Interracial Relationships

I've wanted to write about this for a while, which is strange because this is something that I used to be very unopinionated about. I used to say, just date who you want. I don't care about race, and I still don't. However, I've come to realise that I care about the little consequential things that come with race. These are the things that caused me to change my mind about this topic altogether; a topic that I used to be very indifferent about in the past. I cannot quite say that today. From what I've said thus far, it seems that this post is about race, but it has more to do with humanity in general. In particular, the very obvious flaws of it. If you haven't figured it out already, I am going to be expressing my thoughts on why most people should not embark on interracial relationships.

Once Upon a Time

Growing up, most if not everyone was black. Therefore it was highly probably that your workmate, your neighbour, your spouse, and your children will all look like you — at the very least, they will have a similar skin colour to yours. Additionally, I never left the country and don't remember seeing many foreigners at the same time, so seeing people who looked to starkly different from you was very rare. I remember in my last year in Kenya, we received a student from the Netherlands. He was the most popular person in the entire school for quite some time. But I digress. What I'm saying is that I never thought about things like this because I never had to. Yes, my young age probably had something to do with it as well. Either way, I'm emphasising that my current thoughts and opinions about this topic don't come from any experiences I had as a child... Not completely.

The US of A

I'm going to skip over my experience of leaving my home country and 1st months or years in the United States. Such a topic will likely have it's own dedicated post in the future, to which I will put a link to read, once it is written.

If you were raised or spent time with a lot African women as a young boy, you probably heard the same thing I did, often more than once:

Be wary of those white women.

I was young, and in a new country. So, as you can probably assume, this went in one year and out the other. Now, I firmly hold the position that this is said out of ignorance. However, in hindsight, what they used to say was not completely preposterous. Because it was said so bluntly and often without much context, finding any fragment of validity in those words is difficult, if not impossible, without particular life experiences. Regardless, I was indifferent to what people looked like: how dark, or pale, one's skin is, how big their lips are, how small their eyes are, along with the countless characteristics that can be used to pinpoint race and ethnicity, were just that. Characterstics. However, this is America, and in such a place moreso than anywhere else in the developed world, these things are much more than that.

American History