Title: Black Women, Interracial Dating, and Marriage: What's Love Got to Do With It? | HuffPost
Headings: Black Women, Interracial Dating, and Marriage: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Black Women, Interracial Dating, and Marriage: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
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Content: successful black men pairing up with white women, but now that the practice has come home to roost, so to speak, I cannot help but admit to feeling a bit demoralized. I wish my male relatives luck and joy in their relationships, but I also feel a pinch when I watch them with their girlfriends. It is the same sharp tug of disappointment that gets me every time I see a black man with a white woman on his arm. 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. Certainly my reaction links back to a few bad apples in my own young dating years. 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, which was what he really wanted anyway. For both these men (and to be fair, they were not much older than 20 at the time and thus had plenty of maturing to do), white women were the pinnacle of womanhood — the prize that they secretly coveted, the emotional weapon that they knew they could wield. But personal moments of rejection are not the driving force behind my resentful feelings about black male-white female relationships now. The driving force is, instead, my 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.