I met him second semester of freshman year. It was a bright day. We happened to be wearing the same neon green Northface jacket. He stuck his hand out to shake mine; it was firm. A wonderful, tall boy with a big frame whose soul felt oddly familiar. Sometimes you meet people, you look them in the eye, and you just know they’re going to change your life forever. This was one of those times.
Three years later, like I knew we would be, we were in love.
It wasn’t until my mom sat me down one day that I realized there were certain challenges we would face as a couple—challenges stemming from the ignorance and prejudices of some people. No matter how many times I tried to explain to such people, there was one thing they continuously struggled to understand: I didn’t choose him because he was white; I chose him because he felt like home. We would get stares, but my mom would calm me down and tell me it’s because we were so beautiful. I never believed her.
Our school was an incredibly diverse place, but there weren’t many interracial couples with a black woman and a white man. As much praise as we got on social media and in real life, I would still get remarks that I liked “pink” (referring to his penis) and that he had a taste for “chocolate.” I never told my boyfriend about these remarks, even if they were from his friends, because I knew he would be upset. Throughout my entire life, I had built up my own defenses to racist and derogatory comments, so I chose to deal with much of this ignorance alone. I never wanted him to suffer in the ways I had before. I was constantly insecure that people looked at us and either wondered why he would ever date someone like me, or on the fetishizing side of the spectrum, thought, of course, he wants to be with someone “exotic.”
I spent countless times in the kitchen with the elders of my family explaining that he had a name and it wasn’t “white boy.” I had infinite conversations with my cousin clarifying that I don’t exclusively date white men, but that I just fell in love with someone who was. I assured her that he treated me like the most amazing girl in the world, and it wasn’t because I was black.
Comments were made about how beautiful our kids would be if we were to conceive—we were 17. I would show him to new college friends who wanted to know what my high school boyfriend looked like. Him being white was always the most shocking thing to them, as if the concept of us as a couple was going to somehow reverse the effects of racism entirely. Yet even under that delusional belief, my identity as a black individual was constantly being invalidated or challenged because I was in love with a white person. As if being in love with a white man made me less black. As if our entire relationship was focused on race. In actuality, the only time we talked about it was when we planned what we would do if we were in public and someone tried to harass us. I wish we didn’t have to have that conversation. But the reality was, we were living in a country where interracial love was still very much a taboo concept; Alabama didn’t lift all interracial marriage laws until the year 2000, and even then, 40% of its citizens voted against this decision.
As I grow and I see interracial relationships becoming more popular, I want everyone to think more about the two people dating versus the difference in their skin tones. They are human beings who have a beautiful relationship often because they’re in love—not because it’s “trendy” or “cool.” I applaud the increasing number of interracial couples I see because they have the courage to defy expectations and live beyond the confines of “taboo.”
I loved my boyfriend because he was amazing. He understood all of my dumb jokes, he looked at me like I was the only girl in the room, he kept me moving, he kept me grounded, and he fought for my love every single day when we were together. And that’s just how hard I loved him back. Not because he was white. Not because he wasn’t black. But because he was love, and at the end of the day, what more can any of us really ask for?