eternalreign06
Chi-town Bred
My Husband's Unconscious Racism Nearly Destroyed Our Marriage
When I was in my teens, I figured I’d be married at least three times. The first would be the young, practice marriage. My second marriage would be the passionate one through which I would become a better version of myself, and my third would be the one that stuck. As you can see, I never really had a lot of respect for the institution.
By the time I was 30, after years of never sleeping with anyone for more than two months, much less actually dating them, I’d revised my prediction from three to zero. I’m not religious; I didn’t want kids; and I sure as hell didn’t want someone in my home that felt like they had any control over my decisions. Why get married at all? That shyt looked stupid to me.
Then I met Kevin*. We met in the geekiest way possible: He saw a picture of me in a cosplay outfit, wanted to know more, found my blog, and then found my profile on a dating site and asked to meet at DragonCon. Everything about that impressed me. I loved the idea of someone being willing to do a little legwork to find me, especially since exercising my curiosity and putting in some effort to satisfy it is how I engage with the world. His approach spoke to me. Also, he asked me out—no hedging, no game playing. He stated up front that he wanted to get to know me better and asked me on a date. In a society where people are “hanging out” and “chilling” and “hooking up”—meaning anything from a light kissing session to a night of full-blown sex—being direct was important.
There was only one concern: He was white. I’d been in the dating scene for a while and while I didn’t think race should matter, I definitely knew it did. I’d met my share of white men looking for a “Nubian goddess” (their words, not mine). Or the ones who believed that Black women would offer some kind of freaky, wild sexual experience. I’d met white men who wanted to demean and defile me, white men who wanted to dominate or be dominated by me, and white men who just wanted to check a Black woman off their sexual bucket list. Not to mention the ones who thought that being with me somehow made them “edgy” or proved they weren’t racist. I mean, not every white guy has a “David Duke cock“ right?
Needless to say, 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 fukked 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 fukk we were doing together. And I really wasn’t there for that shyt.
But you know how they say timing is everything? Kevin entered my life at a particularly vulnerable point. My father had passed three months before we met. He’d been sick for over a decade with cancer and I spent that entire time blocking out everyone. When he passed, all that energy I’d used protecting myself started to dissipate and my walls softened. I started letting people in. I was willing and capable of giving people opportunities to be a part of my life, and I was also willing to do the work to keep them there.
That’s why I let Kevin in, but it’s not why I kept him around. I’d always been told to be more feminine, more womanly, and to cater to some stranger’s every need, but Kevin didn’t expect that. He didn’t try to mold me into the perfect woman. He didn’t look for me to take care of him. He didn’t minimize my accomplishments; we weren’t competing, and my success did not undermine his masculinity. And he was nice to me and genuinely interested in me—something I’m sad to say wasn’t common in my relationships. He listened and he cared. He also had an important characteristic that I share: the willingness to examine his beliefs and change them when he learns that they’re wrong. He doesn’t state his beliefs as vocally as I do, but he shares my love of learning and adapting to shifts in our perception and awareness.
Being with Kevin felt like a refuge from sexism. At the time, that seemed more immediate—and easier to address—than the racism that surrounded me. But it didn’t negate the fact that Kevin is white—and not just white, extremely white. He has ash blond hair and pale, easily sunburned skin. His close friends are all white men and their spouses. His family is mostly white. His co-workers are mostly white men. 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. Many of his friends lived in “white flight” zones, suburban areas where white people moved to avoid the “downfall” of urban areas. I was constantly required to go to the one Atlanta county still referred to as a “sundown town”—as in a town Black people shouldn’t be in after dark. And while he and his friends were pretty clueless about these things, I was very aware.
It was in one of these predominantly white spaces, a restaurant with a mostly-white clientele, that I first ran headlong into Kevin’s unrealized racism. I’d just learned that he and all his friends carried four-inch pocket knives (or “box openers,” as they liked to call them), and I was kinda freaked out by it. My weapons tend to be off-label weapons, like my keys, a pen, or my purse. I only had one friend who carried a gun, and nobody carried knives. Now, I was sitting surrounded by armed white men.
When I pointed out that they were all carrying weapons, they laughed—didn’t I know the knives were just for opening boxes? I could have been arrested or killed for carrying something like that, regardless of what I planned to do with it—unlike them. They wouldn’t face any consequences for bringing weapons into a restaurant; after all, they were white and the restaurant was mostly white. Kevin shrugged at my observations and said “At least we don’t have to worry about being shot.”
This was how I realized that I was dating a racist man.
When I was in my teens, I figured I’d be married at least three times. The first would be the young, practice marriage. My second marriage would be the passionate one through which I would become a better version of myself, and my third would be the one that stuck. As you can see, I never really had a lot of respect for the institution.
By the time I was 30, after years of never sleeping with anyone for more than two months, much less actually dating them, I’d revised my prediction from three to zero. I’m not religious; I didn’t want kids; and I sure as hell didn’t want someone in my home that felt like they had any control over my decisions. Why get married at all? That shyt looked stupid to me.
Then I met Kevin*. We met in the geekiest way possible: He saw a picture of me in a cosplay outfit, wanted to know more, found my blog, and then found my profile on a dating site and asked to meet at DragonCon. Everything about that impressed me. I loved the idea of someone being willing to do a little legwork to find me, especially since exercising my curiosity and putting in some effort to satisfy it is how I engage with the world. His approach spoke to me. Also, he asked me out—no hedging, no game playing. He stated up front that he wanted to get to know me better and asked me on a date. In a society where people are “hanging out” and “chilling” and “hooking up”—meaning anything from a light kissing session to a night of full-blown sex—being direct was important.
There was only one concern: He was white. I’d been in the dating scene for a while and while I didn’t think race should matter, I definitely knew it did. I’d met my share of white men looking for a “Nubian goddess” (their words, not mine). Or the ones who believed that Black women would offer some kind of freaky, wild sexual experience. I’d met white men who wanted to demean and defile me, white men who wanted to dominate or be dominated by me, and white men who just wanted to check a Black woman off their sexual bucket list. Not to mention the ones who thought that being with me somehow made them “edgy” or proved they weren’t racist. I mean, not every white guy has a “David Duke cock“ right?
Needless to say, 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 fukked 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 fukk we were doing together. And I really wasn’t there for that shyt.
But you know how they say timing is everything? Kevin entered my life at a particularly vulnerable point. My father had passed three months before we met. He’d been sick for over a decade with cancer and I spent that entire time blocking out everyone. When he passed, all that energy I’d used protecting myself started to dissipate and my walls softened. I started letting people in. I was willing and capable of giving people opportunities to be a part of my life, and I was also willing to do the work to keep them there.
That’s why I let Kevin in, but it’s not why I kept him around. I’d always been told to be more feminine, more womanly, and to cater to some stranger’s every need, but Kevin didn’t expect that. He didn’t try to mold me into the perfect woman. He didn’t look for me to take care of him. He didn’t minimize my accomplishments; we weren’t competing, and my success did not undermine his masculinity. And he was nice to me and genuinely interested in me—something I’m sad to say wasn’t common in my relationships. He listened and he cared. He also had an important characteristic that I share: the willingness to examine his beliefs and change them when he learns that they’re wrong. He doesn’t state his beliefs as vocally as I do, but he shares my love of learning and adapting to shifts in our perception and awareness.
Being with Kevin felt like a refuge from sexism. At the time, that seemed more immediate—and easier to address—than the racism that surrounded me. But it didn’t negate the fact that Kevin is white—and not just white, extremely white. He has ash blond hair and pale, easily sunburned skin. His close friends are all white men and their spouses. His family is mostly white. His co-workers are mostly white men. 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. Many of his friends lived in “white flight” zones, suburban areas where white people moved to avoid the “downfall” of urban areas. I was constantly required to go to the one Atlanta county still referred to as a “sundown town”—as in a town Black people shouldn’t be in after dark. And while he and his friends were pretty clueless about these things, I was very aware.
It was in one of these predominantly white spaces, a restaurant with a mostly-white clientele, that I first ran headlong into Kevin’s unrealized racism. I’d just learned that he and all his friends carried four-inch pocket knives (or “box openers,” as they liked to call them), and I was kinda freaked out by it. My weapons tend to be off-label weapons, like my keys, a pen, or my purse. I only had one friend who carried a gun, and nobody carried knives. Now, I was sitting surrounded by armed white men.
When I pointed out that they were all carrying weapons, they laughed—didn’t I know the knives were just for opening boxes? I could have been arrested or killed for carrying something like that, regardless of what I planned to do with it—unlike them. They wouldn’t face any consequences for bringing weapons into a restaurant; after all, they were white and the restaurant was mostly white. Kevin shrugged at my observations and said “At least we don’t have to worry about being shot.”
This was how I realized that I was dating a racist man.
Y'all cacs can have her she looks musty