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Black Men-White Women-Black Women: A Love Story
This is a love story. It’s a story about a relationship between a man and a woman. It’s a story about
the relationship between black men and black women. It’s a story of a relationship gone terribly wrong.
I live in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that can be called a nearly perfect melting pot; it’s a mish mosh of difference—different races, ethnicities, income levels. Sidewalk cafes of every stripe line the street: Vietnamese, Indian, African, Italian, French, Caribbean, Middle-Eastern, Dominican. Brownstones dominate but sprinkled between them are a few large-scale housing complexes. It’s fitting then that in the midst of this cultural fusion the ultimate barometer of mixing would occur. Interracial couples pepper the streets of this enclave the way condiments season a stew. They are visible, prevalent and at times, if one is hasty in their judgment, it would appear that in the land of coupledom they’ve achieved numerical domination.
Ironically, it’s easy to see why one may spot ten to twenty interracial couples in one afternoon within a span of several of my neighborhood’s blocks, given that nationwide interracial relationships still aren’t welcome in many communities. Like other groups, having found a haven that is amenable to them, interracial couples flock to the neighborhood for the easy comfort found in not sticking out.
Caribbean enclaves attract West Indians, neighborhoods considered gay friendly have a higher proportion of gays, East Asians congregate in specific areas of particular boroughs. So seeing reams of interracial couples spilling out over the neighborhood isn’t exactly surprising. Truth be told, it’s a good thing, if as we’d like to believe it shows greater comfort, fewer divisions, increased respect, appreciation and love for one another as human beings.
What is unusual, however, is that in my neighborhood the majority of these couples share a salient trait. That feature being that the majority are black men and white women. It’s gotten so that walking down the street on any given Monday through Sunday, I am likely to see many more black men together with white women, than I am to see black men and black women. And they look happy. Happier, more well-off and better dressed than many of the black couples in close proximity.
As someone who is attracted to men of all races and who will partner with whoever I fall in love with, on many levels I recognize these partnerships as good for the human race.
On another level, however, I question them. Not the individual relationships but the black man-white woman phenomenon that seems increasingly to have taken hold. Despite an unwillingness to appear racist, bitter or vengeful I find the proliferation of these pairings increasingly presses itself under my skin.
“What,” I wonder, “is the special fascination that black men have for white women?” I understand the desire to date, love and fall in love with and partner or marry women or men of any and all races. It’s a simple refusal to limit one’s self or one’s humanity; to be defined solely by race. But when it comes to the black man what frequently happens is that as soon as the brothers have access and opportunity to white women, the black woman simply ceases to exist. She becomes the blind spot on the vehicle called his life. A good many of these men who engage in the policy of white exclusivity, are financially successful businessmen, actors, athletes or creative sorts. They are men who either have achieved or seem destined to acquire some measure of success.
Many black women I know become angry at this conundrum. We birth them, raise them, give them the foundation for success and then they dump us. Go figure. It’s hard to explain our anger, harder even to acknowledge it because we know it will be deemed irrational, racist, narrow-minded, desperate and scapegoating. And so we bury it. But make no mistake, we still feel it. And we know the reasons for our anger are complex and layered, much like the relationship between the races.
One thing we do know: Our anger is not directed at the women or at the relationships. It’s directed at what seems to be the impetus for the phenomenon of crossing over and never crossing back.
The history goes a little like this:
For years black men were forbidden from dating white women. But in 2004, the stigma against dating a black man has largely diminished for white women, particularly in the nation’s larger metropolitan cities. (Think Kobe Bryant pre-and-post his rape trial, Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods, Karl Malone, Rick Fox, most black athletes, actors, rappers, singers, businessmen.) There are no longer any states with laws against miscegenation, though until 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional, laws were in place in states like Florida, Missouri and Oklahoma, along with 27 other states. And it wasn’t until as recently as November 2000 that Alabama became the last state to repeal the ban against interracial marriages. Much of the restriction has been removed. So, like most of us, black men crave what they could not have. It’s a no brainer. If kept on a chocolate-free (or in this case vanilla-free diet) when the diet ends, we go crazy. We enter a chocolate-frenzy known as bingeing. So it shouldn’t be surprising that white women and black men are now bingeing on each other.
Adding more power to this atomic cocktail is the male cockfight. Each cock wants to have the prize that the biggest rooster in the barn possesses. And the ultimate prize in the white man’s barn is the white woman. So I understand the special pull that white women have, beyond the normal attractiveness, that they, like every other group of woman possesses.
The white woman’s allure is magnified a thousand times over by relentless images on television programs and advertisements that proclaim subliminally, overtly, subconsciously, that they are the most beautiful women in the world and the standard against which all other women must be judged. TV’s impact on sales of assorted products works the same way. Companies pay millions of dollars for a few minutes of T.V. ad time. Why? Because they know the more viewers are told that something is ‘hot,’ special, in-demand, a must-have, the more they’ll want it, and are likely to rush out to buy it. The purchaser’s psychology is that it will, by association, make them more powerful and special too. It’s a successful formula and advertisers bank Big $s on that. So in this regard black men are tailgaters on the beauty highway, merely following traffic. Who wouldn’t succumb when the images piped at you 24-7-365-12 tell you that the most beautiful woman in the world looks like Gisele Bunchen, Pamela Anderson, Heidi Klum, Claudia Schiffer, the cast of the O.C., the list goes on and on and on. Who could resist this global programming?
Of course black women in large part do resist it. The same ads tell us white men are the finest creatures on the planet. But we, unlike black men, have not succumbed to the mythology. We continue to find black men beautiful and desirous. We continue to want to be with them, even when we date other men.
And when we see this profusion of black men with white women to the exclusion of ourselves, we don’t want to beat up the women, we don’t want to harm the men. We are too busy trying to decode and process the phenomenon and its maddeningly lopsided numbers.
Surely we say, if everything was cool between the races, we’d see more white men dating and marrying black women. At a minimum there’d be some balance in the numbers. But there isn’t. Despite the increase in numbers of black women dating white men, the disparity remains, well, disparate.
Instead we feel ourselves attacked and under siege. The feeling is an interesting combo of invalidation-under-valuation, and ultimately powerlessness. The black man’s rejection implies that ‘any white woman is worth more than a black woman.’ This trumpets a message to black youth that black women are not worth while. They can’t compete or compare. It reaffirms for white women the subliminal and overt messages they receive about their beauty setting the standard. And, of course, along with that affirmation comes the attitude from some white women that no black woman can compete with them for the black man or any other man. We bite our lips, ball up our fists and shove them deep into our pockets. We don’t want to admit it. But the truth is that attitude is enough to make a sister murderous.
In the midst of all of this other men also ignore black women. Though a minority of men from other races will approach black women, by and large, they represent a small statistical number. Men from other races have also received the message that in the beauty-equals-status=s trophy department, black women rank last. So if white women are the Nikes, Asians and Latinas are the Adidas, and Black women aren’t even Payless (because we know that many of us like Payless shoes, we just don’t want to admit it, neither do we want to get caught going into the store). No, instead we’re what an acquaintance of mine calls “Bo Bos’’ the no name sneakers that nobody wanted when they were kids.
What’s fascinating in this rejection-denial gumbo is that white men desired and sexually assaulted black women with abandon throughout slavery when according to them, ‘all blacks were considered animals.’ Funny then, that now that we’re ‘humans,’ they no longer see or desire us. The more likely scenario is that media messages, coupled with the guilt and denial about slavery’s past contribute to white men’s reluctance to affirm and, or date black women.
Of course, many black women are suspicious of white men and their motives. We wonder if they’re looking for a walk on the wild side, freaky sex, a Hoe-down. Whatever it is, these questions keep us trapped and separated from exploring options, desires, and intriguing possibilities.
The fact that black women feel responsible for our men and our community also keeps us hostage. Like many women around the world, too often we act as though it is solely our duty to keep the community intact, to reaffirm our men, and pick them up when society has beaten them down. To many of us, dating white men would be another way of denying or beating down black men. With history in mind, we think that it would be a denial of the past….a concession to the rapes. So we desist. Even when the brothers continue to ignore us or strut past us with the latest acquisition in their long line of blondes, brunettes, redheads. We remain ever faithful to the make-believe husband or lover who is never coming home.
One of the strongest obstacles to black women dating out, is the post-slavery mythology that sisters have hot pants. We’re simultaneously ball busters and whores. So if we’re whores it figures men want to screw us, preferably behind doors. If we’re ball busters we’re certainly not worthy of marriage. And so in the most vicious irony of all, the black woman is labeled by her captors and the man who should be her mate and protector post-slavery adopts the label and further helps to imprison and deny her.
Now to my white sisters. I ask you to examine the following scenario and tell us honestly how you would feel. Let’s imagine that you are a white woman (easy enough, you already are), you live in a particular neighborhood, whenever you look around it appears that the most successful and frequently most appealing white men in your neighborhood are coupled with black women. My bad. I meant, only coupled with black women. Your white brother, father, son, ex-lover and the charming stranger lighting up your radar, all act as though everything about the black woman is superior to you. Her hair, the color of her eyes, her skin, her personality, her attractiveness, her intelligence, her very essence. You are a big fat zero on a scale of 1 to ten and she is, of course, a ten-plus. Let’s take it one step further. Imagine, if you will, that 30 percent of white athletes were married to or dated only black women. Imagine if Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Colin Farrell, Justin Timberlake, Johnny Depp, John Travolta, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, George Clooney and many of their equivalents in sports and music only dated black women. They sang their praises, all the magazines preyed upon their looks and praised their beauty. How would you feel? Well, that my friend, reversed is what black women all too often feel.
Black women are denied so often and invalidated so completely that when we bitch and moan about what you have rightly termed your personal relationship, you question why the personal must be political and why it is that we seem to have problems with your relationship? You only have one man after all, you can’t be accused of stealing all the black men in the world.
Adding to the hurt for black women, is the fact that as much as we celebrate the tearing down of some of society’s walls, including the reduced restrictions on dating across race (definitely a good thing), we also look at the reality that as recently as fifty years ago if a black man whistled at a white woman he could be accused of rape, go to jail or get lynched. And the truth is, given the psycho-drama she was in and the pathology of segregation, back then many white women falsely cried rape, thereby helping to destroy black families and black lives. We look at black men and say ‘Brother, through all of that I had your back. I still have your back even when times are at their hardest. But here it is that you catch a whiff of a white woman’s panties and you are gone. Can a brother have a sister’s back sometimes, too?’
Okay. Breathe, we say, to ourselves. We’ve been in this game for a long time. We’ve seen a lot, experienced a great deal, survived even more. So brother, we understand. And we don’t hate your love story. We don’t wish you and it gone. Sometimes, in fact, we tell ourselves that if you can’t see us, you don’t deserve us. We tell ourselves that your lack of love, desire and validation will only be cured when others begin to want us, when we start dating out in as large numbers as you do, when we open ourselves up to others and you see that we are becoming the Nike, that we are desirable, that you are not the only option available to us.
Other times, when the hurt is akin to a near fatal wound, slicing inches into the flesh, cutting through tendons, exposed and raw, we say we hate black men for what you don’t do to us, we say we hate you for your lack of love for us. But dig it, my brothers, dig it. When we say all this, when we obsess so long, when we talk about what you do and don’t do and we analyze and try to re-analyze all that is going on with and inside you, can’t you see? That’s not hate. It could never be hate. It’s love that we love, value and want you. We want you to want us too. We keep talking like we’re in therapy because we keep wanting to work it out, we desire to be with you…we want you to love us and desire us too…. So all that hate you think we be spewing when we look at you, it ain’t hate, it’s love inverted, it’s a long lost love and hurt, calling out to you.
By Max Smith
Max Smith is a writer living in New York. She can be reached at maxsandro@msn.com
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Slim Thug's - Buffoonery
(Photo Slim Thug. A misnomer indeed. Now this is a character who truly looks like he should be, rather, like he has the credentials to tell a black woman, hell, any woman, how to act, dress, look; because he is such a fine and upstanding specimen indeed. I mean, all black women must dream about getting a piece of his super slim fineness indeed. Bwahahaha! Check yourself, before you -- say what? -- wreck yourself!)
And rapper Slim Thug, LaToya Luckett's ex, is the latest culprit. Check out what the self proclaimed cheater had to say about why black women need to lower their standards, and why the "white side" of his girlfriend is the cause of their relationship working.
Here's a snippet from Slim Thug's heartfelt and uplifting interview with VIBE :
“Most single Black women feel like they don’t want to settle for less. Their standards are too high right now. They have to understand that successful Black men are kind of extinct.”
“My girl is Black and White. I guess the half White in her is where she still cooks and do all the shit that I say, so we make it. She just takes care of me and I like that. She don’t be begging and I don’t gotta buy her all this crazy ass shit. And she’s a smart girl too.”
“White women treat they man like a king and Black women feel like they ain’t gotta do that shit. Black women need to stand by their man more. Don’t always put the pressure of if I’m fucking with you, you gotta buy me this and that. Black men are the ones that motherfuckers need [but] I think a lot of them need to step it up too.”
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Steph Jones' Message to Black Men Who Hate Black Women
This cat right here, this young cat, has just risen twenty degrees in my book. Why? Because he's speaking truth. Because he's speaking knowledge. Because he is so cognizant of the divisive nonsense afflicting the black community, and because he has the courage to address an issue that frequently gets pushed to the side or played down. And because he breaks down in an intelligent manner the slights that dark-skinned women receive on a daily basis from blacks, to say nothing of the larger society.
Jones explains why those insults and back-handed compliments 'She's pretty for a dark-skinned girl,' point to self-hate and a continuation of the racist notions that we've imbibed over time. Big up to this brotha for having the cojones to come out and speak on this, and for knowing that as a fair-skinned cat he would be likely to catch some hell from folks who will do anything to avoid the issue.
This is a direct and admirable juxtaposition to the disparaging, self-hating commentary from types like Slim Thug, Ocho Cinco, Tyrell Owens, and Chris Brown, to name a few. Intelligent analysis, combined with self-awareness, community awareness and a sense of the role of society and history, that's a beautiful thing.
Ain't nothin' sexier in my book than intelligence and an appreciation and love of self, in combination with a love and respect for all humans and all cultures; particularly when much around you applauds one thing and downgrades the other.
Luvin' Steph Jones right now. I'm glad he's here as an alternative voice for a lot of the young brothas and sisters (of all races) to listen to. What's ailing black people is a simple case of self-hate, and whenever comments like the ones Jones mentions in his video are uttered, those are just the symptoms manifesting themselves.
I'm gonna have to take a closer listen to Jones' music afterall. Celebrating Steph Jones' courage and love of black women today. Steph Jones Message To Black Men Who Hate Black Women Bossip.com
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