Is Marriage for White People? by Ralph Richard Banks

Author:Ralph Richard Banks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

The Exotic Adventure?

Another fear that many women expressed had less to do with family and friends and more to do with the man himself. Some black women worry that white men see them as an exotic adventure. They suspect that the white men who approach them have a “thing” for black women or are indulging a curiosity that will soon pass, just as one might sample exotic food with no intention of making it part of one’s daily diet.

When Maya, the prosecutor from D.C., first started dating Bill, a sports agent, he seemed really cool. They got along well, and she liked that he seemed so into her. But over time her view of him changed. Bill represented a lot of black athletes and often took Maya to celebrity gatherings. She enjoyed meeting sports figures whom she had before only seen on television. But after a while, she began to feel that he was showing her off. When he paraded her around his black clients and buddies, “he even talked differently,” she recalls. “I started to feel that he thought he was better off with the black athletes because he was dating a black woman. I started to wonder whether he thought having a black girlfriend could raise his status in the eyes of his clients.” Eventually, Maya ended the relationship. “It just wasn’t about me, you know? He’s one of those guys who has a thing for black women.”

As Maya’s experience suggests, some white men do want to date black women for the wrong reasons. One woman I spoke with summed up the worry of many: “With white men, it’s almost like they want to possess me rather than have a relationship with me.”

For some women, it is difficult to shake the suspicion that a white man’s desire for a black woman—any white man’s desire for any black woman—is somehow sordid or degrading. Many black women associate white men’s attraction to them with the twisted sexual relationships that often developed between master and slave. One woman from New York says that when she visited rural Virginia to work on the Obama campaign, a white man there expressed interest in her. “But I didn’t think it should be taken as complimentary,” she says, “because throughout Southern history there were all these white slave masters who took black mistresses.” She felt that appreciating his attraction to her would somehow perpetuate that pattern, as if he regarded her not as a potential wife, but as something akin to a concubine.

A number of the women I interviewed can relate. As one woman explains, “I do see white men as the oppressor. Even within my own family,” she says, “black women have been the victim of sexual violence by white men. I think it’s still very prevalent, this desire for white men to want to conquer or tame exotic women.”

In some cases, though, this suspicion on the part of black women does them a disservice. When a white businessman she had dated a few

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