"dating white men was tiring. I had to constantly be on guard, preparing myself for their racist comments. And I knew they were coming. I knew there would be a point where I’d have to talk about why I could say n***** and they couldn’t. I knew there’d be a conversation about Black on Black crime. I KNEW there’d be some fucked up assumption about Black people that I’d have to dismantle and then beat my white date over the head with—thereby ending whatever the fuck we were doing together. And I really wasn’t there for that shit...
The more serious our relationship got, the more I was spending half my time—at least—surrounded by white people. While I’d gone to predominantly white schools and worked in mostly white companies, I’d never had so many white people suddenly in my intimate spaces. It’s one thing to hit it and split it with a guy and another to interact in my personal time with entire groups of white people, sometimes in my home.
And it affected me a LOT. I was constantly pulled out of spaces where I felt comfortable and pushed into spaces that felt isolating. We live in Atlanta, where multi-racial, multi-ethnic options are everywhere, yet when we socialized with his friends I was required to visit all-white neighborhoods, businesses, and events...
Growing up Black in America, you learn to ignore a lot of racist shit, especially if you are moving in white spaces. I was taught that white spaces were aspirational, that access to these spaces meant success. That’s a white supremacist ideology, but we live in a white supremacist society, so it’s also true: all-white spaces are where a lot of power brokering happens. This often means that the more power you achieve, the more you face casual social racism...
The side effect is that this type of talk, this dislike and hatred of Black people, becomes not just the white noise but also the internal harmony of your life. It goes from being something you actively ignore to something you actively hum, and eventually sing. You stop noticing it, and then you stop fighting it, because it no longer sounds wrong to you. It sounds normal."
Related: Secretly racist boyfriend
FB: "If you want to be my lover", the black version "I’d realized that, although being with Kevin had helped me to recognize the racist attitudes I’d unconsciously swallowed, he hadn’t been able to do the same. He wasn’t willing to face his own racism, and this meant I didn’t trust my husband with my Blackness. I am not naïve; I do not expect another person to ever understand and accept the whole of me. I think that is highly unrealistic and self-centered. But my Blackness defines how the world engages with me, and it is something that he had to understand and embrace for us to be together. And in order for him to do that, he had to own his racism."
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