When you see a black woman and a white man walking together, holding hands or with a baby in tow, what’s the first thing that comes to your head? There’s often a lot of assumptions that folks on both sides of the melanin spectrum come up with to justify their unions, and most of it has nothing to do what’s probably the real, honest-and-true reason: They LIKE each other–simple as that.
Sheesh. If I haven’t heard it all. And the list I could put together might be longer than the Dead Sea Scrolls, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll list a few of the most common bass-ackwards reasons people think black women and white men hook up.
“He just wants some jungle booty.”
Well, maybe. But when you see increasing amount of black women with wedding rings on their fingers by their melanin-challenged partners, that judgement holds about as much water as a sieve. A man will not give you his name, bear children with you, and merge his finances so he can have some black jungle booty on the regular. Sorry; try again.
“She just wants good-haired babies.”
Hmmm. This is a tough one, because I can’t speak for every black woman who procreates with a rainbeau is seeking to water down her blackness. But to be fair, I bet there’s a little some of this going on. Colorism is a real problem in the black community that has gone mostly unaddressed. Dark-skin and kinky hair have are by and large not embraced by our community, and yes; we all know where it came from. But must we continue the slave mentality? Are we really that weak?
As for me and mine, my first child was born out-of-wedlock to a gorgeous dark-skinned black man and I just KNEW we were going to have a beautiful dark-chocolate baby. But you know what? She came out with skin like caramel and sandy brown hair with blond streaks. Go figure.
I think most black, educated and upwardly mobile black women are just looking for partners who will love and cherish them. Black women want to get married, dammit! It’s our right, and white men (or non-black men) are the ones who are actually stepping up and marrying dark, kinky-haired black women, why you mad, son?
“It will never last.”
Also not true.
Marital stability studies published on the Education Resources Information Center found that White female-Black male unions are more prone to result in a divorce than White-White marriages are, while Black female-White male marriages show substantially lower rates of divorce than White-White marriages.
Erica Chito Childs, Ph.D., an associate professor at Hunter College and Past Chair of the Section of Racial and Ethnic Minorities for the American Psychological Association and author of Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Media and Popular Culture says that black men don’t necessarily date and marry interracially because they have transcended their hang ups about race, she told me. Dr. Childs, a white women who is divorced from a black man, says that often, black men boo-ing up with non-black women has more to do with status and getting the “trophy” that was once taboo and off-limits to them.
“She hates herself. She just doesn’t want to be black.”
Oh, contraire. I would argue that for someone who has been married interracially for nearly a decade, a union between a black woman and a white man often makes you feel even more black. You are indeed the brown dot on the white piece of paper. What I also find quite interesting (and not in a good way) is the double standard that abounds when it comes to black men’s ability to remain activists for their community, and still retain their black cards. No one questioned whether Civil Rights activists like Harry Belefonte, Sidney Poitier, Quincy Jones, and rabid Black Panther, Huey Newton on whether they still wanted to be black while gallivanting, mating and marrying white women.
Here’s a thought: Perhaps the personal is not always the political.
“The white man is crazy. No sane white dude would marry a black woman.”
Most interracial marriages between white men and black women are happening at the professional level–that means, both parties are college-educated and gainfully employed. These men are not losers or “white-women’s cast offs.” They’re doctors, lawyers, top-agents of Homeland Security, Secret Service men, insurance salesmen, engineers, business owners, and billionaires like Peter Norton–you know him, right? He’s the guy that keeps those pesky viruses off of your PC.
Real talk: white men may have more to lose professionally by dating and marrying black women, but guess what? THEY JUST DON’T CARE.
“White men are only interested in light-skinned black women.”
What a laugh. If a white guy wanted to boo up with a light-skinned woman, he’d just get with a white one.
Christelyn D. Karazin is the co-author of Swirling: How to Date, Mate and Relate Mixing Race Culture and Creed (to be released April 2012), and runs a blog, www.beyondblackwhite.com, dedicated to women of color who are interested and or involved in interracial and intercultural relationships. She is also the founder and organizer of “No Wedding, No Womb,” an initiative to find solutions to the 72 percent out-of-wedlock rate in the black community.
