BLACK MEN, BLACK WOMEN, AND RACE-EXCLUSIVE DATING

Recently in an online conversation, I was confronted by a black man (a webstranger)for listing in an online dating profile that I was (in March or April, when I made the page) interested in meeting and hanging out with a man in the Massachusetts area, regardless of the guys’ ethnicity, race, height, age, etc. I was bored and trying to find like-minded people to chill with. This guy took my all-inclusive invitation for FRIENDSHIP (in no area did I list dating or “hooking up”) as a signpost that I was open to dating  “white” men (?)…I don’t know how he ignored everything I wrote and came up with that ( look under my “websites” on my Facebook page and click on the Plenty of Fish URL to read what he read).

In addition to that, this man had the nerve to add my “blackness” (as in character, not color) to the equation. In the profile, yes, I’m honest about who I am. I am interested in and I do study Pan-African culture. I have done work within my predominantly black community in Detroit, and yes, I am African American, and damn proud of it. However, being who I am, closing myself to the opportunity to get to know others or not develop relationships, platonic or not, with a non-black man is out of the question, especially when I am living the majority of the year in an area where I feel like I’ve meet all 18 24-year-old or older black men within a 25 mile radius from my school. Though I have yet to date outside of my socially-constructed “race”, I would not have knocked the idea, considering the circumstances of my arrangement of living. I feel that love and sex are psychological and anatomical, respectively. “Race” and history, outside of popular thought and plain bigotry, have very little to with male-female or even same-sex relationships. The sooner people realize this, the sooner they’ll find what they are looking for in their love life.  I think people may miss out on a good thing because they can’t see past color and/or stereotypes about different people. Colorism within the black community even speaks to that.

That rant aside (LOL), I was annoyed that this brother would just jump to the conclusion that my “pro-black” ass was a hypocrit for being open to “other ethnicities and races”..or as he deciphered from that, “white men.” What is this insecurity and sensitivity to that about, men? I didn’t mention a damn thing about dating or marrying specifically a white man, and this is immediately where his mind went, lol…

Women, how do you feel about the above situation? Some black women also have issues with black men dating/partnering white women. If the tables were turned and I was a black man looking beyond race for “companionship”, would you react the same as my web friend?

Share your thoughts, please…..