Race and Dating

I thoroughly enjoyed a fascinating and thoughtful piece by Ernest Baker on "The Reality of Dating White Women When You're Black", which includes the following:

By middle school, and especially high school, those expectations were even more apparent. I started to see what it really meant to be in an interracial relationship. Sometimes white girls hid me from their family, especially their father. That was normal. I had one girlfriend in high school who strictly forbade doorbell ringing. I'd let her know when I'd be outside. She was not going to go through the trouble of calling attention to the fact that she was going out with a black guy. I can't say that my own mother has never asked, "When are you going to bring home a girl who looks like me?" Running around with white girls comes across as a rejection of your blackness to the women in your family, even though that wasn't the case. To me, it was simple. The girls who showed me the most attention at school were white. The world made it complicated and assumed I had an ulterior motive, and it sucks, but I understand why.

There are self-hating black men who date white women for contrived and pathetic reasons and I hate them...

As despicable as racism is, an unforunate fact that this article makes apparent is that it often maintains a hold on its victims in many unexpected ways. Conversely, it is heartening to see that many reject it anyway, despite enormous pressure to conform.

-- CAV

P.S. One thing in this piece that gives me pause is the explanation of why many blacks wrongly cheered the O.J. Simpson verdict. On that score, I refer my readers to Item 6 ("Collective Responsibility") in this piece about how blacks perpetuate racism, by Walter Hudson.