New Prospective Subjects from africana.com
Voices: Four Takes on Interracial Love (Kenn Turner, Rone Shavers, Bethany Allen, Jace Clayton )
Why I Don't Date Outside My Race
By Kenn Turner
I'm not racist. I swear. In fact, using an age-old disclaimer routinely said by people who emphasize that they are not racists: "some of my closest friends are white." And some of the couples I regard as my truest friends are interracial. However, my own decision to not date outside of my race has been shaped by unforgettable personal experiences and troubling social trends that have become a central part of my consciousness. I guess, like most people, I am a product of my upbringing.
The first and most formative event happened in the 1960s during my early childhood in my hometown of Monroe, Louisiana, but I recall the events of that night as if it happened yesterday. I remember being awakened in the middle of the night by relatives who were taking my cousin and his white German wife into our home after they were both severely beaten by the Ku Klux Klan for "race mixing." I still remember the ugly black and blue marks that colored her otherwise beautiful skin, reminders to me – even until this day – of the consequences of dating outside my race. This incident itself did not make me afraid to date outside of my race, but I vividly remember the profound anger it stirred in my pre-teen heart for weeks after that night. These were sentiments formed in the racially polarized world of the pre-Civil Rights-era south.
The experience that made me permanently give up on interracial relationships happened after I dated a white girl in high school. Although the main reason I pursued the young woman was to satisfy my own curiousity about white Americans, and also to attempt to validate the myths that circulated about white women, I was completely surprised by my community's reaction. My parents always spoke in lofty, ethereal, compassionate generalities calling for universal love and understanding. However, when I brought my white high-school sweetheart home, my mother (and my three older sisters) became just short of hysterical. My teachers, mostly black women – who simply adored me because I was a student leader and high academic achiever – also gave me the cold shoulder during my brief interracial romance. Through their actions, they contradicted all the lectures they had given me about being colorblind.
Moreover, my undergraduate years at a historically black college also helped to wipe out any possibility of me experimenting with dating white women. I went to Southern University in Baton Rouge, where out of about 9,000 students at the time only one on-campus student was white and female. So I came of age, and experienced the defining moments of my romantic life, in an environment where the only women to date were African American. And I simply just never even considered going out of my way to find a white woman to date.
Finally, although life has taught me to never say never, I made a vow with a very close friend of mine that we would not date white women. I was commissioned in the United States Navy in 1980 and at that time fewer than one per cent of all naval officers were black. Because most people in the armed forces tend to eat, drink, socialize and date other military people, this automatically thrust me into a world that was overwhelmingly white. Almost all the black men I knew at the time dated white women – to my dismay and that of my friend, who was also a Southerner and one of the few fellow black officers in the Navy. Over beers one night, talking about how everyone we knew seemed to only date white women, we pledged that we would be different and always date black women.
Life is Too Short…
By Rone Shavers
When I was 19, I was young, virile, and enrolled in a tiny, rural college in Vermont where not only did females outnumber males by a ratio of 3-to-1, but the closest urban center was almost 4 hours away. This was a very prestigious college, yes, but unfortunately, out of the 400 people who went there, only about 20 were black. Drawing the proper conclusions, really, you shouldn't even have to ask. Have I participated, and do I continue to participate in interracial dating? You bet your sweet ass I do...
You see, interracial dating can be simple, joyous and fun, provided that you don't objectify your partner, and provided that your partner is not objectifying you. Simply put, to be objectified is to be viewed as Frankenstein: sub-human, simply the proper amalgamation of parts and the recipient of another's (cultural, erotic and otherwise) projections. And if you are sexually attracted to someone only because they are of a different race, you are objectifying him or her. If you want to have a relationship with someone simply because they are of a different race, you are also objectifying. But the rush of objectification fades in the morning, especially when you have to actually deal, converse with whomever you recently objectified. It's better to love a melon, a DVD, a baseball bat instead...
Yet, if you are attracted to someone – really attracted to them, and in more than simply a sexual way – and you do not allow yourself to explore the possibilities of a relationship, simply because they're of a different race, then you are still objectifying; negatively, inflicting and reinforcing old prejudices simply due to someone's race.
I refuse to be limited, especially in terms of love, by my race (a nineteenth century concept that definitely has outlived its usefulness, if not its welcome). And the notion that I must endeavor to love someone black simply for the good of my race, implies that emotional, spiritual, and intellectual reciprocity – the very things that determine a successful relationship of any sort – should be secondary to larger, racial concerns. They are not. This reciprocity, this bonding is universal, non-exclusive, and comes in all colors.
Blacks, whites and everyone else should date whomever comes their way and floats their proverbial boat, so to speak. It's necessary, so that they may gain the understanding that aside from obvious cosmetics, the differences between black and white, especially in terms of true emotional relationships, are negligible at best. Life is too short to limit oneself, and one's reproductive years that much shorter, so when two people of different races connect, shouldn't we all celebrate one more small step towards a further understanding, one culture for another? After all, how else is one to gain insight into another culture or race, especially if one experiences or engages in no intimate part of it?
A Black Girl's Rite of Passage
By Bethany Allen
Everyone remembers his or her first love. My first boyfriend was 14, black and beautiful. He was the first boy I ever slow danced with, the first boy I ever kissed...you get the picture. We were in love. That is, until he dumped me 5 months into the relationship for a white girl.
Not just any white girl. This one had stringy hair, braces and the body of a poorly drawn stick figure. I just couldn't understand what he saw in her. I was crushed. Talking about this fiasco with my girl friends was like a black girl's rite of passage. I remember it like it was yesterday.
There were only three of us at my high school, but three was enough for this particular council. We talked for hours about how the black guys at our school all chased the white girls around like they were the greatest thing since the chicken wing. I haven't talked with those girls in years, but the conversation goes on.
Any time I get together with my female friends, the subject of interracial dating is likely to arise. Like a scene out of a Spike Lee movie, we sit around and lament the lack of "good" black men and the fact that those men that supposedly fit the bill are not necessarily looking for us.
Many of my female friends have experienced losses similar to mine. You can tell who we are- we're the ones who stood up and cheered when Angela Bassett's character pimp-slapped her husband's white mistress in Waiting to Exhale. Let's face it; experiences like my failed high school romance can make a woman bitter. Yet it seems to me that it takes a little more than teenage rejection and the subsequent bitterness to make a sensible, open-minded person such as myself shudder at the site of a black man with a non-black woman. That was ten years ago! I'm over that, aren't I?
Whatever the reason, I have to admit that interracial relationships still generally disturb me. While I know in my heart that it is entirely possible for men and women from different racial backgrounds to find love in one another, I still have my doubts about the true nature of many such relationships that I am familiar with.
Ultimately, it boils down to choice. If you are a black man and you choose to date outside of the race, you're perfectly free to do so. And I am just as free to cringe as I walk by you and your mate holding hands. Please don't take it personally! Unless you happen to be my first boyfriend.
Crossing the Color Line
By Jace Clayton
A few weeks ago I got married. The service was bilingual. My wife? She's from Spain, that country 30 miles north of Africa. She's not black, but she isn't white either, and she certainly is not an American. Several months before our engagement a transient Ethiopian doctor struck up a conversation with us. He held French citizenship; we sat together in the gay district of Madrid. "She is very beautiful," he was saying in flawless English – his fourth language, my first – "you should marry this woman."
People can't get enough of interracial relationships. They debate it, they demonize it, they defend it. Everybody brandishes an opinion and an anecdote to support it. When their friends get with someone of a different ethnicity, they ask how it is, under the covers. They're not racist, they're just curious; it's not that they mind you as a couple, but marriage is hard enough anyway, and just think about how difficult things will be for your children.… They generally suspect that if you're with someone who doesn't look more or less like you, than you would rather look more or less like the person you are with.
In a country as fraught by polarized notions of race as this one, whites and blacks regard each other with varying degrees of envy, love, confusion, hatred, horniness and respect. Mostly, though, they just see themselves. And then extrapolate how that self-image might be shifted by living beside a body with some serious contrast. The only real problem with interracial relationships is that love requires commitment to truth and a few eyes that see clearly – and in America, race is the last thing that folks have the strength to examine at any substantive level.
Love, at least the way I see it, is precisely the sort of thing you can't anticipate or envision until it arrives. At which point it becomes unmistakable. Knowing the person you want to love before you know the person you love is a blinding form of fantasy. In odd correspondence, race is perhaps the most fantastic thing Americans know. Therein lies the rub.
Crossing the color line takes the privacy out of love and turns simple gestures of affection into public activism (or humiliation, or castigation, depending on your point of view and the overall feistiness of your immediate milieu). All of the taboos against it thrive, however subtly, on undercurrents of racial purity, territorial thinking, and the threat of lost identity. Culture can barely be open, much less plural.
Minority provincialism rarely encourages or recognizes the myriad play of cultural forces and brute history that constitute any person's path through life. Love, on the other hand, is obsessed with that path, all rocks and flowers uniquely unkempt.
First published: September 7, 2000
About the Author
Kenn Turner is a Commander in the U. S. Naval Reserves. Rone Shavers is a writer living in Chicago. Bethany Allen is a writer, student and mother living in Massachusetts. Jace Clayton is a writer living in Manhattan.
http://www.africana.com/articles/voices/ls20000907love.asp
Why I Don't Date Outside My Race
By Kenn Turner
I'm not racist. I swear. In fact, using an age-old disclaimer routinely said by people who emphasize that they are not racists: "some of my closest friends are white." And some of the couples I regard as my truest friends are interracial. However, my own decision to not date outside of my race has been shaped by unforgettable personal experiences and troubling social trends that have become a central part of my consciousness. I guess, like most people, I am a product of my upbringing.
The first and most formative event happened in the 1960s during my early childhood in my hometown of Monroe, Louisiana, but I recall the events of that night as if it happened yesterday. I remember being awakened in the middle of the night by relatives who were taking my cousin and his white German wife into our home after they were both severely beaten by the Ku Klux Klan for "race mixing." I still remember the ugly black and blue marks that colored her otherwise beautiful skin, reminders to me – even until this day – of the consequences of dating outside my race. This incident itself did not make me afraid to date outside of my race, but I vividly remember the profound anger it stirred in my pre-teen heart for weeks after that night. These were sentiments formed in the racially polarized world of the pre-Civil Rights-era south.
The experience that made me permanently give up on interracial relationships happened after I dated a white girl in high school. Although the main reason I pursued the young woman was to satisfy my own curiousity about white Americans, and also to attempt to validate the myths that circulated about white women, I was completely surprised by my community's reaction. My parents always spoke in lofty, ethereal, compassionate generalities calling for universal love and understanding. However, when I brought my white high-school sweetheart home, my mother (and my three older sisters) became just short of hysterical. My teachers, mostly black women – who simply adored me because I was a student leader and high academic achiever – also gave me the cold shoulder during my brief interracial romance. Through their actions, they contradicted all the lectures they had given me about being colorblind.
Moreover, my undergraduate years at a historically black college also helped to wipe out any possibility of me experimenting with dating white women. I went to Southern University in Baton Rouge, where out of about 9,000 students at the time only one on-campus student was white and female. So I came of age, and experienced the defining moments of my romantic life, in an environment where the only women to date were African American. And I simply just never even considered going out of my way to find a white woman to date.
Finally, although life has taught me to never say never, I made a vow with a very close friend of mine that we would not date white women. I was commissioned in the United States Navy in 1980 and at that time fewer than one per cent of all naval officers were black. Because most people in the armed forces tend to eat, drink, socialize and date other military people, this automatically thrust me into a world that was overwhelmingly white. Almost all the black men I knew at the time dated white women – to my dismay and that of my friend, who was also a Southerner and one of the few fellow black officers in the Navy. Over beers one night, talking about how everyone we knew seemed to only date white women, we pledged that we would be different and always date black women.
Life is Too Short…
By Rone Shavers
When I was 19, I was young, virile, and enrolled in a tiny, rural college in Vermont where not only did females outnumber males by a ratio of 3-to-1, but the closest urban center was almost 4 hours away. This was a very prestigious college, yes, but unfortunately, out of the 400 people who went there, only about 20 were black. Drawing the proper conclusions, really, you shouldn't even have to ask. Have I participated, and do I continue to participate in interracial dating? You bet your sweet ass I do...
You see, interracial dating can be simple, joyous and fun, provided that you don't objectify your partner, and provided that your partner is not objectifying you. Simply put, to be objectified is to be viewed as Frankenstein: sub-human, simply the proper amalgamation of parts and the recipient of another's (cultural, erotic and otherwise) projections. And if you are sexually attracted to someone only because they are of a different race, you are objectifying him or her. If you want to have a relationship with someone simply because they are of a different race, you are also objectifying. But the rush of objectification fades in the morning, especially when you have to actually deal, converse with whomever you recently objectified. It's better to love a melon, a DVD, a baseball bat instead...
Yet, if you are attracted to someone – really attracted to them, and in more than simply a sexual way – and you do not allow yourself to explore the possibilities of a relationship, simply because they're of a different race, then you are still objectifying; negatively, inflicting and reinforcing old prejudices simply due to someone's race.
I refuse to be limited, especially in terms of love, by my race (a nineteenth century concept that definitely has outlived its usefulness, if not its welcome). And the notion that I must endeavor to love someone black simply for the good of my race, implies that emotional, spiritual, and intellectual reciprocity – the very things that determine a successful relationship of any sort – should be secondary to larger, racial concerns. They are not. This reciprocity, this bonding is universal, non-exclusive, and comes in all colors.
Blacks, whites and everyone else should date whomever comes their way and floats their proverbial boat, so to speak. It's necessary, so that they may gain the understanding that aside from obvious cosmetics, the differences between black and white, especially in terms of true emotional relationships, are negligible at best. Life is too short to limit oneself, and one's reproductive years that much shorter, so when two people of different races connect, shouldn't we all celebrate one more small step towards a further understanding, one culture for another? After all, how else is one to gain insight into another culture or race, especially if one experiences or engages in no intimate part of it?
A Black Girl's Rite of Passage
By Bethany Allen
Everyone remembers his or her first love. My first boyfriend was 14, black and beautiful. He was the first boy I ever slow danced with, the first boy I ever kissed...you get the picture. We were in love. That is, until he dumped me 5 months into the relationship for a white girl.
Not just any white girl. This one had stringy hair, braces and the body of a poorly drawn stick figure. I just couldn't understand what he saw in her. I was crushed. Talking about this fiasco with my girl friends was like a black girl's rite of passage. I remember it like it was yesterday.
There were only three of us at my high school, but three was enough for this particular council. We talked for hours about how the black guys at our school all chased the white girls around like they were the greatest thing since the chicken wing. I haven't talked with those girls in years, but the conversation goes on.
Any time I get together with my female friends, the subject of interracial dating is likely to arise. Like a scene out of a Spike Lee movie, we sit around and lament the lack of "good" black men and the fact that those men that supposedly fit the bill are not necessarily looking for us.
Many of my female friends have experienced losses similar to mine. You can tell who we are- we're the ones who stood up and cheered when Angela Bassett's character pimp-slapped her husband's white mistress in Waiting to Exhale. Let's face it; experiences like my failed high school romance can make a woman bitter. Yet it seems to me that it takes a little more than teenage rejection and the subsequent bitterness to make a sensible, open-minded person such as myself shudder at the site of a black man with a non-black woman. That was ten years ago! I'm over that, aren't I?
Whatever the reason, I have to admit that interracial relationships still generally disturb me. While I know in my heart that it is entirely possible for men and women from different racial backgrounds to find love in one another, I still have my doubts about the true nature of many such relationships that I am familiar with.
Ultimately, it boils down to choice. If you are a black man and you choose to date outside of the race, you're perfectly free to do so. And I am just as free to cringe as I walk by you and your mate holding hands. Please don't take it personally! Unless you happen to be my first boyfriend.
Crossing the Color Line
By Jace Clayton
A few weeks ago I got married. The service was bilingual. My wife? She's from Spain, that country 30 miles north of Africa. She's not black, but she isn't white either, and she certainly is not an American. Several months before our engagement a transient Ethiopian doctor struck up a conversation with us. He held French citizenship; we sat together in the gay district of Madrid. "She is very beautiful," he was saying in flawless English – his fourth language, my first – "you should marry this woman."
People can't get enough of interracial relationships. They debate it, they demonize it, they defend it. Everybody brandishes an opinion and an anecdote to support it. When their friends get with someone of a different ethnicity, they ask how it is, under the covers. They're not racist, they're just curious; it's not that they mind you as a couple, but marriage is hard enough anyway, and just think about how difficult things will be for your children.… They generally suspect that if you're with someone who doesn't look more or less like you, than you would rather look more or less like the person you are with.
In a country as fraught by polarized notions of race as this one, whites and blacks regard each other with varying degrees of envy, love, confusion, hatred, horniness and respect. Mostly, though, they just see themselves. And then extrapolate how that self-image might be shifted by living beside a body with some serious contrast. The only real problem with interracial relationships is that love requires commitment to truth and a few eyes that see clearly – and in America, race is the last thing that folks have the strength to examine at any substantive level.
Love, at least the way I see it, is precisely the sort of thing you can't anticipate or envision until it arrives. At which point it becomes unmistakable. Knowing the person you want to love before you know the person you love is a blinding form of fantasy. In odd correspondence, race is perhaps the most fantastic thing Americans know. Therein lies the rub.
Crossing the color line takes the privacy out of love and turns simple gestures of affection into public activism (or humiliation, or castigation, depending on your point of view and the overall feistiness of your immediate milieu). All of the taboos against it thrive, however subtly, on undercurrents of racial purity, territorial thinking, and the threat of lost identity. Culture can barely be open, much less plural.
Minority provincialism rarely encourages or recognizes the myriad play of cultural forces and brute history that constitute any person's path through life. Love, on the other hand, is obsessed with that path, all rocks and flowers uniquely unkempt.
First published: September 7, 2000
About the Author
Kenn Turner is a Commander in the U. S. Naval Reserves. Rone Shavers is a writer living in Chicago. Bethany Allen is a writer, student and mother living in Massachusetts. Jace Clayton is a writer living in Manhattan.
http://www.africana.com/articles/voices/ls20000907love.asp
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