Why do I date white women? Black women have told me it's because I'm a sellout. The white men who can get past the mental anguish of my black penis tarnishing "their" women think I'm making some latent admission that their race has the most attractive women. White women range from those so intrigued by black men that it veers into fetish to those so reluctant to date black men that it feels more racist than preference-driven. These are generalizations, of course, but they are attitudes that I've personally encountered. Skepticism towards black men/white women relationships is a longstanding and well-documented part of our cultural fabric in America.

Most people have it wrong. I'm not a "black man" who "dates white women." I'm a person. I have my own unique experiences and some of them include having dated women who are white, but because interracial dating is such a historically tense and loaded subject, it's hardly ever looked at with any understanding or compassion for the people personally involved. The concept of a black man in a relationship with a white woman is a "thing" that people have an opinion on, and that opinion comes with an entire set of stereotypes, fueled by racist ideology, a complicated past, and sometimes even pop culture. Kanye West once rapped about how successful black men will "leave your ass for a white girl," and then put himself into that box by marrying a white woman, furthering the pervasiveness of flawed, generic ideas about interracial relationships.

That swath of generic ideas has an actual impact on culture and society, too. How many jokes have been made at Kim Kardashian's expense because of her history of dating black men? Twenty-two-year-old virgin psychopath Elliot Rodger just killed six people in California and left behind a paper trial of racially charged sentiments like, "How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me?" The most visible criminal trial of the 20th century centered around a blonde white woman who was presumably murdered at the hands of her black husband, O.J. Simpson. White reaction to The Verdict may have been one of shock and rage, but it's also largely oblivious to the history of disenfranchisement, partially as it relates to interracial relationships, of blacks in this country.

Part of the reason why black people celebrated the O.J. verdict is because it was a rare example of a black man finally beating the system that was so unjust to his people for so long. It was cold, hard, classic revenge. Throughout this nation's history, unfathomable numbers of innocent black men have been hung from trees and burned because of often fabricated stories of their fraternizing with white women, and there were usually no consequences for the white men lynching them.

I was taught the story of Emmett Till by my mother at a young age. I don't think she did it as a warning as much as to be like, "This is something you should be aware of." He was 14. It was 1955. He got dragged out of his uncle's house and tortured and killed because he maybe flirted with a white woman. A racist jury acquitted his murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, despite overwhelming evidence, and, to rub salt in the wound, both admitted to killing Till inLook magazine the next year. O.J. getting off brought a twisted, but understandable feeling of justice. The shoe was on the other foot for once and so be it if two white people wound up dead. We'd lost many more. That's harsh, but that's the historical context of black men dating white women that I unfortunately have to consider when doing the same.

Though those events are something of which I'm always cognizant, I didn't adhere to them as any sort of cautionary tale. The story of Till's murder didn't scare me as much as it made me want to piss off racist fucks even more. And I was only six years old when the O.J. verdict was read. Even then, I understood that it was racial, but there was a disconnection from my personal reality. Nothing about my worldview was sexualized yet. Whatever I learned from the trial was tucked away as something that I should know as a black man, but it didn't have a life-altering impact on my own development. I'm not going to murder anyone. For whatever implications the trial had, that shit also had nothing to do with me. The idea was always to live my life however I wanted to live it.

I don't say that as some guilt-ridden rationalization for dating white women. There was no rationalization. I grew up how I grew up. I never consciously set out to date white women. My attraction to them was likely a natural response to my environment. The year after the O.J. verdict, my dad was now getting enough money to move his wife and three children to a nice house in a Chicago suburb. Nobody was trying to assimilate with white people, but sometimes that's just the way things go when you want a better home and better schools for your family. But it does have an unforeseen effect on your outlook when you're one of the few black families in town.

Before I was even 10, I started having crushes on girls, trying to get my first kiss, and all of that. All I saw around me were white girls. I thought this girl was hot because of her freckles and I thought that girl was hot because of her soft hair or whatever and I just wasn't in fifth grade thinking about the racial ramifications of features that I found attractive. Other people think about that, though. I was consuming all of this media and I could just sense from the adults around me that, as a black person, when I was watching TRL, it was expected that I be more attracted to the girls in Destiny's Child than Britney Spears.

By middle school, and especially high school, those expectations were even more apparent. I started to see what it really meant to be in an interracial relationship. Sometimes white girls hid me from their family, especially their father. That was normal. I had one girlfriend in high school who strictly forbade doorbell ringing. I'd let her know when I'd be outside. She was not going to go through the trouble of calling attention to the fact that she was going out with a black guy. I can't say that my own mother has never asked, "When are you going to bring home a girl who looks like me?" Running around with white girls comes across as a rejection of your blackness to the women in your family, even though that wasn't the case. To me, it was simple. The girls who showed me the most attention at school were white. The world made it complicated and assumed I had an ulterior motive, and it sucks, but I understand why.

There are self-hating black men who date white women for contrived and pathetic reasons and I hate them. They're so upfront about their exclusive attraction to white women and they'll give you a list of reasons why. It is deliberate for them. They smugly go out of their way to put down black women based on stereotypical notions about their attitude, or hair, or something equally stupid and it's corny and disgusting. That's one of the issues with interracial dating. Any time a black man walks around with a white woman he's giving off the impression that white women are his specific preference and that he has a problem with women of his own race, and because that applies to some black men who date white women, it becomes a label that all of us are subjected to. It's nothing to walk past a random black woman on the street and get a death glare and maybe even overhear something like, "They're taking all of our men." I was out with my white girlfriend at The Graham in East Williamsburg sometime last year and a black woman came up to me and asked me why was I dating a white girl when she can't even get a man. Shit is crazy out here. I promise.