Love's Not Color Blind by Kevin A. Patterson

Author:Kevin A. Patterson [Patterson, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thorntree Press
Published: 2018-01-31T01:47:03+00:00

Tokenism

“I was in Denver, a city I had never been in, to attend and present at a polyamory conference. The day before, I drove 90 minutes to spend the night with my girlfriend in her hometown. We typically spent every other weekend with one another, and this weekend would’ve been our time together. So, if I missed this brief opportunity to see her, it would be almost a month that passed between visits.

The morning of my flight, I woke up well before sunrise to make the 90-minute drive home. I got my kids ready for school, I got myself ready to travel, and my wife dropped me off at the airport. With all the moving around, I was exhausted by the time I reached the hotel where the conference was being held. So, when a friend suggested that I skip the opening festivities, I took his advice and slept through the night’s events. The host’s welcome. The keynote address. The party. All of it.

The next morning, a conference attendee asked me about a bit of flashy attire on the outfit that I wore to last night’s party. The party that I had missed. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I brushed it off and went about the business of finding breakfast.

As I was loading up my plate at the breakfast buffet, someone approached me from behind. This shorter person threw an arm around me and pulled me down into a kiss on the cheek. It was a lovely kiss. Turning around to see who was offering such a warm embrace…I saw a woman I didn’t recognize. I’m bad with faces, but not that bad. This woman was a stranger to me and by the look on her face, I was a stranger to her. I had been confused for someone else. She embarrassedly apologized for the mistake, and a nearby friend pointed out to her, her intended target…another tall, black man.

As it turns out, me and this other gentleman are several years apart in age, and he looks almost nothing like me. But we were the only two black men in attendance for the majority of that conference. When I got a chance to speak to him later that day, he asked me about my polyamory-activism. As I described my work, he hit upon the realization that I was ‘the guy with the blog’ who other attendees kept confusing him for.

He was the guy with the flashy outfit that I was mistaken for on my way to breakfast. No one was expecting the strange occurrence of not one, but two, tall, black men and, apparently, it was difficult to tell us two mostly dissimilar men apart…even for those who knew (one of) us well enough to initiate unsolicited intimate contact.”

– Kevin Patterson, Professional Body Double for Tall Black Men

Go ahead and Google “college Photoshop black.”

It’s cool…I’ll wait.

Ok, if you didn’t bother Googling, or even if you did, here’s what you might’ve found: In September of 2000, a story

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