Jacie Williams is a junior majoring in communication. She can be contacted at [email protected].I am in love. You jaded people might laugh, but I can take it. It does not make it any less true.
I don’t mean the type of love you see in movies. I don’t mean the type of star-struck impractical love that high school kids stumble through. I am quite happily past all those crushes and obsessions.
I am in a very healthy, and in my opinion, normal relationship. We have been dating for more than a year and a half. We go out to eat, watch movies, cook dinner together, play video games and have a number of common interests. He is simply a wonderful guy.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? So I wonder why people sometimes look at me in a strange way when I tell them. It is not envy I see when I look into their eyes, but confusion.
No, actually, I want to take that back. It is not even in confusion that they look at me, but in curiosity.
Being in an interracial relationship in Mississippi might have its problems, but if it does, I have not encountered them yet.
The only person who even raised a counterpoint against it was my mother.
“Jacie, are you sure you want to be in a mixed relationship?” she would ask.
It had nothing to do with the guy I am dating. She has no objections to him. She was just concerned that we would encounter problems socially.
Maybe other people would not like me because I was in a mixed relationship.
She advised me, but did not scold or condemn me. “Just make sure it is what you really want before you make any long-term commitments.”
Well, she might be right. There might be some people who judge me. There might be some people who hate me. There might be some people who cannot see past the shade of someone else’s skin to see how happy the two of us are.
The response I gave her more than a year ago was simple, truthful and still how I feel today. If there are people who do not want to associate with me for being in an interracial relationship, then they are not the people I want to be associated with anyway. I am not losing anything by cutting those people out of my life.
My biggest concern when I started dating David was not the color of his skin. I was worried that we, like many other couples who started as friends, would not last and our friendship would be horribly hurt. Instead, we have just grown stronger and continue to grow as time goes on.
What I have found to be most people’s objection is that the “culture” is just too different between blacks and whites.
This only means that they do not understand what culture really is. It probably also means they have not been exposed to racial problems in other parts of the world.
People too often try to stereotype when it comes to race. In truth, I have more in common with David than I have with most of the white guys that I have dated.
By this, I do not necessarily mean in interests, goals and values, even though we also seem to have more of those in common than in my previous relationships. It is simply that David and I were reared in similar ways.
We were both raised moving around as children following our father’s work. We were exposed to different places and different people at very young ages.
I lived for quite some time in a suburb of Miami. I was blind to it at that age in my life, but the kids I played with in my community came from all kinds of backgrounds.
Alejandro and his half brother were partly Hispanic. Scott and Chelsea were part Asian. Then there were the bullies that lived at the end of the block who were spoiled white kids.
One of my best friends was very similar to me. We were both white, joined the same Girl Scouts and even went to the same church.
Another good friend of mine was from the Middle East. She spoke and wrote in Hebrew and was Jewish.
Did any of that matter to me when I was 10 years old and playing kickball in the street? No. What mattered was that we had fun. I did not realize at the time how influential these experiences were going to be for the rest of my life.
David and I both have very stable families. Our parents were never divorced, never remarried. Both of our families come from similar economic backgrounds.
So what is so different about us? That my skin lacks a pigment his skin has? Would that really be a reason to throw our love away?
I am not saying that everyone should try interracial dating. I am, however, a firm believer that people should follow their hearts when it comes to love, even if it leads them to a different color.