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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In a perfect world, love would be blind. Individuals would choose each other for kindness, intelligence, perseverance, courage, and a host of other mysterious reasons that make attraction so magical. Race and the characteristics that have come to represent it — like skin color, eye color, and hair texture — would not be factors in matters of the heart. This is the way things would be if our love lives actually mirrored recent scientific findings, which tell us the human family is so genetically close that we share more than 99 percent of our DNA. Genetically speaking, there are no racial categories; race is merely skin deep. Dating and marrying across racial lines should therefore be natural, common and acceptable. But this is not a perfect world. This is the United States, where a deep-seated notion of racial difference has been the rationalization for oppression, the rallying cry for discrimination against people who are not white. Within this racialized landscape in which whiteness has reigned supreme, the line between white and black has been the starkest marker of racial difference, with the white side of the line representing all that is positive, and the black side of the line representing all that is negative.