracial relationships were part of “the norm” and that labeling didn’t happen so often. Who exactly would I be betraying though? I certainly don’t feel like I have an obligation to the “white” race in any way, and certainly not in my desire to have the partner of my choice. Perhaps this might be different in a more tight-knit community. For example, if I grew up with the framework of “everything about you is white” and it was an integral part of my existence, perhaps I would feel some guilt for introducing someone “other than white” into my life. Such an idea is quite terrifying to me, for I can’t honestly say that I know someone who is completely devoid of influences from other racial communities.

Allison: My community of friends and extended relatives doesn’t adhere to all of the dominant social norms. I’m white with friends and relatives of color,. In this circle, some of us are straight and some queer, some able-bodied and some disable. Some are working-class, some are more comfortable, and some are struggling to make ends meet. We’re all in this together. Through friendship and kinship with this community of complex, well-rounded individuals, I’ve experienced a profound awareness: when it comes to challenging a lifetime of internalized identity politics, the only person I have to worry about betraying is myself.

Anything else you’ve noticed that we didn’t cover above?

Megan: One thing I’ve noticed which has come up in a lot of the other panels is any discussion of class or its intersection with our dating choices? Which, not to generalize, may be because I wasn’t exactly born into class privilege, so it stands out to me a bit more, and it’s something I have struggled with in terms of dating as an adult. But Lauren and Jill both noted implicitly in their answers to the first question (and I alluded to as well at some point), racist stereotypes and assumptions about interracial dating often have a class component to them within white communities, even as — as the Esquire article and the writers on the Black Panel noted — dating outside your race in seen as a class privilege for particularly African-Americans. Which, to a certain degree, belies my experience when I am visiting my hometown and the surrounding areas: many of the interracial couples there aren’t college-educated and don’t come from money, but rather come from similar class-disprivileged backgrounds to one another. And not that those couples don’t encounter familial resistance or raised eyebrows on one side or the other or both, but it does make it somewhat easier for me to resist the characterization that interracial dating is exclusively a function of class privilege or “dating up,” though certain racial pairings remain less common.

In terms of class, all of the interracial relationships I’ve had (and many of my intraracial relationships) have been with people who come from class backgrounds similar to mine: first or maybe second generation to attend college, limited funds growing up, public schools, saddled with school debts to try to claw our way up the economic ladder (or who got to where they’re at by a less conventional means, be it military service or forsaking higher ed because the money wasn’t there). I’m more comfortable with someone else who expects to have to hustle and struggle to get ahead than someone who expects to just do well, which I often view as a function of growing up comfortably middle class or above and never struggling for money. It just some times feels like there’s a secret coded language among well-off people some times, to which because of my childhood economic status (and, to some degree, cultural traditions) I don’t have access, and which (when dating) leads to the same series of arguments, misunderstandings and lack of communication.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting that it hadn’t come up, especially reading the contributors to the other panels’ takes on the intersection of class privilege and race. I had never thought about it that way… but then when I thought about it in my life, I actually sort of had the opposite experience? Which perhaps speaks to my own class background and how I was raised more than anything else.

Allison: Both of the partners I referenced in this discussion were the teenage children of single mothers. We were all conscious of the fact that money was not in abundance, but we shared what we had when we had a little cash to go around. In both relationships, going out to eat meant I usually paid for the both of us because I’ve worked steadily since I was 16 and made sure to save what I could. It’s not too much different now that we’re all adults. The last time M and I had dinner, I paid. He works in television, but it’s more for experience than a high paycheck while he works his way up the ladder. He’s always appreciative of my generosity. In return, he’d always be the first to offer me a ride somewhere (I hate driving) or else surprise me with a visit from 4 hours away. We may not always have the same amount of money in the bank, but it’s never been a question for me that we’re equals.

Sam: I have a few lingering thoughts. One is that we didn’t actually talk with/to each other, which is disappointing. There are certainly things said I’d like to engage with, both to challenge, and to praise. We also didn’t really address the Essence article, which is totally fucked up (the article that is, not necessarily our not addressing it). The main thing that’s sticking out for me right now, though, is the dearth of systemic or political analysis here. It pops up here and there with a few sociological concepts, but it’s mostly implicit or lacking from our series of personal stories. Personal story telling is an incredibly important tool for political work, one that I both use and teach often in my work, but I feel like our stories, no matter how rich they are, aren’t really serving any particular, explicit, coherent agenda/point/argument/claim (or even several conflicting ones). The “So What?” seems to be somewhat elusive here.
I have some real anxiety about trying to supply any of this single-handedly, and I should note that, for now, I’m focusing my comments on this particular roundtable. I’m glad that white people, both het and queer, think about race when they date People of Color. I also think it’s a pretty low bar to clear. (I’m trying really hard not to snipe at any other contributors to this post. I’m writing this the night before the roundtable closes, likely after everyone has done their final read through and please note that this is in no way fair.) The questions that concern me when thinking about interracial dating are, in this arena what constitutes racial/social justice? These are really sticky questions in which its helpful to examine how we dealt with racialized dating dilemmas, but I think we need more here. I know that I hesitated to take up much space (until now that is) with long stories and as a result my experience is described in mostly broad and abstract terms that aren’t discernibly Queer or illustrative of any of the subtleties of the situations. I’m assuming that my fellow contributors also left their descriptions brief and somewhat truncated.
My point here is that there are some particular threads between our stories that we can tease out that are directly related to the Essence article. One is that race overlaps with and affects socio-economic class. There are many others, which, again, I’m hesitant to begin examining here because of the absence of other answers. For now, I’ll leave this to commenters to elaborate on.

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

Megan Carpentier, friend of the blog, formerly of Jezebel, now executive Editor of The Raw Story; Sam Menefee-Libey, friend of the blog, one time contributor, and blogger at Campus Progress; Jill Filipovic, friend of the blog, and Editor of Feministe; Porter, technologist and friend of Latoya; Lauren, founder of Feministe and long time friend of the blog; Allison, long time friend of the blog; and DC, Allison’s brother.

Megan: My first college boyfriend had immigrated with his family from Taiwan when he was 4: in Boston in the mid-90s, I definitely caught and was weirded out when we would get one of Those Looks on the subway (white women dating Asian guys being a less common interracial kind of relationship, he explained, though Boston’s not exactly known for being a bastion of racial tolerance, so it might not have been that specific, either). His family adored me — not so much for me, though I think I tried hard to be nice, but because dating a white blonde girl represented a level of American assimilation achievement that they wanted for their son, and they expressed it that way at some point to him (and he, foolishly, repeated it to me).

But I’ve spent the entirely of my adult life living and working in urban areas, where interracial dating is relatively common, my friends are pretty liberal and most people who know anything about me know better than to say shit to or in front of me that I’m not going to like. I wracked my brain trying to think of anything particularly stereotypical that’s been said about one of my partners, but the best I could come up with was a roommate who said about my Latino then-boyfriend, “It looks like you two have been fucking your brains out for months” because of our pretty clear physical chemistry whenever we were hanging out. I guess that would play into a stereotype about Latin men — especially as we hadn’t actually slept together at that point — but we were pretty absurd around each other (and me as much as him), so it’s harder to call it out as an example.

I should qualify: I’m pretty weird about introducing the men I date to my friends, and have a tendency not to do so until after at least the 3-month mark (a bar not achieved that often). So there are, like, 3 guys in the last 10 years who have dated me long enough to have actually spent any time with my friends or close acquaintances (outside of my roommates/the friends who introduced us), let alone my family. So I also just don’t have a lot of recent data in this regard, outside of strangers giving me the side-eye for making out with/holding hands with someone who doesn’t present as white. I’m sure I have relatives who would break out some stereotype crap, and even some people in my extended social circle who might stupidly do the same, but I just don’t have the data.

Sam: When I was dating Women of Color, pre-critical consciousness, I was in spaces where interracial dating was “normal” and I wasn’t particularly attuned to how race was functioning while I was with my partners. After I stopped being a completely oblivious jackass, the places where my sexuality was public were mostly spaces of resistance, and I rarely spent time with partners in open public spaces. As such, I rarely encountered the sort of stereotyping problems that I’ve heard friends and comrades discuss, and which I’m sure others in these roundtables will discuss with razor-sharp insight.

Paradoxically, I encounter more awkward situations with my current primary partner than I have in the past. I’m now working at a very mainstream non-profit and dating a white bio-woman (two things which bring me no end of self-doubt, guilt, and authenticity crisis, even though my partner and I love each other a lot and discuss these things often). It’s the most public, long-term relationship I’ve been in and we’re in mainstream spaces more. She’s part Portuguese and sometimes is read as a Woman of Color and both of us are frequently read (correctly!) as queer. This leads to all sorts of funny situations that baffle people around us (including parents) but since we’re insulated by class and race privilege and both work and live in social justice/activist communities, it is rarely damaging to us.

Jill: I’ve been in New York for nearly the entirety of my dating life, in a community where interracial relationships are commonplace, so any reaction at all has been minimal. Since my first Big Relationship, I’ve dating men of color and white men with varying degrees of seriousness, and the reactions are pretty much the same — although with the men of color there are sometimes comments (always from white people) about how we’ll have cute babies that will look like Benetton ads. That’s about as racially explicit as it gets.

And of course sometimes boyfriends and I have actually left New York, and reactions vary — during a layover at George Bush International Airport in Texas, we got a lot of raised eyebrows and outright stares, and it was very uncomfortable. We also studied abroad together in Italy, and public displays of affection were met with some visible confusion. Which isn’t to say that there are never raised eyebrows in New York, but negative reactions (or any reactions at all, really) are much less common, and not much different than those I’ve gotten being out with white men.

Porter: Friends have made jokes about dating someone exotic, but I was sure each time that the joke was mocking the idea that interracial dating would be a concern, not actually mocking interracial dating.

I think my family goes slightly out of their way to communicate their supposed comfort with it, which seems like a pretty well-meaning approach for someone who does actually have some concern. Haven’t dated someone of a different race for a long enough time to know if that reaction would change as things like marriage and kids might come up.

Megan: Actually, having wracked my brain, I did come up with one incident in my peer group of racism that just completely flummoxed me. I’ll redact some details for her privacy, but let’s call her a friend from my post-secondary education days with whom I retained contact into my early professional life (and, for context, she was a mixed race child of a Catholic Asian mother and white father from an urban area). I was having a small party over a holiday weekend and invited a (married, African-American) friend and co-worker to join us, a crew of mostly people from college and grad school. When she arrived, I was standing just out of sight talking to my co-worker, and, when she rounded the corner, she stopped short, kind of flinched and was like, “You didn’t tell me you’d invited someone like this.” I’m not sure if she didn’t notice his ring or thought we were dating — my ex and I had broken up a couple months earlier and I wasn’t seeing anyone specific — or what, but I can only imagine her reaction if I’d then introduced him as my boyfriend. As it was, we just stared at her like she was a crazy person and I stammered an introduction, and I think I spent weeks apologizing to him at every opportunity for having subjected him to racism in my own apartment. She and I haven’t really spoken since. Reading what others have said (in this panel and the others), it pretty clearly falls into that hierarchy-of-race thing that others have touched on and experienced, but having been presented racism at a young age as a strict binary (something Bad White People feel or do to other races), it was just very unexpected, even in my early twenties.

DC: I think that Jill and I had a similar experience with environments and the role of the interracial relationship. Growing up in Washington, D.C., interracial relationships were commonplace. I think that I’ve received more looks for being with my partner of the same sex than I ever had when holding hands or having other public displays of affection with a straight woman of a different race. However, I have heard similar stories of friends going out of town to visit friends or take a vacation, and their comfort-zone of expressing themselves in their relationship suddenly gets thrown out the window when dropped into a new environment.

Allison: My friends were accepting. But I noticed that my mother showed a more defensive and protective side. I still remember when my younger brother was snowed in with his white girlfriend across town during the same week that she called me at M’s house — and she never called to check in without concern — to insist that I come home before midnight. My Dad got a picture of M* and I at my senior prom. It isn’t displayed anywhere in the house. Stuff like that. It gives me… pause.

Porter: I have dated interracially. But living in New York, I experienced something new that prevented some: I have been told by a handful of Jewish girls that we were getting along too well and it had to stop, because they couldn’t seriously date a goy.

Sam: Yes, this is definitely akin to anxiety I experience. And I don’t think this type of reasoning is very helpful. Now, just because I think it’s unreasonable doesn’t mean I don’t still give myself grief for it, but I try not to give it too much thought, with a few caveats. White people have a lot of personal work to do around racism. It fucks us up in all kinds of ways that are really hard to deal with. The last thing we ought to be doing is externalizing our fucked-up-edness on the People of Color we’re close to. If we have stuff we need to deal with, if we haven’t done a fearless and searching personal inventory of our whiteness and our own personal racial formation, then it’s probably not a good idea to be dating a Person of Color. If we’re doing the best we can with that stuff and deal with it pretty well most of the time: ok. It’s something we should always be open to continued work on and ought to be in open and honest dialogue about with the people closest to us, both white and People of Color, but dealing with it opens up opportunities for more ethical relationships. The personal and communal practices we engage in that resist, destabalize and construct alternatives to those structural and cultural things the commenter mentioned are probably varied and localized and are definitely an important part of coming to personal terms with one’s own whiteness. If a white person is engaged in good personal and political, individual and communal work fighting racism and dealing with their own whiteness, I think they effectively address a lot of critiques about interracial dating for themselves.

Megan: The alternative — segregated dating? — seems so absurdly fucked up to me that I can’t hold that thought in my head for very long. I think it’s important to resist the white beauty standard, and I make an effort not to date individuals of any race who racially essentialize dating (men of color who only date white girls, white dudes who can’t imagine being attracted to X race). But I have trouble approaching dating as a zero-sum game or as a competition, and I just can’t get with the idea that we should all stick to our own race for the good of the women of another. Like, if everyone supposedly means well but the end result looks discriminatory, it can’t be a good thing.

From a more structural perspective, the white beauty standard isn’t going to be solved by individual white women eschewing interracial dating. It’s a structural problem rooted in white and class privilege and limiting people to dating within their race isn’t going to solve the structural problems (nor eliminate white people and people of color from being attracted to one another — not everything about attraction is about looks, for one). It might actually exacerbate the problems inherent in the standard and the community tensions.

Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t be cognizant of your race privilege as a white person, or that there’s no area of constructive criticism or engagement on these issues (see also: don’t date men that profess themselves exclusively attracted to one race!). But it does seem like the solution proposed by the commenter (and others) — date only white men — is both unhelpful in addressing the structural problems with the beauty standard/intracommunity discord/limited acceptability of certain combinations and in being a throwback to a day in which interracial dating was frowned upon.

Work to change the system, to expose its underpinnings; advocate for more diversity in media images and image makers; check your own privilege and grip it less tightly. See beauty outside of the pages of Vogue, and share it with others. Love other people who do the same.

Jill: That’s actually something I’ve thought about a lot. The “only date white people” suggestion isn’t a particularly good solution, but I do think it’s crucial to interrogate who we’re attracted to and why. I’ve known too many white dudes who only date Asian girls (or girls of whatever race, but there’s a particular breed of white man Asian fetishizer that I seem to encounter a lot) because “I just like them better,” and, well, I don’t think it’s that simple either (not to say that all white dudes who date Asian women are fetishizers, obviously, or even that I’m usually in a position to judge who’s fetishizing or who’s not — I’m talking about a specific kind of white dude who will talk about how he only dates Asian women because he loves that they’re so small and sweet and “act like ladies” etc etc). Obviously relationships are highly individual and we’re attracted to who we’re attracted to, but there are also themes to how these things actually play out — as Megan said above, it seems less common to see white women with Asian men, for example, than white men with Asian women. And there are different class assumptions that get projected onto black/white couples vs. Asian/white vs. Latin@/white, etc etc. I think checking that is important, and recognizing that dating both outside and inside of one’s racial group can bring up more than “just” racism (or racism that’s also informed by classism, assumptions about religion, etc).

That doesn’t mean “don’t interracially date.” It does mean at least devote a little brainpower to this topic, and realize that no matter how much of a Good Anti-Racist White Person you are, you’re still part of this system, and that means that you’ve not only gotta do some extra work, but also that there’s no easy perfect way to be a Good White Person Interracial Dater. Anxiety and guilt over The System is not going to be particularly helpful to your relationship. And romantic relationships are so particularly intimate and unique that zeroing in on race because you need to be The Anti-Racist White Person can throw up blocks to intimacy — your partner Jack should be “my partner Jack” whose racial background informs his life, not “my black partner Jack,” if that makes sense. That isn’t to say “be colorblind,” because just no; it is to say that there’s a fine balance between recognizing the complexities and difficulties of interracial relationships, and going so hard into Good Anti-Racist White Person mode that you make the race issue about you, and you let your partner’s racial identity eclipse your partner as a whole and complicated person with a history and a set of characteristics that are interwoven with race but far from solely defined by race.

Porter: I think that’s a pretty sweet sentiment to express. “I have this inclination, but is it causing others harm?” I don’t have a whole lot to add to the above… examine the inclination, which usually includes indulging it. Worry less, do more. I think it’s when Big Systemic Concepts get in the way of Enjoying (or at least, Trying Out) Life that humans experience a subtle, needless suffering.

If someone gives her grief, she can go Socratic on them and see if they can explain why she, personally, is exemplifying their preconception.

DC: Honestly, it’s never crossed my mind. I’ve certainly never felt like I should be guilty for who I am and am not attracted to. Philosophers and scientists together have studied the ways that love that drive someone crazy in the exact same way that it can bring a nation together. Azar Nafisi put it really well when she said, “Cultures should meet with the best that they have to offer.” I think that by hiding the way that we love to bend to societal expectations or to avoid the potential consequences is ultimately more damaging than trying to make people hear you. Make them hear you, or live in the silence.

Allison: I’m with Porter — interrogate your privilege, yes, but don’t let it stop you from living life to the fullest and enjoying a meaningful relationship between two equals of different backgrounds. When it comes to race, I understand that the dominant culture reveres my whiteness and endows this attribute with purity, inherent beauty, and an elevated social status. I also have to be mindful of reducing partners of color to stereotypes; I recently had a heated exchange via Twitter with a white rapper who claimed to be sick of “feisty Latinas” throwing their dinners at him (actual quote: “I love yall but dios mio you have the shittiest disposition’s ever”). He was irritated that I even suggested it was problematic.

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

Megan Carpentier, friend of the blog, formerly of Jezebel, now executive Editor of The Raw Story; Sam Menefee-Libey, friend of the blog, one time contributor, and blogger at Campus Progress; Jill Filipovic, friend of the blog, and Editor of Feministe; Porter, technologist and friend of Latoya; Lauren, founder of Feministe and long time friend of the blog; Allison, long time friend of the blog; and DC, Allison’s brother.

Megan: My parents were liberals, so they went to a great deal of effort to teach my sister and I about equality and to drill into us that racism/homophobia was really, really bad. Of course, growing up in a small, almost exclusively white semi-rural town, there wasn’t a lot of putting-that-into-action that could go on, but that’s what we were taught. When I started dating the one black guy in my graduating class (and stayed besties with my friend once she came out), I definitely sensed that the values behind the rhetoric were being tested in ways they didn’t necessarily plan for. (It didn’t help that he was far from the best guy to me and that my relationship with my parents was already strained almost to the breaking point at that time, so it’s hard to separate those things from what I felt was their hesitation about his race in any specific way, but that was 17-year-old me’s impression.)

Of course, that was also the first time I ran up against “Mom doesn’t like me dating white girls,” too, which came as a kind of shock. It had never occurred to me that anyone but white people could be inappropriate about race or even racist (see also: 17, from a small, semi-rural mostly-white town), so to have someone’s mother basically refer to me as “that white slut” her son needed to stop dating, I wasn’t sure what to even do about that. I mean, other than sneak around behind her back and prove her right.

I should say: my parents were also very conservative about what media my sister and I were allowed to consume: we didn’t have cable; I wasn’t allowed to see R rated movies before I was 17 (in theatres or on video, insofar as they could prevent it) or PG-13 movies before I was 13; I didn’t hear pop music at all until I was 7 or 8. Magazines were limited to, like, Highlights and Ranger Rick. Books were about the sole thing I was allowed to consume without question (until my dad caught me reading Heinlein for the graphic depictions of sex with no understanding of the underlying misogyny, so they imposed limits eventually). So questions about cultural messaging are weird for me, because so much of media was occurring outside of my limited vision, and what I was taught about right/wrong came down from my parents, from books and from age-appropriate television. All of which, in the 80s, boiled down to “racism is bad, and if you think people of x race are that different from you, you’re racist.” It never really occurred to me that interracial relationships were or should be problematic to anyone but an unreconstructed racist.

Sam (White, Queer, College-Educated Man): Almost all the messages I encountered, whether directed at me by teachers/parents/community or soaked up from broadcast media, were standard white liberal pablum. Interracial relationships were fine because we’re all people or race doesn’t matter or [insert colorblind platitude here]. My parents gave race and personal relationships more thought than most other adults in my life, but they rarely brought it to the forefront of conversation or gave it the kind of sustained focus a white kid probably needs not to turn out totally messed up by White Supremacy. I don’t blame them for this and am extremely thankful for their capacity to have thoughtful and challenging discussions about race and racism, but they certainly weren’t raising me in an actively anti-racist manner. Most of what I encountered outside of a family context was the careless sort of Gramscian “common sense” that is toxic because of its thoughtlessness and self-centeredness rather than because of any sort of explicit ill intention.

I grew up in a Los Angeles suburb that was both racially and economically diverse and quite lesbian/gay-friendly, so my friends and social milieu at school and in the places I hung out were multiracial and culturally and economically diverse, something I didn’t come to appreciate or think of as unusual until attending a very white private college. I’m the son of two middle-class, lefty college professors. I was materially comfortable but not excessively so growing up, but of high socio-economic status because of my parents’ profession and community of academics.

Interracial dating was a pretty normal thing amongst my friends and I had several friends from school, church and my neighborhood who were multiracial and whose parents were in an interracial marriage. Interracial gay couples were not even unusual. Again, these relationships and atmospheres didn’t seem particularly unusual or notable in a multiculturalism-obsessed 90s, where I assimilated all kinds of messages that told me this was how it ought to be and had nothing to do with politics or inequality. As long as I had friends who were People of Color and listened to jazz and attended international fairs, etc., I had no issues. I think that without race ever becoming the focus of any sort of sustained focus or coming into question, I took most of this for granted and didn’t feel particularly strongly about any of the messages I heard, since none seemed to take a particularly strong stance and none seemed to conflict with each other. Racism, of course, was a terrible thing and I wasn’t a racist (of course not!) but was race a problem? Not really. Then were interracial relationships? Definitely not.

I should stress that I don’t remember all the messages I received, but that the above general impression is an accurate (if a little flippant and over-simplified) rendering of my memories of childhood. I didn’t really date before I graduated high school for a number of reasons, so the questions of love and sex and race never collided in a way that would register as important to a narcissistic, angsty teen. My story is about as banal as it comes (read into this as you will).

Lauren (het, white): It would be fair to say that much of my early social justice education was done through the act of interracial dating and the discussion around it. My parents were older, and were raised in the Jim Crow south, even attending high school in a rural Arkansan town during the state-enforced desegregation and the Little Rock Nine. Their wishes were often communicated by my mother, who tried to convey many stereotypically racist ideas about sex and dating, and about black people in particular. Black men were untrustworthy and sexually deviant, they would hurt me, don’t ever bring one home. The underlying sentiment was that there was no telling what my good ol’ boy father would do to the young man of color I chose to date or to me, the unruly fast-assed daughter that brought him home. My older sister tried to talk to me about it once, saying that no matter how nice or accomplished this theoretical date of mine would be, it would never be acceptable in our house to date a black man. I remember teenage me balking at her, disbelieving the extent of my parents’ racism. I genuinely didn’t understand the various rules and guidelines of racist dating. No matter how nice? There was one guy I dated on and off for a couple of years at the end of high school who was Latino-American, and I remember some conversation among my family about whether or not it “counted” for me to date a “Mexican” who, other than his very floral name, read “white”.

I was raised in the North, on the campus of Purdue University in Indiana. Rural as the state is, I was fortunate to have had access to the university’s social and education resources, and the effects of living with one of the more diverse campuses in the Midwest (we used to boast the largest foreign student population in the U.S., but I don’t know if that is true any longer). My friends were racially diverse, thus my dating pool was racially diverse, and my friends and I dated as we wanted overall without a lot of racist social interference. My folks were horrified when I came home one night at barely eighteen years old and announced that I was pregnant and was going to keep the baby. The father was a Chinese-American college student five years my senior. They kicked me out of the house and I couch-surfed for the remainder of my pregnancy. The offense was twofold: 1) I was pregnant out of wedlock 2) by a person of color.

Jill: My parents are liberal Seattlites, so any conversation around interracial dating generally amounted to, “We just want you to find someone who makes you happy and who you love.” The rest of my family, though, is less open-minded — my sister and I were repeatedly removed from family events when my uncle or grandpa would start using the n-word, and it was pretty clear that for their kids, interracial dating was not an option (my parents used to voice hope that my female cousin with the racist dad would marry a black guy, which they meant as “Your uncle needs to quit it with the racism and his daughter marrying someone black would at least make him shut his trap,” but in hindsight was pretty messed up, at least for the hypothetical black guy. Unsurprisingly, the cousin in question married a white guy).

I’m not sure anyone ever said it out loud, but I always got the sense that there was a hierarchy of which racial groups were the most acceptable, and that black people were at the bottom (there were comments from my immediate and extended family about how it would be unacceptable for a guy to pick me up for a date “blasting rap music” or calling me his “bitch,” which is racially loaded enough to read loud and clear). And from my peers the messages were much stronger. A white high school friend dated a black guy, and her brother immediately asked her if she was going to turn into “one of those girls who wears her hair in a slicked-back tight ponytail” — a class signifier, where I’m from, of being “trashy.” White women who dated black men (and to a slightly lesser extent, white women who dated Latino men) were definitely marked as low-class; the same wasn’t true of white women with Asian men. Black women with white men weren’t nearly as visible, and where I grew up it was pretty commonplace to see white/Asian relationships, so I saw less of a stigma there.

My first serious relationship, which lasted for almost all of college and a while after, was with an Indian guy, and that was generally ok with my family (his family was less thrilled about it). But the fact that his family wasn’t particularly happy about it gave my family slightly more room to air their concerns — that the cultural differences would be too big to surmount, that his family would never accept me, that I wasn’t being treated as well as I should because he couldn’t be totally honest with his parents about our relationship. So the message I got about interracial dating was basically that interracial dating is fine in theory, but very hard in practice — and that its acceptability varied pretty widely depending on the race of your date.

Porter (male, het, white, 31): For a little context — I’m the youngest of two, and we were a pretty nomadic family. We moved about every 2 years, and sometimes more often — almost entirely within the “Big 12”: Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Missouri. Also stints in Wyoming and Alabama. Being from Texas was a point of pride for my parents, and for me. Never really lived in an urban environment, but definitely middle class suburban, upper class suburban (top 10% of household earnings, not top 2%), and quasi-rural. We went to company-paid country clubs, and stressed about house payments and college tuitions.

We were consistently and somewhat saccharinely religious, if not deeply (until my sister and I both became pretty die-hard in high school, setting the stage for an agnostic pivot later on). We always had a church home and participated regularly, and worried about new agers and Satanism infecting us, but also, dancing was fine, drinking was fine, R movies were fine at most ages (esp. for me; less so for my sister), and we made fun of Baptists over dinner as the ones who were going to love Heaven, since they weren’t having any fun down here.

So, race. From my family, a few different keyframes come to mind. My parents were consistent in saying that race doesn’t matter, and dating across racial boundaries is OK, even if these messages weren’t consistent with other ones.

• My dad loves jokes about racial stereotypes, and passed that on to me, for better or worse. This made my mom uncomfortable…
• …even though my mom was the one who worried to me if my sister had enough white friends, and called her the “President of the International Club” of our very white high school. Concern about one’s kids not fitting in is a strong one, I think.
• I recall my mom, a middle school teacher, saying interracial dating & marriage were totally fine, but that she really worried about the impact on their children.
• I’ll never forget my dad’s company (a commercial insurance broker) trying to sell a custom suite of insurance products to an association of black churches. (My dad also tried to develop strike insurance for union members; he thinks insurance products can do good in the world.) He commented, jokingly and also in real disbelief, that written correspondence from the association’s people would spell “ask” as “aks”. Far moreso, he was shocked at what he felt was an unjust amassing of wealth by paid church leaders in poor black communities, and felt the insurance product never came together as a result of their, in his mind, greed. I was about 10-11 years old when hearing this.
• I dated a Korean Catholic girl in high school. I remember being very nervous to tell my parents, but I started with my dad one night, and he was just happy about it, and for me. This was a huge relief, so I’d clearly expected their rhetoric about being OK with race to butt up against reality in a negative way.
• Her family was not OK with it. So, we snuck about.
• Months after we started dating, my parents remarked that they could see why white guys would like Asian girls, because Asian girls are more conservative and sweet. Facepalm. They meant well and I acted agreeably in appreciation of the gesture, although I found the comment a bit offensive and short-sighted.
• In 2008, there was no way my folks were voting for “Barack HUSSEIN Obama”. Complicated.

As for friends / peers, I recall a few things:

• Very little friction amongst high school friends, and later, around dating any race. I was in band and it was a lifestyle for us, though, so we were already a more diverse, nerdier group, staying within ourselves and slightly removed from perhaps rougher social pressures.
• There was definitely friction about dating people of a different faith in high school.
• In high school, most students knew who the girls were that only dated the small number of black boys, and some of us — me, regretfully — thought that strange and conspicuous, and made fun behind their backs.

DC: To be honest, I don’t think I really heard much in the house about interracial relationships growing up. My closest cousin, Cristina, was of mixed descent. Her father (my uncle) was half African-American and half Japanese, while her mother (my aunt) was half Spanish and half Irish-American. We spent a lot of time at their house when I was younger, and we all got along just fine like other families. Another one of my great uncles was African-American and married my great aunt, a Spaniard, and their children were also close with us. In church, we were constantly surrounded by other interracial couples and their children.

Despite having these people constantly in my life, I never realized that “interracial relationships” was even a term that separated people’s lifestyle choices into categories until someone told me. I never really thought about what it meant to date “interracial” because in my mind, particularly as a child and adolescent, there was no difference. When one of the kids at school questioned why a “white boy” would have any interest in a “black girl,” I remember being really confused. Why wouldn’t I? She was pretty, after all, and until the same kid told me that “it just isn’t supposed to be that way” and that “it’s mixing,” it never crossed my mind to think about it.

As I grew older, my oldest brother began to date a young and beautiful Caribbean-American girl. They dated throughout high school, and when my brother moved away to live with my father and attend community college, she came to visit once that summer. My father, who had lived a separate life away from my aunts and uncles for many years after my parent’s divorce, did not warm to her immediately. I would certainly never classify my father as a racist, but this moment certainly made me question where exactly his values changed from mine. I would later notice the way he worried more about my younger half-siblings in their choice of partner when the partner was of a different race. However, I never grew up in this environment where a certain race warranted a particular implication.

Allison: The messages I received were very well-intentioned, but often limited in their scope. (I should mention that I’m DC’s sister, so we share the same relatives mentioned above!) I know that my aunt faced some criticism when she got involved with my uncle: both of them were young, working-class Jehovah’s Witnesses, but she was white (first-generation immigrant from Spain) and he was Japanese-African American. I can’t quote any of the specifics about the scrutiny she received for dating him because I heard about it the way so many other family stories are passed down: secondhand from other relatives. I do think you have to consider the specific demographics of a Jehovah’s Witness dating pool — baptized Christians aren’t allowed to date outside of the religion, but single men (“brothers”) who were both age-appropriate and JW were in short supply. So there was a kind of open-mindedness within my extended family, driven by equal parts doctrine and Law of Scarcity, that stretched to make room for interracial relationships — in large part because being unmarried was not an option for the women in my family after a certain age. Did their acceptance for new in-laws of color always translate into anti-racist thinking? Judging by some of the comments I’ve heard my white relatives make over the years, I would be hard-pressed to say that love always conquered privilege.

Megan: Obliviousness helps, I guess? It never occurred to me when I was younger and dating interracially that anyone I’d want to be friends with would care, and I figured anyone who cared isn’t someone I’d want to be friends with. I think that still holds today, but with more compassion: I can understand why the women of color with whom I’m friends might have misgivings about me dating outside my race because of the beauty standard/cultural messaging stuff, and I wouldn’t want to contribute to making someone feel bad (which is not to say I’d take it into account in terms of whom I would date, but I’d understand the issue and be willing to talk it out). But if a white friend was weirded out by me interracially dating, I’d lose their phone number.

In terms of dating someone more seriously, I think dating interracially can add a layer of complexity in terms of one another’s families and making an effort to be respectful and value and participate in one another’s cultural traditions and practices — particularly if really long term decisions like marriage and children are on the table. And I’m cognizant that as the white person in the relationship, I probably have a lot further to go to understand, respect, value and participate respectfully. It doesn’t give me pause, obviously, but it’s one of those things that it’s important to think about and verbalize inside the relationship and to be willing to accept (constructive) criticism about.

Sam: Before I started going through my “good white person” phase (and before coming out as Queer), I didn’t think about my interracial relationships as particularly denoted by race. Sex and dating were scary enough by themselves that they tended to push out other reasonable areas of concern. When I started dating Women of Color, I was spending my time with liberal-non-profit-types who mostly demonstrated a similarly “race-neutral” attitude, so there was no friction there. The go-along-to-get-along attitude actually postponed any and all catalyzing events that would force me to examine the significance of race both personally and politically, so this lack of friction wasn’t helpful or nice.
After/while moving blessedly quickly from “race-neutral” to “good white person” to “white anti-racist,” I became much more concerned with race and personal relationships, sexual and platonic. Add on top of this that I was coming into a Queer, polyamorous sexuality and I was very, very concerned with power and relationships, whether racialized, gendered or otherwise. I had sexual relationships with several Men of Color, Women of Color and one Genderqueer Person of Color over the course of a few years in several different cities and countries and each and every time race was a significant factor that my partners and community and I discussed as openly and honestly as possible. My fears and misgivings were often about my own thoughts I would fuck it up, anxiety about my privilege, anxiety about my own anti-racist or queer authenticity, etc. These fears and misgivings were many, frequent, and extremely varied, making them difficult to rehash quickly in this context. I’ll leave this train of thought here, open to questioning/problematization by interlocutors and commenters.

Jill: I also didn’t really think much about it when I started dating someone non-white. It was my first real relationship, and my first most things — the fact that he was Indian was pretty low on my list of things to stress out about, at the beginning. The fact that he was a New England prep-school-educated kid from the East Coast and I was a middle-class public school kid from out West felt like more of a cultural divide than his race or religion, and I was way more concerned with the whole “I’m a 19-year-old virgin who has never dated anyone and now I’m away at college and I found this amazing person who I feel like I could maybe be with forever and oh god what do I do now how does this work?” But as the relationship progressed, it did become an issue, especially when we were years in and dipping our toes into conversations about marriage and kids and a life together. He was pretty straight-forward early on that things would be easier if I shared his cultural background, and since I didn’t he wasn’t totally sure we could really have a future. As much as that was hurtful at the time, he was right — of course that would have been easier. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t be honest with his parents about the fact that I wasn’t just a “friend,” and I didn’t understand why he couldn’t grasp that I felt deeply disrespected by that refusal to disclose our actual relationship (in my culture, saying your girlfriend of several years is just a friend and not introducing her honestly to your parents is taken as a sign that you don’t respect her or are embarrassed by her). He couldn’t understand why I was insulted by his decision, when for him it wasn’t about respecting me but about respecting his parents’ wishes and his family’s distaste for discussing relationships. So going in I was pretty open-minded; he was less so, and his hesitations were pretty justified. It was not easy. And juggling the conflicting needs of his family and me (in addition to his own needs) was very tough on him — much tougher than it was on me.

The reaction from our peers was fine and rarely notable. Strangers on the street would sometimes make comments (and my high school friends had a hard time spelling his name), but mostly it was a non-issue.

Porter: Other than my initial experience in high school about dating a Korean girl, where I worried about what my folks would say, I’ve had very few misgivings since. I’ll confess to having a slight bit of pride when I date a girl who isn’t white — not so much that it drives my choice, but I’m aware that the feeling is there.

Since my humor is South Parkian in a sense, I tread carefully before a gal reveals her sensitivities around that type of humor, but I also won’t end the night before I’ve tested them.

I don’t think I’ve been treated differently, positively or negatively, as a result of interracial dating (I’ve dated Korean, Indian, Persian). Class and worldview differences provide more social anxiety for me than race does, with two notable exceptions: taking a black woman or a Muslim woman home to the folks would make me anxious, no matter how consciously I’m resolved on accepting any range of reaction. I just sense that those are the points of greatest friction.

DC: Well, I certainly didn’t feel like I had anything to be concerned about. My first interracial relationship was with an African-American girl, back when I was still fooling myself about my sexuality. We were 12, in sixth grade, and crazy about each other. I was short, hadn’t really hit puberty yet, and had bleach blonde hair. She was tall, had large breasts, and a calm, quiet personality. I remember trying to get my mom to agree to let me marry her then, and it was all very fairytale-esque. My mom never expressed any sense of disinterest or worry that I was dating someone of another race, and seemed more concerned about my potential misunderstandings of a marriage license at the ripe age of 12.

I don’t really remember getting much in the way of criticism from my then-girlfriend’s parents, either. Again, I think her parents thought that we were young and hormonal, and that this phase of “puppy love” (as I remember it being called) would come to pass. People at school thought it was cute, or funny, or gross. (Remember that in sixth grade, girls are starting to become more than someone to tease to a young man’s mind, but they haven’t quite reached that point yet.) I honestly can’t recall a bad experience from that relationship that was related to race.

When I was 16 and open to my sexuality as a gay man, I began dating a Filipino young man. I was infatuated with him and everything about him, though I had never dated anyone of Asian-descent. Again, I don’t think the infatuation was with his race, but rather with the excitement that came with a new relationship. As I was very much “undercover” in my sexuality, my family never met him, and the few friends that did thoroughly enjoyed him and his company. We never talked about the role of race in our relationship.

My husband is of mixed “white” and Latin-American descent, while I am a mix of primarily Spanish and Irish “white” descent. As we both speak Spanish and lived similar lives in smaller Spanish-speaking communities in the United States, race has never come up. Most people in our group of friends are shocked to find out that we both come from such a background, and though he is very connected to his Latin-American side (as I am to my Spanish side), no one on either side of our families or groups of friends has had concerns solely based on the issue of my or his race.

[Just as a side note: as I’m re-reading this and thinking about my answers, it might sound like I “had it easy.” I think the biggest difference (for me) was that I never really labeled relationships as “interracial” when approaching one. Until the label had been introduced to me, I never felt any sense of separation between couples of the same race or couples that included one or more races. I feel frustrated that even such a label exists, as it separates my relationship from someone else’s solely based on a single fact.]

Allison: I haven’t had any long-term, conventional relationships that were interracial, but there were two close friends I was involved with romantically in high school and college. I had some anxieties about what each of their parents would think of me, an introverted white girl who dressed in thrift store cast-offs, coming home to get their once-over. But it wasn’t really an issue in either case. M’s mother let me bum cigarettes even though I was underage. I asked her questions about journalism — she worked for a major paper and had some insight as a long-time employee of the industry. She didn’t comment on her son’s obvious feelings for me, but she did leave us alone in the living room several times (and we all know what happens when you leave two horny teenagers alone together for more than 30 seconds). The mother of my other friend (Bengali) gave me books, tea, and praise for my student-produced play. Considering that her mother was loathe to praise my friend’s best work, it came as a shock to both of us that my overwrought little high school play had earned her positive accolades. The core of these two mothers’ acceptance was always obvious to me.

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.

refresh_daemon: Agreed. Plus, as far as population goes, Asian Americans are smaller and consequently less visible overall. Furthermore, I think Asian Americans even now tend to be less vocal and prominent in mainstream media, so it really has to do with our general lack of presence, combined with the perpetual foreigner concept that gets attached to us.

N’jaila: I also know a lot of Asian Americans that see themselves as “White Minorities” who don’t need to be counted outside of the White mainstream. I think these people are insane.

Elton: I agree. But when institutions treat Asians as practically white, and downplay the fact that Asians experience racism, what do you expect? Especially in higher education, there is an invisible asterisk beside “minority” or “diversity” that says *actually we mean non-Asian minorities, and our definition of diversity is “fewer Asians.”

Eric: I specifically remember the moment on Tyra when a gay interracial Asian-white couple made an appearance.

About halfway through the clip, a gay Asian man in the audience and confronts the Asian man on stage. His speech mirrors many discussions I have heard about “self-hating” Asian women, and in particular the debate around eye widening. Growing up, I had always been aware of the epicanthic fold and “double eyelids,” but it had never registered to me as a beauty standard until high school when I met Asian girls who wore eyelid tape.

Seeing this discussion on a national television show was pretty groundbreaking to me, even if I first watched it with a bit of contempt considering the kinds of melodrama that gets milked – not just on Tyra – but on daytime talk shows in general. And I think bringing these kinds of questions – about self-hate and about racism in the gay community – to a national audience is a pretty bold move for groups of people who already receive very little recognition in the mainstream (gay interracial couples, gay Asians, etc.). On the other hand, and I say this knowing that talk shows like this aren’t really the best resource for having meaningful, thought-provoking discussions, the portrayal of the relationship and of the two gay Asian men was a little hokey and did very little to talk about interracial gay relationships other than “people are racist towards us and think I hate myself.”

I think people don’t know how to speak about these issues, especially in the Asian American community, because we are taught about racism against blacks and rarely about racism against Asians. I don’t believe that many people understand that racism against Asians happens in the first place, or that interracial relationships with Asians can be strife with racist attitudes. People ask me why I consider it racist for a white man to have a “thing for Asians,” or straight up tell me it isn’t racist in the least, and I often have trouble talking about it with them.

Holly: I’m nodding my head reading everything that everyone else wrote. Racism against asians gets buried easily. You can get away with a racist restaurant name, chinese laundry jokes, stereotyped accents. I’m not saying that because I think racism against other groups should be ignored! And in fact, it’s probably true of many groups besides asians too — but I think it does contribute to asians being “invisible minorities” and a lot of asians really like it that way. They want to be the successfully assimilated immigrants, even if the “difference” stigma won’t ever really fade away in the minds of way too many people who see us always as foreigners first and foremost. There’s also an aspect here that has to do with sexuality and gender — I think the hideous treatment of black women by our culture and its beauty standards is more of a “guilty secret” that a lot of well-meaning people would immediately admit exists. Liberals feel bad about this; it’s how we got “I Love My Hair” on Sesame Street. Asian women have a different problem that doesn’t create as much liberal guilt — exotification and another flavor of ridiculous idealization, fetishization, etc. It’s the fallout of a “positive stereotype”; although most people would agree that gross anime-chasers are disgusting, they see it as part and parcel of a typical problem that any “beautiful woman” would face. And Asian men are a total afterthought, because the liberal political culture isn’t even aware that racist stereotypes are constantly affecting Asian men’s gender too. Complaints mostly surface on forums where Asian guys are complaining about how nobody will date them — and it’s way too easy, in the mainstream discourse, to simply dismiss that as a bunch of dudes whining instead of looking at it as a symptom of racism + sexism.

N’jaila: When I was younger I very much felt like the “normal” group of men for a woman to like was White. I felt abnormal because I had a strong preference for Black , Brown and Yellow men. I think for many people that’s always going to be true, White partners are going to be the most accepted because in this country they are considered “normal”.

I remember in high school one of my close friends was a Latina who basically told me I was “too smart” to like Black guys. It was so shocking and deeply offensive that our friendship pretty much ended right there.

refresh_daemon: Agreed with N’jaila re: white people as the default partner. But this also brings up a bit of the point that Elton touches upon below. Until recently, the general visibility of Asian men in pop culture has been very limited and rarely in the context of relationships. Most Asian men I’ve seen in pop culture have largely been paired with Asian women as well (John Cho being the only immediate positive counterexample that comes to mind in “Flash Forward” and “Harold and Kumar”–I would like to forget about the Donger and all the Yellow Peril films of the early 20th century.) Consequently, I do think that it reinforces, to some subtle extent, the idea of Asian men, in particular, staying within Asian populations when it comes relationships.

Elton: It’s frustrating that non-white women are rarely portrayed as equally attractive as white women.

It’s frustrating when I am attracted to a white woman and have to wonder if Eurocentrism is warping my perception.

It’s frustrating to worry about whether someone I like will return my affections because I am Asian.

Being an Asian male is like perpetually seeing a “look but don’t touch” sign.

Holly: It’s just generally disgusting, although I feel like I’ve watched this grow during my lifetime. When I was a kid, there were almost no representations of families that looked like mine — one white parent, one Asian parent. When I saw this start to appear, I felt relieved and less weird — but then it became the MOST well-represented type of interracial relationship, because it’s so innocuous for a white man to have a woman “invisible, feminized minority” on his arm. These representations really hastened the rise of “I want an Asian girlfriend too” throughout my teen years, and it wasn’t really an improvement. I think it’s made it much easier for Asians to date white people, that’s for sure — and that’s an improvement my mother would have been grateful for in her early years (before she decided she hates my dad and pretty much all other white guys.) One of the most disgusting flip-sides, however, is that “dating an asian woman” is the #1 low-committment way for a white guy to show that he is Not A Racist according to some really boring, minimal, conservative definition of racism. Look, he loves people that are NOT WHITE! He eats tofu! Isn’t he amazing? And yes, I have to admit that I’m also thinking of my own father here. It’s not WHY he married my mother in the mid-70s, but it was definitely a benefit, and it still is for such guys.

Eric: If anyone has read “Paper Tigers” by Wesley Yang, from New York Magazine, he follows the “Asian pick-up artist” who holds white women to the ideal. In Romeo Must Die, Jet Li and Aaliyah had a kiss scene that was cut because audiences did not respond well to an Asian man and a black woman being in a relationship. While it is certainly the case that media representations of interracial relationships in general, not just Asian ones, typically feature a white character, I am interested in the disparity between these representations and the visibility of mixed race Asian celebrities, like Naomi Campbell, Tyson Beckford, Cassie, Bruno Mars, Nicole Scherzinger, Chanel Iman, and Tiger Woods. It’s strange that there are so many highly successful mixed race black-Asian, Latino-Asian, etc., celebrities out there, and yet we rarely see couples who could be their parents.

I will say one of my favorite black-Asian interracial couples from television is Manila Luzon (who I wrote about previously) and Sahara Davenport from Rupaul’s Drag Race, though I recognize that they are really an exception to the rule.

N’jaila: I think you rarely see discussions of Blasians because to many people they aren’t considered mixed. Not to mention there’s sometimes very negative reactions to non-Asian looking Blasians like Naomi Campbell and Tyson Beckford. Growing up I felt very alienated from Asians, it felt almost silly to embrace a group I was part of that I felt constantly rejected me.

Also I think most people assume that if someone is Blasian that their mother is Asian and their father is a Black guy in the military. Growing up I NEVER saw a family on TV that looked like mine.

I actually got to sit in with J.T Tran’s workshop. I actually think is a naturally sweet natured guy, but his workshop made me depressed for a good month or two. #

refresh_daemon: The cynic in me wants to say that the reason why interracial couples who would resemble the parents of those multi-racial celebrities don’t really get featured in pop culture is quite simply because a white person isn’t part of the equation and the mainstream doesn’t care if there’s not a white person involved. Also, I think the mainstream tends to ignore the Asian heritage of most (all?) of those celebrities, regardless of how they choose to self-identify.

Is there anything else you want to add that was not covered above?

Elton: The difference between the way Asian men and Asian women are assimilated into Western society manifests itself as the interracial dating disparity. The Asian man is depicted as the foreign other, while the Asian woman is more welcomed and accepted by the West. Patriarchy places a greater onus on men to carry on the family line, so the dating choices of the Asian man are restricted by Asian culture (which wants him to refrain from dating altogether until he has completed his education, then enter an arranged marriage) and by Western culture (which wants him to avoid marrying Western women). Is this why it seems to be more permissible for Asian women to date outside their race or even to date at all?

N’jaila: I don’t know if I agree that Asian women are assimilated into Western culture. I think White male privilege allows White men more opportunities to date any race he pleases. You still don’t see Asian women being seen as examples of standard beauty, something exotic maybe but Asian women are over represented as only sexual objects for White men. #

refresh_daemon: I do think that, at least earlier on in mainstream media, Asian women were more openly accepted than Asian men in the sense that they were more visible in leading and ensemble roles on television and, to a lesser extent, in film. I think as of late we are closer to reaching parity between the two genders, at least in terms of presence (particularly in commercials), but there does seem to be a lingering disparity in terms of representations of interracial relationships with Asian women and men, with Asian women more frequently interracially partnered (usually with white men), but Asian men more frequently depicted with Asian women than with other groups.

Holly: I tend to agree that commercials are leading the way, but I still don’t see anywhere near as much representation of Asian men in fiction film & television. Reality TV is a little closer to parity, for obvious reasons. And I think this goes back to the whole gender + race question, where Asians are the “feminized minority,” and so Asian women (of a certain class status and adherence to western beauty ideals, obviously) are treated as “even more feminine than white women,” a package that comes with fetishization, de-humanization, and more representation.

Elton: Is it ok if I pose a question? As we know, who we are “allowed to date” (by parents, culture, society, and just plain who returns or rejects our affections) differs from who we’re actually attracted to. Much ado is made about the Asian man’s unrequited love for white women. Do you find that there is a difference between the kind of person you prefer (whether for friendship, romance, or sex) and the kind of person you are “allowed to date”?

Holly: That’s a very interesting question, although I probably have a weird answer as a multi-racial Asian with one white parent. I think my early upbringing and exposure to racism made me think of my Asian parent as the “weird, mean one that nobody liked, who ate smelly food and couldn’t speak English as well.” But I also identified much more strongly with her in terms of how I felt relative to my peers: that I was the weird outsider. On top of that, I was also unequivocally taught by my family that inter-racial relationships and kids were a good thing, no matter what anyone else said; they wanted to make us resistant to anti-miscegenation messaging even more than they thought about more pervasive racist ideas about non-whites. So I remember thinking when I was younger that I’d be following in my family tradition if I was in a relationship with a white person, because I wasn’t white, and that my kids wouldn’t be either. (This might be have been influenced by the fact that the first person I dated in high school was ¼ Japanese.) But I’m sure I also unconsciously thought of that as “dating up.” When I got older, I dated more and more people from other backgrounds — indigenous, Latina, South Asian, and a lot of them mixed in one way or another. I guess I still thought of that as “interracial dating” since almost any pairing would be interracial dating for me, and therefore kind of positive. I’ve only dated one person who identified as 100% East Asian, though, and I often wonder why — is it because of negative messages I received about my mother when I was little? Or because I spent a lot of my youth not feeling “Asian enough” either? Probably both and more.

N’jaila: I’m in a weird position where I feel like my natural feelings are going against nature. I feel like if I say “I won’t date Asian men anymore” I’d be doing so because so many people have told me that I shouldn’t be dating them. I don’t want to live my life according to other people, but at the same time most people do. So I feel like my entire romantic life I’ve been trying to box with God, I’m doomed to fail.

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.

Damon: This is an odd question for me to answer, because while I’ve never “dated” interracially, the first woman I slept with in college was white.

Outside of the fact that she was a senior and I was a freshman, our two month long relationship was pretty unremarkable. It was your garden variety college fuck buddy arrangement — I don’t think I ever even saw her before 1am — but the circumstances around us meeting each other were so wrought with contrived stereotype that it could have easily been the premise for an episode of “The Game”

Basically, she approached me at a bar, and asked if I was “Damon Young from the basketball team.” When I replied “Yes,” she whispered “I want to fuck you” in my ear. I (obviously) obliged.

Now, although I realize that this story can be deconstructed from a thousand different angles, it’s important to note that if she never approached me that night, I still probably would have never slept with and/or dated a white woman.

Why? Well, for starters, I’m much more attracted to African-American woman than I am to any other demographic. I’ve also been lucky enough to live in places where black women are bountiful and (most importantly) I’ve been lucky enough to have attractive black women attracted to and interested in me. While I definitely find women of all colors and cultures attractive, I’ve never had a need to “step out.”

And, even if I did feel that need, all of my flirting, approaching, and dating experience has been with black (and “black acting” Hispanic) women. I mean, I know that women are, for the most part, women, but there are some subtle and not so subtle differences in the way that different cultures of women act and respond to romantic interest. Basically, I have no clue how to approach non-black women. I wouldn’t know what to say, how to flirt, how to gauge interest, etc.

Also — and since we’re being candid here, I’m going to be candid — the type of white women who are more attracted to/interested in dating black men usually aren’t attracted to black men like me. While I’m dark-browned skinned and over 6 feet tall, I’m not ‘black” enough for the type of white woman who’d easily approach a black man. This isn’t a compliant, just an observation. Again, this could be a symptom of the cultural vacuum I currently reside in, but I bet this extends past the ‘Burgh.

N’jaila: Damon, I know exactly what you’re talking about. I usually feel like I’m not the “type”.

Damon: N’Jaila, I wonder if there’s a white man and woman on a Google document somewhere out there discussing how black people who exclusively date whites aren’t into white people like them.

Ashley: My first sexual encounter was with a white guy. I was a freshmen in high school and he was a sophomore in both my spanish and math classes. We were an unlikely duo. He was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed lacrosse jock. I was brown-skinned, threw the shot put, read Eric Jerome Dickey novels, and thought Lil’ Zane was going to be the next great MC. However, we bonded over AIM. We both thought that our spanish teacher looked like Santa Claus and we loved Linkin Park. It was unusual… Our friendship didn’t extend beyond AIM or in class. When we were with our respective groups, we’d just nod our heads to each other and keep it moving. I’m not sure why that was the case. It was something we just didn’t discuss. We ended up bonding over our curiosity about sex. It was just that simple. After it was done, we both agreed that either we were awful, or it just wasn’t that eventful. I transferred schools and we never kept in contact. I ran into him a few years later and it was sort of awkward. Not because of the sexual encounter, but because we both knew that we had something “there” – even if it was just friendship. However, we didn’t know how to overcome our differences. And even when we saw each other again he seemed awkward.

I date women and I’ve realized that in the lesbian community race is not as big of an issue. I get approached by women of all hues of the ‘Lbow’ and there doesn’t seem to be a big purple elephant in the corner. Women, by nature, tend to be more willing to discuss race, differences, and anything! They’re also, from my experience, more willing to step outside of their comfort zones. I was totally open to dating whomever I clicked with. I went to an all-black college and black women were the most accessible. As simple as that.

I do, however, find myself more attracted to black women. Not necessarily just aesthetically, but culturally.

Damon: Ashley, I don’t know if I agree that women are more willing to discuss race and differences and whatever. Maybe women are more likely to discuss those things with another women, but you’d be surprised at the conversations men have when there aren’t any women within earshot. It’s not all porn and fantasy points.

N’jaila: Can I just say how dehumanizing this whole “dating as the market place” is? And to whom must Black women raise their stock for? For whom do we need to gain value? If any group of man sees me as a commodity and one of lower worth BECAUSE I’m Black than those men are not in my dating pool. I refuse.

This is pretty much saying that Black women aren’t being unfairly devalued because of a racist and sexist establishment but because of Black women’s deficiencies in picking partners.

Damon: As my homegirl pointed out in something I wrote for VerySmartBrothas today, black women can be interested as hell in dating interracially, but that doesn’t mean shit if the interest isn’t reciprocated. On the other hand, I know firsthand that many non-black men — men who’d be open to dating a black woman — don’t consider it as a real possibility because they assume that black women won’t be interested in them.

The most interesting point the author brings up is the idea that if more black women married outside of their race, the marriage rates for black women and black men would increase — an idea that I don’t disagree with. It actually does make sense that, if there was a more even ratio of single black women and single black men, the men would feel more pressure to commit and ultimately marry.

Ashley: Can someone post a link to that? I just want to make sure that I’ve actually read that one. There are so many floating around. I was responding to the WSJ one.

So I finally made sure that I read the correct article. I’ll be honest… I think black women should date whomever they fall in love with. I’ll be the black woman who just says what I think: it’s ridiculous that some black women are so committed to only dating black men. I mean I get the whole Obama/Cosby thing…

However, I also don’t think that the solution to the marriage “crisis” should be approached from the same angle as, say, buying a Kia Sorrento when you really want a BMW. It’s much more complicated than that.

Cheryl Lynn: Black women should date the men that they are physically and emotionally attracted to and everyone else should shut the hell up. Can I please get at least a full one-year ban on articles about black women, dating, and marriage? The plethora of articles is starting to make me a bit paranoid. I was perfectly happy before! Now I’m lying in bed at night wondering if I’m going to be childless and single until the day I die. Jeez!

Tami: Yes, Cheryl! This idea that black women, apart from all other human beings, needn’t consider who they are attracted to and who works best for their lives and goals, makes me cringe. It’s all about getting the ring! Who cares if you have to act like someone you aren’t and pledge your life to someone you aren’t interested in? You’ll be married! I believe in dating men of all races, but the idea of dating a non-black man purely out of desperation is ridiculous and surely offensive to any men involved.

It’s not that the Essence piece didn’t make some compelling arguments. It’s just that I’m weary of black women being instructed on what they need to change to be marriageable.

Andrea: All I got from the article is “Black women, date outside the race so Black men get jealous and will want to date you!” It’s as if the article advocates using other men of color as pawns in the continuing war between Black women and men. What did Audre Lorde say about using without the consent of the used is abuse? And Essence and Banks are totally cool advocating this? ::gasface::

Damon: Andrea, I didn’t get that perception. From my understanding it was more of an encouragement for black women to stop exclusively shopping at Whole Foods and be open to buy produce at Whole Foods, Wegmans, Target, and Trader Joe’s. (This analogy made much more sense in my head.)

Andrea: Indeed. LOL!

Helena: If a woman’s main goal in life is to get married. Like the title “Mrs.” means that much to her and her life won’t be the same without it, then yeah go on ahead and date everybody. Date midgets! Date convicts! Date Coal Miners! Whatever. But if a woman’s goal and desire is to date and marry a BLACK man, then telling her to do different doesn’t really help does it?

Also no one every discusses why more black women don’t date white men. Perhaps because my black body has been preyed upon in the not so distance past in this country. I’m not saying I have some genetic predisposition to not dating white men because of slavery and Civil Rights, but you grow up in a country where a black woman’s body was sexualized and dehumanized by white men and where having a legal relationship with a white man wasn’t possible until the middle of the last century? Am I the only one who remembers the John Mayer Madness? Come on. I don’t date white men now because 1) I don’t know that many socially and 2) I feel safe with black men. Those are my personal issues, obvs, but they can’t be ignored.

Sewere: That article was just downright offensive. First of all, dating doesn’t work as a market and the sort of “signaling of higher value of goods” is just another racist and sexist way of describing black women. But even if we were to accept the dating other women to increase stock with black men, how does that actually work out? If the author has already stated that a lot of the successful black men don’t want to be married and online data continually shows that non-black men aren’t engaging black women, how does that increase the stock and options of black women? Wouldn’t a more effective approach address damaging representations and portrayals of black women? I also want to add that I completely agree that black women should not limit themselves to black men only and they should be open to dating other men. Minor rant: Honestly, bearing the burden of the community is just another way of policing black women’s choices denying them their individuality and humanity. Let’s not also forget that the article neglects the realities of LGBTQI black folk out there. /end rant.

Dani: I’ve written before about the spate of articles and “news” shows examining black women and marriage. The Essence article is better than much of the other coverage in that you get the sense it was a black editor and a black writer or team of writers trying to do something useful for black women, rather than trying to slyly undermine or demean us. But this article repeats many of the same problems in that it assumes that black women are this monolith sitting around plotting how we’re going to get to the altar. Are there really people who are willing to date someone they’re fundamentally not attracted to so it can increase their “bargaining power” with black men? It just seems like a dehumanizing way to be talking about people’s emotions and desires. I stand by what I’ve written before: We need to take seriously the idea that black women are marrying at lower rates than other women because we’re asking real questions about how such a move would benefit us and when faced with lackluster answers, we’re opting out. We need to consider that black women are perfectly poised to craft new approaches to intimacy and care-giving and family-building. We’ve always done this. It’s time to get support for these actions – the same kinds of subsidies and benefits government offers married people. I’m not saying all unmarried black women have intellectualized their situations to this level, but I’m still looking forward to the day we see more people asking why marriage is seen as *the* key to social, economic and family stability, when instead we could be fighting for policies that do more to support unmarried people.

Kadian: The thesis of this article makes dating and relationships seem like a well-plotted poker game. I absolutely detest game-playing when it comes to relationships. It’s not a very adult way to approach such things. In an ideal world, Black women would date whomever we choose. I did. I do think the commitment to dating inside the “race” is a sticking point mostly for heterosexual African Americans.Interracial dating is far more common in other western countries like France and Britain, where I now live. I remember being shocked by the prevalence of this the first time I visited London 11 years ago. Britain is not without its racial issues, but the historical context is different from that of the US.

N’jaila: I didn’t really get too invested in the fashion article, its seems like a little fluff piece. Of course my idea of fashion is matching my heels to what ever color Power Ranger is on my t-shirt that day. I’m in no place to judge a man by his clothes. I’m quicker to judge a man by what console he plays or if he favors Marvel over DC.

Damon: Yeah, it was definitely fluff, and I’m not in the business I’ve telling people what they should be physically attracted to. I mean, I probably won’t be dating any women who dress like Nicki Minaj any time soon, so I can understand a woman preferring a certain look as well. Like it or not, your wardrobe choice does provide a glimpse of your personality.

Ashley: I agree that it was a fluff piece. Shows like ‘Single Ladies’ and ‘The Game’ have paid homage to and created these aspirational black personalities. It’s almost like that book ‘Our Kind of People’, we’re still fixated with maintaining class structures. It’s evident in the different characterizations of the how each man is outfitted. I mean a “baller boo”…. Seriously? I know plenty of engineers pulling down six figures and they’re definitely rocking a tattered t-shirt, jeans and flip flops.

Cheryl Lynn: Well, I’ll just go ahead and out myself as a black woman who doesn’t read Essence–or any women’s magazine. The focus on relationships is irritating and they cost too much money. I got a subscription to Esquire for $4.00 and that magazine is the business! Yes, that’s terribly off topic, but I’m always proud of a good deal!

Damon: Cheryl Lynn, when I found out that a year’s subscription to Esquire was only 4 bucks, I thought I was being punk’d. Seriously, can someone explain to me how a greeting card — a totally useless object that’s usually only read once and placed in a fucking shoebox — can cost as much as 12 months of one of the best magazines on the market?

Tami: What? $4 for Esquire? You know I’m bout to be all over that!

As for that fashion piece? Hot buttered bullshit. I could have stomached it if it had been written as fluff and no positioned as serious advice.

Andrea: As much as I thought the piece was foolishness, it does address the not-so-subtle issue of class presentation via clothing. It served as a dovetail to the IR dating story because it reinforces the idea that the popular Black female opinion is the Goldilocks Average: not too working-class, not too bougie, but dressed enough to look like the man trying to look “baller,” which seems to translate to “moneyed enough yet ‘keeping it real’.” It’s, like the IR piece, is another way to keep the Essence audience aspiring for or maintaining Black middle-classedness.

Helena: Listen, one time I saw the sexiest looking man I’ve seen since falling in love with Taye Diggs’ teeth in high school. I was walking to work and he passed me on the street. He was in jeans, a tight white T-shirt and Timbs. He looked like a construction worker. I smiled. He smiled. And we both kept it moving in our opposite directions. Walking away toward to the metro I thought to myself, “Damn, Helena, he coulda had yo’ babies.” Anywho, so I get on the Greenline and who do I see sitting across from me? Timbs Dude. And he flashes his Taye Diggs teeth and says, “We have to stop meeting like this” or “This must be fate.” I can’t remember. So I chat with him on the train. He’s sweet and very loquacious. I blame Tyler Perry for happens next. I give him my number. He asks if I’m headed to work and I say that I am. Then I ask what he does. His response: “Well you should always start a relationship with honesty, right? Well, yeah, I live in a halfway house. I just got out of jail. I did seven.” The end.

Damon: Typical black woman. Can’t give an honest brotha a break.

Sewere: I couldn’t make head or tail of the fashion article, plus it was just ridiculously classist, the “investment banker” look, the “blue collar” look and the “baller” (what does that even mean?). I know a lot of blue collar folks who wear buttoned down shirts and slacks and a ridiculous number of PhDs who were jeans and rumpled shirts to work… I guess the article just strikes me as utterly incoherent.

Dani: I felt like it was a typical Essence moment. I like looking at the hair spreads and reading some of the articles. But inevitably, I always hit a moment when I say to myself, “I live on a different planet,” and turn the page. That said, it speaks to something the article on dating seems to miss: the central role that personal preference and desire play in the choices we make. In the same way the women in the style article were fundamentally, irrationally irked by their boyfriend’s sartorial choices, some women are going to be fundamentally, irrationally irked by a man who doesn’t get their 90s R&B references or who doesn’t dance with them way they like or who doesn’t appropriately appreciate their mother’s macaroni and cheese. And that is fine. People have the right to want what they want and hold out till they get it.

Want to read more? Jump to part 1, part 2, or the full series.

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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