In honor of Loving Day, I would like to devote this week’s column to interracial relationships–the subject of an anthology that Jennifer Gandin Le and I are in the process of putting together.
Through our already fascinating journey reading, researching, soliciting essays, writing, and chatting it up among our brilliant writer’s group (we must give Joie her due for coming up with the title of this very blog post), we have realized that interracial relationships are a lightening rod issue in a stormy time. But not in the way that they once were.
Today, being in an interracial relationship doesn’t really matter…until it matters. It is the former state–not really mattering–that we are encouraged by and this latter moment–suddenly mattering–that we are fascinated by.
It is hard to pinpoint a time when my boyfriend’s ethnic background (Caribbean-American, Brooklyn born) and my own (Irish-Scottish-Norwegian-American, Colorado Springs born) started to matter. We have been through a lot together in seven years. But there have been some pretty funny moments along the way…
When I first showed my grandmother a picture of the two of us together in my dorm room and said, “Look mom, this is Nik, the new guy I’ve been telling you about!” she took a long look, paused, and said, “Ahhh, raisins.” There was a tiny box of raisins sitting on my desk. There was also a six foot tall black man standing beside me, but apparently she wasn’t sure how to handle that. I decided that Grandma–Nebraskan, Episcopalian, starring down 80 grandma–wasn’t ready.
Only a couple years into our relationship, I showed up on his doorstep with a wedding shower gift for his older sister, petrified that I was late. Turns out that when Nik’s family says “party at 4″ they mean “remember you got a party to go to around 4 and start getting your shit together.” Once other people showed up (over an hour later), I sat in the corner and blushed most of the time. His aunties and neighbors walked in one by one and hollered, “Who’s the white girl?”
He’s endured my family’s propensity to have intrusive conversations around the dinner table and I’ve learned to laugh it off when his step father makes fun of me in an accent so thick I have no hope of understanding it.
And mostly we are just us. Not black. Not white. Just Bub and Court. Watching The Wire, making eggs, and laughing in bed until way too late into a Saturday afternoon.
You two sound just adorable.