Before I understood what “wild oats” were, my parents—especially my mother—warned me to stay away from white women. Both came of age in the pre-Emmett Till South, where black men got lynched for so much as flirting with white girls. For my mother and father, however, avoiding “playing in the snow” was more about racial pride than physical safety. I can still hear my mother telling me that there was no need to “cross the fence” because we had every shade of color imaginable on our side, from “dark as midnight” to “high yaller.” “Have some pride,” she said. “If you and your friends don’t stay within the race, girls like your sisters will not have decent men to marry.” She meant that the male portion of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “talented tenth” had a duty—which they failed to meet because of slavery and its aftermath—to protect black women and take their rightful place as head of the family. To marry “out of the fold” was to once again abandon black women.
I did not openly question this obligation, but I did surreptitiously date white girls. In college, when I dated a white girl, my father believed it was simply a misguided attempt to dis my parents’ values. Meanwhile, my mother prayed for my black soul. I called my parents hypocrites for marching for freedom in the 1960s while castigating me for embracing freedom in my choice of romantic partners. I saw myself as carrying out Dr. King’s dream—that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
Before and between marriages, I dated women with light, dark, and red hair, but relatively few with dark skin; I’m now married to a woman with blond hair and blue eyes. I used to rationalize my choices as a search for smart women, skin color be damned. And when I did admit, to close male friends, that I found blonds and redheads especially appealing, I was always quick to point out black women who also tripped my trigger, such as Halle Berry and Vanessa Williams. Interestingly, they were in many ways the “high yaller” version of what I found attractive in white women. Did I truly have a preference but lack the guts to admit it? Was it just physical—I gravitated toward whites over blacks the way other men go for model-thin waifs over their more zaftig sisters? Or was it something deeper? I have to wonder if years of living in white neighborhoods and attending an Establishment bastion like Harvard created confusion about my racial identity—and maybe that confusion led me to what could be taken as a symbolic abandonment of black women.
One of my best friends, who resembles a slightly wizened, middle-aged Kunta Kinte, has followed a similar path; his spouse is a statuesque blond with blue eyes whose family hails from Northern Europe. He is proud of his blackness and rails with gusto against the injustices that whites have inflicted upon African-Americans. He says the only criteria for his partner is that she be “pretty, nice, and let me be the man.” The ethnic identities of his paramours over the years suggest he does not believe African-American women fit the bill. He told me that, living in Minnesota, his choices were strictly a result of “supply and demand,” but I wasn’t really convinced. Truth be told, I have always felt that we two were playing a little game of hypocrisy in energetically proclaiming our love for black people but not sharing our love with black women.
Now my teenage sons are introducing me to their girlfriends, and it appears the apple has fallen close to the tree. Until recently, I said nothing. After all, I taught them to look past color. Yet I also taught them never to forget their racial heritage. I still very much believe what Dr. King preached, but I worry that, through my choices, I have unwittingly told my sons they should look primarily to non-African-American women for romance.
Ironically, my mother has come to terms with “crossing the fence.” And I have become more empathetic to her underlying fear, that my dating and marrying women who did not look like her was somehow a rejection of her and her values. Since women have historically been the ones to pass on cultural traditions from one generation to the next, my stepping outside the racial box meant that my children might not be as connected to our African-American roots as I had been. This is a scary prospect for a proud African-American like my mother. And I owe it to my sons to make sure they consider that possibility as they make their romantic choices.
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