- How much would a negative reaction from a family member to you dating interracially impact your decision to continue dating a) the same individual, and b) any future individual of a different race?
It’s easy for me to say it wouldn’t matter to me, but perhaps I’ve not sufficiently appreciated this actually being a possibility. There are certain things in my life that I do purposely avoid bringing up to my parents because I know how strongly they would disapprove and don’t want to deal with it. Maybe if my family disapproved strongly of interracial dating, I’d have been discouraged from dating outside of my race. Then again, the thoughts in my head about whatever it is I think or how I spend my weekends are easily something I never have to share with them (outside of some mild-to-moderate tongue biting at Thanksgiving dinner); deliberately manipulating my love interests and/or hiding them in order to avoid scorn are much, much different, so maybe I would put my foot down. So, I don’t know how I’d treat the situation, even though I’d like to think my inner I-Do-What-I-Want would do what it wants. I have no problem doing whatever the hell I please despite people’s disapprovals, but for some reason, it’s a lot tougher with family. Hell, I haven’t even come out of the atheist closet yet, and I’ve been agnostic since I was 12 years old, and full-blown official atheist since 17.
In any case, in real life (hypothetical babbling aside) my family, fortunately, couldn’t care less about what race I’m dating if they tried. I have one sister who gets all “kill whitey” at times, but she’s very easy to ignore in that regard. The rest of my family doesn’t care, and my parents certainly don’t. Maybe because they’re not d-bags? Maybe because they had to deal with scorn out “outside” dating themselves? They’re the same race, but my grandmother nearly died 1,000 deaths when my mother dared married an American.
**There was some discussion earlier of the idea of black women perhaps getting the short end of the stick when black men date interracially, and I’d love to explore that further, particularly if it relates to other races, as well. **
This is why I agree with ReticulatingSplines when he says this poll would be interesting if divided by gender. Black, White and Latina (Latino/a not a race, I know, let’s not go there when you know damn well what I mean) women very often want to only date and sleep with men of their own race. My cite is the people I’ve known my entire life. For them, their race is the entire dating pool. For men, the dating pool is people. Men, of any race, will usually date/screw whoever they like or think is cute, and never even have any concern over the races that people of their own race are seeing. Very, very rarely have I heard a few black men whine that what he defined as “educated black women” were either fiercely single, or didn’t date black guys. Now of course, I’ve got my theories on their theories, which are a separate conversation entirely (or maybe not), I’m just saying this kind of gripe has been otherwise nonexistent among men in my admittedly limited personal experience. And while this kind of gripe is not common among women either, if I were to categorize these types of complaints by sex, I’d reckon 95% have come from women.
To this, I give you this, from another thread I saw in CS some months ago.