Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year Ceremony 2016 at Barclays Center – Red Carpet Arrivals
Featuring: Ashley Graham, Justin Ervin
Where: New York, New York, United States
When: 13 Dec 2016
Credit: Ivan Nikolov/WENN.com
Ashley Graham was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and admits, “I didn’t grow up around many Black people.” Yet eight years ago she met a Black man that would change her life and finally open her up to true love, her husband Justin Ervin.
In an essay from her new new memoir, A New Model: What Confidence, Beauty, and Power Really Look Like,* which appears on Glamour.com today, Ashley reveals her ‘”pattern of going out with anyone who thought I was hot” since the age of 16 which finally stopped when she joined the church and embarked on a journey to find herself. Interestingly. she also found Justin there but wasn’t quite open to love after having one disappointing dating experience after another: “A guy took me out, then we had sex, then I wouldn’t hear from him again,” she wrote.
And while Justin was both persistent and consistent in his pursuit of Ashley — as well as committed to abstinence due to his faith — it wasn’t until she saw how he was able to handle the racism he experienced when meeting her family that the model knew he was worth putting herself out there for. She writes:
I brought Justin home to Nebraska. Now, I should probably mention that Justin is Black, and that I didn’t grow up around many black people. The sum total of what I learned about African American culture in school was Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Underground Railroad. This was more than my mom knew; she didn’t even see a black person in real life until she was 18 years old.
I never told Justin any of this, and I never told my grandparents that the man I was bringing home was black. I naively hoped everyone would be color-blind—which is not what happened. When my grandparents met Justin, my grandmother was cordial but cold. She greeted him and immediately walked away. When it came time for them to leave, my grandparents didn’t even acknowledge him. Instead my grandmother looked me in the eye, with Justin standing behind me, and said, “Tell that guy I said goodbye.”
I had never seen my loving, hardworking, and wonderful grandma be so hurtful and so racist. I was in shock.
After they left I took Justin on a ride to get out of the house. I’ll never forget what he said as we drove around town: “Racism is never surprising but always disappointing.”
Justin made me understand that someone like my grandma only saw Black men depicted on television in situations involving guns, rape, and violence—situations that perpetuate racist stereotypes against black people in general and black men in particular. She had probably never looked a Black man in the face, let alone had a conversation with him, and now one was in her daughter’s home, dating her granddaughter.
As if his understanding wasn’t generous enough, Justin called my grandmother on her sixtieth wedding anniversary. He’s not a texter or an emailer; he’s a pick-up-the-phone-and-call-you person, and anniversaries are a big deal to him. Afterward Grandma called my mom and said, “You’ll never guess who called me.” And from then on out, she loved him. Loved him.
From there on out, Ashley seemed to love him too. The couple married in 2010, just one year after meeting.
