As I write this article, I’m currently in the middle of an international tour for my show, R&B: Relationships & Bullsh*t, where I discuss location-relevant issues about love, sex and dating in that particular community. Before every show, my co-host and I write out a “thought-map” where we create the questions we want to ask the audience, and analyze which topics we want to cover and which topics we want to avoid. What makes this event stand out from all the other relationship-focused events is that we believe the more gritty the conversation gets, the more hilarious it will become, so we encourage everyone to keep it 100, instead of just keeping it polite or politically correct. But since we’ve begun doing this show, there is one topic that we try and steer clear from – interracial dating. That is the one topic that can take a discussion from straight-forward fun to completely contentious.
This week, a Gawker.com writer named Ernest Baker, typed a 2,600 word manifesto on his affinity for caucasian women titled “The Reality of Dating White Women When You’re Black.” In his article, he rambled about many different topics in a disjointed manner when he really just wanted to say, “I like white girls and I cannot lie! And here’s why you shouldn’t get mad at me!”
After many years of writing about interracial dating on my website, ThisIsYourConscience.com, speaking on relationship panels all over North America and the Caribbean, hosting a weekly podcast on relationships and writing one novella and one full book on love and dating, it is easy to say that I’ve immersed myself in relationships. I don’t say any of that to come off like an expert (because I don’t even believe there’s such a thing as a relationship expert) but I want it to be clear that I’m fully aware of the explosiveness of this conversation and the one thing I’ve learned is that interracial dating conjures up a world of emotions and insecurities, no matter how hard we all try to act like we are “post-racial” and unconcerned with it. I absolutely detest when people say “no one cares if you date someone from another race” because that comment is not supported by fact in any way. Another article titled, “Nobody Cares That You Date White Girls” ended up getting way over 400 comments, much more than average piece. We need to stop pretending that people don’t care, because comment sections on blogs are all blowing up with discussing this supposedly irrelevant issue. The truth about interracial dating that no one wants to admit is that the issue is still extremely sensitive because very few of us have engaged in a completely honest discussion about how it affects the many different aspects of our collective lives.
Although there are many different cultural, historic and psychological dynamics at play here, there are two main reasons why most of us DO care about interracial dating, as much as we pretend it’s not a big issue, and it all begins with the collective cowardice of men and women like Ernest Baker.
In his article, he attempted to explain that he has an organic love for blonde hair and blue eyes, while simultaneously arguing that the Black girls in his high school wanted “thugs” instead of the type of “nice” dude he was – which is fuckery of the highest order. If he wants to profess that his interest in white women is based solely on what attracts him as opposed to disliking Black women, THEN DON’T BRING BLACK WOMEN INTO THE DISCUSSION. I hear this cowardly assertion from Black men and women ALL the damn time.
Please miss me with the “Poor me, Black women/men didn’t like me so I had to run to white folks!” rhetoric. You are entitled to your preference, but when you can’t be bold enough to assert that it was derived from your own mind, as opposed to a necessity-based decision due to rejection from your “own kind”, you are the reason we can’t have honest discussions about race and move past it. We don’t live in a post-racial society or a community that has been freed from the bondage of self-hate, so those words will always create extreme pushback.
The second dynamic that makes this topic so explosive is the massive ignorance from the so-called “Black love” community, which usually is an empty platform people use to propagate their xenophobia. These are the people who profess to “not care” that a Black man is dating a woman of another race, but roll their eyes when a Black male celebrity/athlete is seen out and about with his white girlfriend/wife. These are the people who flood message boards, comments sections and social media with ill-researched stats about how “Black love is dying.”
These are the people who throw around the words “Eurocentric beauty standards” any goddamn time they see a Black man with anything other than a Black woman. These people range from the ratchet to the self-aggrandizing, so-called intellectuals who will reference everything from gossip blog posts to literary essays to prove how Black men have been brainwashed to not like Black women, or women with dark complexions. As if simple preference is no where near enough to explain this “phenomenon”.
They don’t want to hear that the FACTS show that 83% of married Black men with an income of more than $100,000 put a ring on a Black woman. They don’t want to accept the reality that Black men with college degrees marry Black women to the tune of 85% and that recent census data shows that black men marry outside of their group less than any other ethnic group, including Asians and Latinos. These people constantly find themselves locked in debates with the first group of cowards, and intense debating ensues.
The truth is, I know many people who really don’t care about interracial dating but it’s dangerous to assert that no one cares because that’s how we’ve managed to avoid really addressing these topics in a serious way, and allowing for so much bullshit to enter this much-needed discussion. I think everyone, except Klan members, is ready to stop caring but it’s going to start with working out our issues honestly before we can assert that interracial dating is no longer an important conversation in our community.
LAB
Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.