Sunday, November 24, 2013

Interracial Relationships: Time to Move Toward Colorblindness

More than 45 years after Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that made interracial marriage legal, many Americans still consider interracial marriage and dating taboo.

When Bill DeBlasio was elected mayor of New York City on November 5, a plethora of news articles about his marriage to Chirlane McCray, who is black, made headline news. Media sprung in to action claiming that the de Blasio's interracial marriage "shattered the traditional ideas about race and politics." Their marriage commanded the news-cycle spotlight, more than the fact that de Blasio was the first Democrat elected mayor of New York City since David Dinkins in 1993. 

Plaintiffs, Richard and Mildred Loving
in Loving v. Virginia (Time.com)

De Blasio's election also conjured up a diverse set of viewpoints on marriage and interracial dating. Tiya Miles, the chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, blogged on the Huffington Post about her experience seeing her black male family members with women who she wrote looked like "Barbie." 

"Try as I might to suppress the reaction, I experience black men's choice of white women as a personal rejection of the group in which I am a part, of African American women as a whole, who have always been devalued in this society." 

Miles's feelings of personal rejection might be relatable to many African-American women, but certainly not all. Many have found happiness dating outside (or within) their race. McCray is an example.

America has further to go when it comes to interracial relations, but it doesn't hurt to take baby steps. A first step is to avoid seeing race as monolithic. It's become ubiquitous for many to lump the ideas expressed by a few members of a cultural group into the same prism of identity for all members of that group (i.e. black voters when Obama won re-election last year).The danger is that the "lumping" creates separatist attitudes. Nikki Giovanni said, “Deal with yourself as an individual worthy of respect, and make everyone else deal with you the same way.” 

Bill de Blasio celebrates win with
his son, Dante, left, daughter Chiara, and wife Chirlane
Reading Miles's article, I couldn't help but think that there's no proof that all black women rest their self-worth on a black man's decision to date outside his race or that all black women feel devalued in society. Attributing her personal feelings about rejection to "African-American women as a whole" does not move the idea of colorblindness in this country forward. It negates an opportunity to move away from monolithic-ness. 

In the article, Black Women, Interracial Dating andMarriage: What's Love Got to Do With It? Miles candidly talks about where these feelings came from.

"Once I overheard my black boyfriend telling his buddies how he preferred white women; on another occasion (with a different black boyfriend) a guy told me he didn't care that I was breaking up with him because he could go out and get a white woman," Miles wrote. (She said that this happened when her boyfriends were barely 20 years old. They were probably scared—a lot of bros have tried and been rejected by black women too.)

But Miles said she doesn’t see that moment as “the driving force behind my resentful feelings about black male-white female relationships." Instead she said it was about her “awareness of all of the (straight) African American women--beautiful, smart, good women, some of them my own family and friends--who might not have a honey to bring home this Thanksgiving holiday because they cannot find a date, even as rising numbers of eligible African American men will be wooing white women.”


But if we step back and take a look at America, the interracial wooing isn't exclusively rising among black men. It seems to have become less taboo, since Shonda Rhimes brought us ScandalFox allowed SleepyHollowABC greenlit Betrayal (where one of the subpolts is about an older white man's regrets about moving on without his black woman lover) and Rookie Blue (the detective, Traci Nash, is dating Steve Peck, her white co-worker); and audiences watched Megan Goode and Wes Brown on NBC's Deception before it was canceled. If that's not enough, Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad, Phylicia and Ahmad's Rashad's daughter, are starring in Romeo and Juilet on Broadway.

According to Ivory A. Toldson, Ph.D., a Howard University professor and research analyst for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation; and Bryant Marks, a psychology professor at Morehouse College and faculty associate at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, it is a "cultural myth" that successful black men are likely to be unavailable to black women because they prefer to marry outside their race.

Toldson and Marks point out that among married black men with a personal income above $100,000, 83 percent have black wives. Among married black men with college degrees, 85 percent have black wives. Toldson cautions against exaggerating a behavior that we might see as negative, when in reality it occurs a small percentage of the time.


In Waiting to Exhale, Angela Basset's character, Bernadine, is devastated when her husband of 11 years leaves her for a white woman. 

She rips down his ties, suit jackets, shirts and pants from their shared closet, gathers all of these things up, takes his belongings outside and puts them in a car. Then, she sprinkles gasoline all over the car, lights a cigarette, smokes it and tosses the match into the car. Everything he owns burns in that car. A profound scene of the woman scorned.

But another scene proved poignant, Bernadine confronts her soon-to-be ex-husband, John: 

Bernadine: I give you 11 f----g years of my life and you're telling me you're leaving me for a white woman?
John Harris Sr: Would it help if she was black?
Bernadine: No. It would help if you were black.

Does the fact that the woman is white really cause her to dish out that rage of rejection? If it were Lela Rochon's character, Robin, who is African-American, wouldn't Bernadine be just as devastated?
Angela Bassett in Waiting to Exhale
Miles might say no. "Whiteness has been a privileged and prized identity in the U.S.; our national culture has made it this way. So when black men select white women and de-select black women, they are doing so in a context of charged racial meanings."

According to a 2005 census data poll, 82 percent of African-American men marry within their race as compared to other minorities; Hispanic men, 65 percent, and Asian men, 48 percent. And 97 percent of white men marry white women. 

Statistically, black men are not deselecting black women.

Miles says that “the human family is so genetically close that we share more than 99 percent of our DNA. Genetically speaking,” wrote Miles, who is married to a man of Native American descent, “there are no racial categories; race is merely skin deep. Dating and marrying across racial lines should therefore be natural, common and acceptable.” But, she finished that thought saying that the United States is not a colorblind nation.

I agree, The USA isn't a colorblind Nation, but it might begin to be if we take baby steps and realize that we all have the same DNA.

What do you think?