Taboo: Interracial Relationships

Taboo: Interracial Relationships

As I grow older, I’ve despised speaking about my love life and what my interests are. In part, I avoid gossip as much as I can, I abhor any racist or discriminatory remarks, and ultimately I keep my relationship to myself out of respect. I have been following this practice for a lapse of a year now.

During a trip to Puerto Rico in spring of 2016, I unexpectedly became committed to a relationship that had many impossibilities; the first was a racial boundary, the second was an issue of distance and third my family’s standards of a “normal relationship.” But, those were mere made-up imaginative adversaries. The relationship continued regardless of the time difference, distance away from each other and intimacy--the curiosity for watching him fall asleep in front of me, spending silent time looking into each other’s eyes, or even caressing his face.

Coming into this relationship, still unfolding in front of me so slowly, involved; fretting thinking things twice, doubting, looking back, and questioning if this was worth the time. On top of the idea of dating someone outside of my ethnicity, I was also concerned about something that unconsciously bothered me and grasped my attention. Six months into the relationship, I often struggled with society’s ignorance of interracial relationships, especially those where both individuals come from underrepresented, ethnic, or racial backgrounds. This phenomenon is rarely talked about and therefore considered at seldom.

When we hear the phrase interracial relationships it’s easier to browse the internet and find abundant results of interracial couples among white individuals and other racial groups as subordinate; beginning with Asians (the highest percentage), Latinos, and African Americans at the bottom of the list. In the 1950s, less than 3 % of interracial couples existed and maintained a relationship. As the years passed, we became more progressive and accepting. So as a result, more and more interracial relationships have formed. Most recent films, Loving or Get Out showcase the stories of interracial relationships among white and African American couples. These stories shed light to recall legislation (Jim Crow and segregation) that banned love in order to keep one racial group intact and free from any disruption of white purity.

Though, the other phenomena in interracial relationships cease mainstream media from recognizing the intermixing of racial underprivileged groups. Huffington post attests that “so much of the discourse surrounding interracial relationships seems to center on black and white couplings. These are the images we see most in the media…But we should bear in mind that there are all kinds of couplings in the interracial dating world that aren’t acknowledged nearly as much, and that interracial can mean a black woman with an Asian man or perhaps a man of any other race.” However, the new question today is how often do we hear about interracial couples among minorities so say African Americans and Latinos, African Americans and Asians, Latinos and Native Americans and so forth. It is quite obvious that the numbers for these categories may be much less impactful in our society. But, the fact they go unmentioned, signals the lack of praise in swirling with racial groups that have lived similar or near similar life experiences.

Particularly, my relationship flourished through the comfort and empathy of having experienced similar circumstances. We respect and continue to learn from each other altogether to avoid compartmentalizing one another and macroscopically we hope individuals understand that interracial relationships among minorities should be praised as much as it is for white and African American coupling.