CULTURE|RELATIONSHIPS
I Decided to Only Date Black Men for a While and Here’s What I Learned as a Result
I wonder how many people will correctly guess my reason why before reading my story
It was the summer of 2016 and I had never exclusively dated any particular race, aside from the human race, in the many years of dating that I had experienced up to that point.
Several years prior I had a friend, a Black woman, who was attracted to one of my white guy friends. He was very attracted to her as well but she would not date him because she only dated Black men. She felt strongly about only dating Black men for various reasons.
I found it quite odd.
As sexual, open, intelligent, and creative as this friend was, she refused to budge on this issue, aside from some kissing and touching with the dude I mentioned which was short-lived.
A few years later, one of my white male colleagues told me about a co-worker of ours to whom he was attracted. When he asked her out, she told him up front that she really liked him but nothing serious would ever become of them because he was white.
For some Black women, my friend for example, this aversion to white men in particular and a preference towards Black men had to do with America’s history of slavery and the continued systemic racism that is woven into the fabric of American society.
In my case, for the first time, I wanted to meet men to whom I didn’t have to explain what it was like to be a part of Black culture or what it is like to live in American society as a non-white person.
This came on the heels of dating an Italian man with whom I felt close but worlds apart due to many cultural differences.
There was a man who took a liking to me where I worked and I knew it. He was a beautiful Black man who had a son with a wife whom he was divorcing.
Shortly before he made his feelings clear to me, I had decided to only date Black men to save me the trouble of explaining so many things about myself and Black culture to the next person I dated.
I thought it would be a relief, and honestly, in ways it was. However, people are people and after a few months, that particular dude showed me that he was not someone I wanted to continue to date.
I wanted to take it slow for various reasons, including the fact that he had a son, and I was thinking about moving to Seattle. I thought that he was very kind and caring but one day he started showing a more callous and impatient side of himself that seemed to switch on.
We never went back to the way things were.
Philadelphia has a large Black population but despite my greatest efforts, I did not become interested in anyone enough to date them for a year and a half.
Ironically, the men were: Puerto Rican, Pakistani, and basic white American. I didn’t date any of them for more than a month.
My mind kept going back to my former co-worker. He had since left the place where we worked together. I wondered if we could make it work but I was put off by the posts I saw of his on social media.
As pervasive as Black people and culture are in entertainment and news, we only make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population. This was extremely daunting for me when it came to exclusively dating Black men.
I am a vegetarian on top of it and have been made aware that I have quite a different perspective and way of living than most people.
A Black man with a British accent (my favorites were Idris Elba and Chiwetel Ejiofor) was a dream of mine for quite some time but life doesn’t always spin its web in the ways we envision.
I had given up on dating anyone and was set on moving to Germany once I finally finished my Bachelor’s degree in two years.
That’s when my white German boyfriend appeared and completely took me by surprise.
We met online.
He wanted to practice his English and I wanted to start learning German. He had recently visited Philadelphia for quite some time so he was happy to connect with someone who lived in Philly.
I didn’t think anything serious would become of us at all. It was the furthest thing from my mind at the time.
We met in person six months later and have been together ever since.
I have had to teach him many cultural differences related to my American heritage and my Black culture. He has learned so much and continues to learn which pleases me most.
He cares a great deal about what life has been like for me as a biracial female growing up with a single Black mother in the United States.
It is true that he will never fully get what it is like when certain songs that are known in Black communities play on loudspeakers.
He will never know what it’s like to say or hear certain words or phrases that are commonly spoken in my family or amongst certain friends.
He has come to understand why I look for Black characters or diversity in the shows and movies that we watch and why the depiction of them matters so much to me.
I have come to realize that there is a part of me that wanted to be with a Black man romantically because it could mean being more accepted in my Black family which is the only biological family I know.
At this point though, I don’t really care.
I love who I love and I am very grateful that anyone loves me back to the degree that I love them.
Racism does matter.
Color is not blind.
However, I refuse to let aesthetics preside over character traits.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
