After the recent shootings, a black man who is dating a white girlfriend wrote Slate’s Dear Prudence column wondering whether he should break up with his girlfriend whom they have been taking marriage with. The girlfriend told him that “…she couldn’t have a black baby in this world. She is too afraid.”

Much as we cannot generalize because of the above, this is not the first incident of its kind. Ebony magazine put up an article last year by a white man married to a Haitian woman who said: “I Hope My Son Stays White,” explaining if their child is light skinned, he or she wont have to deal with racism. He went…

“I want my son’s skin color not to matter, but the truth is that it does. If he gets darker – if his skin eventually comes to resemble my wife’s more than mine – there will be consequences for him. People will fear him… It will only be worse if he wears a hoodie and sags his jeans, and so shamefully I also hope that he’ll be “culturally white,” following the trends of the suburbs and not the inner city.

If he does darken, women will cross the street when they see him coming, the way they sometimes do when they pass my wife’s brother on the sidewalk. Convenience store employees will follow him suspiciously around the aisles. Cops may hassle him for things I don’t think twice about, like jaywalking.

And, if any of these people decide they need a gun to defend themselves against my scary, black, unarmed son, a large segment of society will assume he deserved to die.

That’s what troubles me so much about the Michael Brown case. His death is tragic, but it’s the reaction to his death that makes me afraid for my son.”

A black and white lesbian couple also had a similar issue. The white partner wanted them to use a white sperm donor. “She says, adamantly, we should try our best to use a white sperm donor. My wife isn’t racially prejudiced at all, but she makes the point that it is a known fact that in this world, especially in Texas where we live, it is a lot easier to be white. Especially if we have a son, it is factually safer to not be black . . .,” said the black partner.

Also, there was a case of a woman who sued a sperm bank for “wrongful birth” because they accidentally sent her a black man’s sperm instead of the white one she had ordered. The child she referred to as a “wrongful birth” is their mixed race daughter. She argued that she and her white partner don’t possess the “cultural competency” to assist their mixed race daughter with typical African American features to cope with the challenges of racial segregation and prejudice in her “all-white community” and “often unconsciously insensitive family.”

Is this becoming a thing for interracial couples (especially black-white couples) who are planning to have children? Are interracial couples afraid of raising black looking children for fear of anticipated prejudice and violence against their mixed race children? If you are an interracial couple, does this bother you?

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So, you’re attracted to a person of another race. You would like to get to know him or her better, but have a sense of dread and weirdness about the whole thing. The person who attracts you is “different”; not the same color or ethnicity or culture as you. Suddenly, you realize that you have stereotyped the person; you have characterized them, and made generalizations or assumptions about them based on their race. What can you do to “see” the person for who they are, and not “see” https://www.interracialdating.com/fyooz/racist-beliefs/the stereotype?

If you truly want to change your stereotype collection, examine the assumptions that you have made about the person and the group to which he or she belongs. Where did those assumptions come from? What information are they based on? Are they based on real personal experiences with real people you’ve actually met, or on what you’ve learned from others, from television, from movies, or in school? Is it possible that some of your stereotypes are incorrect?

After you have examined where the stereotypes you have in your head come from, the next obvious step is to get to know the person. Stereotypes typically “dehumanize” people. Getting to know the person may reveal things you two have in common, such as you both like the symphony or bookstores, or the Giants, Japanese food, or maybe you both have been in a similar emotional situation. Shared similar experiences can open the door to creating emotional empathy, from which trust grows, and then who knows, affection and even love.

At the same time that you are getting to know your new found friend, continue to work on your own inner dialogue. Use appropriate terminology to describe ethnically and racially diverse groups, and avoid using types of designations and expressions which sometimes used to portray groups as inferior or superior to others. Also, be sure to refrain from using sweeping statements to describe all members of a particular group. Catch yourself out when you use the word “they” about a racial group. It can be a distancing word, making them the other, not at all like “we” or “us”.

Changing your own stereotype world requires diligence on your part to change your inner dialogue. Changing the stereotypes which deep down, you believe are true, requires pushing aside that racist inner dialogue and getting to know the living, breathing person who’s actually in front of you. You just might be surprised at how easy you will “see” the person, and how fast your collection of stereotypes will become a relic of old, tired thinking.

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I was reading an article on Cosmopolitan the other day on the best things about being in an interracial relationship and number 2 on the list was: “Your relationship pisses off racists” and the explanation behind it being on the ‘best’ list was, “if seeing a beautiful relationship can’t change their minds, [one] can at least make a hate-filled racist’s day a bit worse just by being with the person [they] love.”

So many things piss off racists… I mean if a mere advert like the Cheerios commercial got them raging just because it featured an interracial family; if a simple movie like Star Wars VII made twitter get populated with racist comments just because its featuring a black storm-trooper (someone even committed suicide over it), then we live in sad world. And this is just fiction.

In the real world, couples have been harassed, hate crimes committed against them for being in interracial relationships. And as the number 6 on the ‘best’ the list goes: “It’s nice to have an ally against racism outside your race…”, I think in some neighborhoods, knowing that your relationship is pissing off racists can be the scariest thing of all.

Yes its great to know that there’s someone there with you with whom you share these racist experiences; yes its great to know that you have someone in this fight against prejudice.

But besides that, how do you really feel knowing your interracial relationship makes racists stomachs churn? Happy that you made another racist’s life unbearable? Sad? Annoyed that in this century people still have such prejudiced mindsets? Scared? Does it make you feel your relationship is not worth the bad experiences you go through?

Do tell…

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Sometimes, its good to go back in history and see where all this began. But as we learned from our previous article: 10 interesting facts about race and skin color, the whole concept of human races is a recent theory. Well below are some facts about racial prejudice. The first one… so unbelievable.

1. Well, here is how people qualified to attend some churches in the U.S. in the early 20th Century: One had to go through a comb that hang from a string on a pinewood slab. The pinewood was used as the color test – you could only get into church if your skin was lighter than the pinewood. The comb was for the hair test – only those whose hair went through without it getting caught on the comb qualified for church.

2. Going by the federal figures, one in four students in America reports to being a victim of racial or ethnic prejudice in a typical school year.

3. If you are a child born to an interracial couple, then automatically, you are categorized under the less privileged or inferior group. This is because traditionally, U.S. has followed the theory of hypodescent.

4. Apparently, going by research conducted on the National Basketball Association referees in 2007, economists Joseph Price and Justin Wolfers maintained that as per results of the study, the referees were expected to call fouls on players who were not of the same race as themselves.

5. Interracial sex was outlawed in Virginia in the year 1662. They made amendments to this law imposing heavier penalties if the persons found guilty of interracial fornication were “Blacks” or “Christians”. Come 1691, it was illegal in the state of Virginia for any Black man, mulatto or Indian man to be seen in the company of or marry a white woman. These laws were dropped in Virginia in 1967.

6. In 2002 the Institute of Medicine documented evidence of pervasive racial inequalities in the healthcare system. These disparities were partially attributed to physician bias. For instance, in the years between 1940 and 1999, more than 4 million Black Americans were reported to have died prematurely compared to their Caucasian counterparts.

7. Racial classification of every child at birth began in the early 1900 in the United States under the Racial Integrity Act. This act made marriage between whites and people of with even one drop of the “Black” lineage unlawful. The driving force behind this law was the fear that interracial sex between blacks and whites would dilute and depreciate the white race.

8. In a bid to prove that some of the human races were intrinsically more intelligent than other races, during the early 1900s, Eugenists employed IQ tests on individuals. The main aim was to show that Blacks and other immigrants (even those from Southern and Eastern Europe) were intellectually inferior to Americans of Saxon or Scandinavian descent. These tests didn’t last long because by the 1940, Eugenics as a science had been discredited. It was also discredited on grounds of being an excuse for racial prejudice and hatred.

9. In order to be allowed into the state of Ohio, blacks were required to post a 500 dollar bond as a guarantee of their good behavior. They were also expected to provide court documents proving that they were free. This happened in the early 1800s.

10. The African slave trade boomed in the 18th century. But before then, Africans and Native Americans servants had the same standing as the White indentured servants. About 2/3 of all White immigrants to the American colonies were non-free laborers. Then came the slave trade boom; Africans and their children were treated and seen as a different and inferior race who became life-long properties of their masters.

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