#32] What I Learned On Race Dating A Black Woman (Not What You Think)

I’m white, and during the last year I dated a Black woman. During this time I learned many things about race that I would not have known otherwise. I don’t claim to be an expert on race or because I dated a Black woman. Yet, the experience opened my eyes to what it can be like to live as a Black person in America.

Most of my education on race occurred either during dinnertime conversations or when my then-girlfriend put Netflix on pause to explain her perspective as a Black women. I want to be careful to emphasize that what I have learned about race is largely based on my interactions with my ex-girlfriend, and may not be reflective of all Black Americans’ experiences.

1) Some Black people feel shafted by capitalism

As successful as she was, my ex-girlfriend was not a fan of capitalism. As she explained to me, capitalism in America was built on slavery. The U.S. Capitol building and many other American institutions were created on the backs of African slaves. For many Black people, the origins of American capitalism are impossible to ignore because they are the foundation modern racism. Seen through this lens, it’s easy to see why my ex-girlfriend might feel ambivalence about capitalism.

2) “Black” person and “Person Of Color” is not the same

Some people assume that the words “Black” and “Person of Color” are interchangeable. As my ex-girlfriend explained to me, Asians and most Egyptians are People of Color.

Black people in America often find solidarity and fraternity with other People of Color here — particularly Asian-Americans — because they have faced similar types of racism. My ex-girlfriend was no exception. Some of her closest friends were Asian or Asian-American. In a similar vein, the past year has been particularly challenging for Asian-Americans because they are sometimes unfairly blamed for the pandemic.

3) Most Jewish People of Color were born Jewish

Over the years, I have seen a few Black people attend synagogue services — so it had never occurred to me that there are a lot of Jewish People of Color in America.

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In synagogues that are mainly populated by white people Jews of Color are sometimes viewed as curiosities — people who white members aren’t sure belong there. It’s not unusual, my ex-girlfriend told me, for white Jews to ask Jews of Color how they became Jewish, a line of questioning that she found particularly insulting. (It’s considered rude in Judaism to ask converts why the decided to become Jewish. It’s even ruder to assume that someone converted because they don’t ‘look Jewish.)

There are many synagogues in America and other parts of the world that have few white members. If I were to visit some synagogues in Chicago, Philadelphia and other major cities, I might be the only white person there. Africa also has its share of Jewish people. Ethiopia, for instance, claims a long heritage of Judaism, that goes back some 2,000 years.

4) You shouldn’t compare the Holocaust to slavery

Comparisons between the Holocaust and slavery was another thing that my ex-girlfriend found particularly irksome. By her account, Jewish people sometimes try to show solidarity with Black people by talking about Jews who died at the hands of Nazi’s during the Holocaust. This is a terrible idea — and incredibly insensitive my ex-girlfriend told me — because it’s ludicrous to compare one people’s suffering to another people’s suffering.

Also, it’s worth noting that, while 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, some figures estimate that as many as 200 million African slaves perished in transit to America. I urge you to remember these figures before thinking about comparing slavery to the Holocaust. Both were atrocious.

People who are both Black and Jewish deal with with both racism and anti-semitism. My ex-girlfriend, for example, is both Black and Jewish.

5) Slave-owning ‘Founding Fathers’ of the U.S. are irredeemable

As a student in high school it was impossible to hear much of anything bad about George Washington, except that maybe he chopped down a cherry tree.

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Yet, as I learned from my ex-girlfriend, while slavery stretched across the Antebellum South — many people supported the abolition of slavery from the earliest days of the American Republic. As such, it’s not acceptable to consider George Washington, in being a slave-holder, to be a man of his day.

There is scant evidence that the Founding Fathers thought twice about owning other human beings. (While Thomas Jefferson publicly condemned slavery, he nevertheless enslaved hundreds of people). In other words, the man who wrote “All men are created equal” did his part to make sure they weren’t. As such, many Black people, consider racism as enshrined in the core documents of American democracy — and cannot see the people who created them redeemable.

6) Racism is everywhere, but white people don’t usually see it

When I went out with my then-girlfriend, she frequently told me we got “stares” or “looks,” as if something was wrong. I didn’t see it, but one of my Black friends in graduate school who was married to a white woman said he had similar experiences.

My ex-girlfriend also educated me about racism in film. At the most unexpected times, she pressed pause on the movies we were watching and pointed out racism in movie scenes. Through these experiences, I learned that films often portray racism in ways that are invisible to white people.

For example, in a film about the mafia — I forget the movie’s name — a white man tells a Black man: “take your scraps with you” before the Black man leaves the room. I didn’t know it before I was told, but plantation owners frequently fed the people they enslaved the scraps of their food — the pieces that they didn’t want, and you wouldn’t have wanted either. In the film, the Black man showed resentment for being told to “take his scraps” — but I wouldn’t have known why, if she hadn’t told me.

7) Not all Black people talk alike

Many white people think that all Black people talk the same, and could fit right in a neighborhood where Black people speak a street dialect. This couldn’t be farther from the case, and it sometimes causes awkward situations, like when a white person asks a Black person why he doesn’t “talk black.”

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My ex-girlfriend, for example, is widely known in government, but many of the people only know her by phone or email. She once recounted an experience where she showed up for a rare in-person meeting of a working group. Upon her arrival at a meeting for the working group that she chaired she was greeted with a suspicious “May I help you?” from a colleague that knew her well — if only by phone. Once my ex-girlfriend self-identified herself, the suspicion disappeared — but she walked away from the meeting knowing that her coworker had always assumed that she was white because my ex-girlfriend doesn’t talk the way some white people believe that all Black people talk.

8) The George Floyd tragedy is a double-edged sword

The tragic death of George Floyd made him a martyr and a symbol of modern-day lynchings that have occurred in the United States for years.

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Murals across America and other countries depict Floyd with angel wings.

But even some Black civil rights activists aren’t happy with such glorified depictions of Floyd.

My ex-girlfriend was one such person who felt torn by images of Floyd as an angel.

She was angry about the brutal choking murder of Floyd.

But she also noted that Floyd had more than a few brushes with the law (for criminal activities ranging from theft to robbery).

To that end, depictions of Floyd with angel wings made her feel a bit uncomfortable.

9) “Passers” are sometimes encouraged to go with it

Black people who have such light skin that they are mistaken for white people are called “passers.” (The full term is white-passing, though my ex-girlfriend never used that word). My ex-girlfriend’s grandmother was a passer. This light skin tone caused a bit of a stir during a traffic stop years ago, when a police officer believed her to be a white woman in a car with a Black man (her husband) at a time when it was illegal in some states for a Black person to marry a white person.

As my ex-girlfriend explained to me, passers are sometimes encouraged by their families to go through life passing for white. If the people they interact with at work and other aspects of their lives don’t question their supposed whiteness, they are coached not to correct this mistake — since it means they will avoid racism when they apply for jobs, business loans, and home mortgages they might otherwise face. As you can imagine, going through life as a passer can cause a variety of other problems. For example, a passer in a car with a Black person who is not a passer may nevertheless face racism by association, or guilt about their silence.

10) Tweeting against racism isn’t enough

Particularly since the murder of George Floyd’s, white people’s anti-racist social media posts have ballooned. My ex-girlfriend was, at best ambivalent to “solidarity by tweet” because these white people are tweeting from the comforts of their home — but doing nothing else for racial justice. To make racial justice and change a reality takes work — and activism — and that won’t happen while you’re sitting behind a computer screen.

For my part, I don’t go on Facebook or Twitter and write or re-tweet #BlackLivesMatter posts. But I am looking for a way to support racial justice. Like my ex-girlfriend, I don’t believe that all police departments should be defunded or that all jails should be shut down. I also don’t want to be part of a racial justice organization that is dominated by white people who pitch solidarity with Black people. I hope that writing this article will lead me in the right direction.

11) White privilege really is a thing — and it matters

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I’ve gone through life taking for granted that no one pulls me over when I’m driving my car because I look suspicious or because I’m wearing a hoody. No one would look at me driving a fancy car and think I stole it. And no one would believe I didn’t belong at a meeting by looking at the color of my skin. In fact, early in my career, I found that as long as I dressed well, people believed I was higher on the totem pole than I actually was.

My ex-girlfriend’s brother, who is the head of the computing department and a doctoral candidate at a major university, has had a different experience. Once when he was on campus, the university police sidelined him because he looked suspicious to them, though they didn’t say why. At the time of the incident, my ex-girlfriend’s brother was wearing a hoodie.

It’s clear to me that Black people continue to face such suspicions or, dare I say, a comedy of errors — except that there’s nothing funny about these mistakes, and the impacts they have on millions of People of Color who live in the United States. Among the other things I learned during the past year, is that there are some things you should never do to a Black person. You may find reading it educational.

What do you do? (Not what I did).

It’s interesting that it took me so long to learn about racial issues. I watched the news media growing up, but I also grew up in a community where there were not many Black people. Only 2 percent of the population of home hometown is Black, according to 2010 U.S. Census data. Moreover, my parents didn’t exactly encourage “mixing” either. They came from the generation of people who believed that Jewish people should stick together. While I certainly knew growing up that there were Jewish people of Ethiopian heritage somewhere, I hardly remember seeing Black people at my synagogue. As an adult, it just seemed normal to seek out people who looked like me.

Normal or not, the idea that people are drawn — or even biased toward — people who look like them has a name: homophily. Homophily is the tendency of similar people to be connected to each other due to their shared biological and cultural attributes such as gender, occupation or political affiliation — as well as race and religion. For my part, I certainly went down the path of homophily for much of my life.

My ex-girlfriend, for her part, helped me by pointing out racial issues as they came up in television, the news or social situations — and by aiding me in seeing beyond homophily. But not everyone has a Black girlfriend to show them the way. To learn about race if you are a white person, you need to be proactive, and pay attention. For example, if you are in a class that has one Black person in it, that Black person will be present to that fact. That Black student may also make judgements about what it means to be a Black student in a class of white people, and may form a construct about how the white students judge him or her. (To be sure, in her biography Becoming, Michelle Obama writes about how hard it would be to be the first Black first first lady, and how she would be judged for her stumbles in ways that her white predecessors would not.)

Meanwhile, the white students may only be vaguely aware that they have a Black classmate, but not put much thought into it. A racially conscious white person is always aware of Black people in their environment, and actively engage them in positive ways inside and outside formal settings.

But the best way to learn about race is to surround yourself with a racially diverse group of friends. As you begin to develop friendships with people with different racial and ethnic backgrounds, race and ethnicity will naturally come up in your conversations. They might even show up when you go out to dinner with them, because of how the people around you treat you, and it might sometimes be uncomfortable.