There's a new TV show that came out on Netflix that many of you may have watched – a truly revolutionary, insightful and thought-provoking show that is not at all just trash TV that we have collectively used to distract ourselves from the flaming pile of shit that is 2020 and 2021. I’m talking about Bridgerton of course, a show we all watched solely for the plot (and by plot I mean Rege-Jean Page). If you haven’t watched it yet my recommendations are a) just skip to episode 5, c. 43 minutes in (or episode 6, 10 minutes in, 13 minutes in and 23 minutes in) and b) do NOT watch it with your parents.
Bridgerton is a period drama but one where – shock horror – there is a multiracial cast and – even bigger shock horror – the varied ethnicities of different characters in the show is not used as a plot line! That’s right, it turns out you can cast people of colour in a TV show without them being one-dimensional stereotypes, or without a whole storyline about how their parents disapprove of them dating a white person. Until I watched this I didn’t realise how amazing it was to see multiple interracial relationships on TV where the fact some of the characters were melanated and some weren’t was not part of the story line – the story line was instead focussed on much more important philosophical questions like WHO TF IS LADY GOSSIP GIRL and HOW TF ARE BABIES MADE!!!???!!! (watch the show if you want to find out how – it will shock you).
It got me thinking about my own experiences of navigating dating as a woman of colour. I’ve not really had to deal with anything bad – occasionally I’ll get a comment from a creepy guy in da club (remember those sweaty cesspits filled with perverts that we used to pay to spend time in pre-pandemic times – I can’t wait to be back in one, honestly) telling me I’m ‘so exotic’ (unless you think Swansea is an exotic place, I’m not) or that I’m ‘good looking for a brown girl’ (literally has that every worked as a successful pick up line??) or the CLASSIC ‘I’ve never been with a brown girl before’ (obviously met with ‘well even though I find you physically repulsive, I of course want to do my civic duty to help you ensure that you can tick off my racial group from your list of people you want to sleep with so I will immediately come home with you’). But other than weird comments like that, I haven’t had to deal with much – even when I’ve dated white people I have never experienced the weird racist relatives or the racist nicknames (I have a brown friend whose white ex –boyfriend’s friends referred to her as his ‘Indian princess’) and my own brown family have always been cool with it too.
I put a poll out on my Instagram asking if other friends of colour had to deal with any weird racial stuff when it comes to dating. There were a lot of people who had been told that they were exotic, good looking for their race, or the first person of their race that the person they were dating had ever been with. There were also those who’d been told they were good looking because they had ‘white features’ or who found themselves on dates with people who specifically looked to date people of their race because they stereotyped women from that group as being either sexually repressed or sexually adventurous. There were even white-passing people who had to deal with weird comments when guys found out that they had some Asian heritage: ‘you must be really flexible then’ (seriously, whut?!).
And of course, there were people who were told by the (white) individual they dated that said individual was ‘into Black guys’ or ‘into brown women’ or ‘into east Asian women’ or even that they ‘really wanted to have mixed race babies’. These people had a preference for a specific racial group, and it was supposed to be seen as a compliment that you belonged to this racial group they were ‘into’.
‘But I just prefer brown women, like how some people prefer blondes!’
Now some people may hear a comment like that and think it’s completely harmless – after all it’s generally socially acceptable to have a physical preference to date say tall men, or brunette women, or bearded people. Is saying you prefer people from a certain race, because of their physical racial characteristics, any different to that? In the words of the great philosopher Phineas (from the well-known duo Phineas and Ferb): why Yes, Yes it is.
Brunette women do not experience systemic oppression and violence solely due to their hair colour. Brunette women have not been historically sexualised and exploited due to the power dynamics that existed between blondes and brunettes. Racial dating preferences are not the same as preferences around hair colour, or height, or beardness, because there is historic oppression, exploitation and power dynamics that come with being in a marginalised racial group.
The book ‘Queenie’ by Candice Carty Williams is absolutely hilarious and brilliantly written, but it also really opened my eyes to the realities of racial fetishisation for Black women. The kind of messages that the titular character gets on dating apps, and in person from white men who sexualise her blackness is appalling – but on reading reviews of the book it seems to be an all to common experience for so many Black women.
And like everything, there’s a history behind this. I am sadly not a historian but this paragraph from a legit historian in the paper ‘The Colonial Roots of the Racial Fetishisation of Black Women’ sums it up quite well:
‘Prior to the British journey to the New World, epic tales of imperialist travellers probed the minds of Europeans regarding the nature of African people. African men were said to have gigantic penises, and it was rumoured that African women engaged in sex with apes. These tales likely reflected the subconscious fears and Freudian sexual confusion of Europeans. However, these dramatized stories were interpreted as factual, and they informed some of the first European perceptions of African people.
When black people were first brought to the New World as slaves in the early 1600s, it is no surprise that they became part of the erotic narrative of colonial imperialism. The perception of black people as hyper-sexualized and uncivilized paved the road for the dehumanization and sexual exploitation imposed upon black men and women brought to the New World.’
This dehumanisation and sexual exploitation of Black people contributed to the rape culture that existed within chattel slavery, including Black women being treated as a sexual commodity and sold as ‘breeders’. And even after the apparent abolition of slavery, this exploitation over Black female reproduction continued through the Eugenics movement and other governmental policies. We still see this stereotype of the hyper sexualised Black women in today’s media; in popular music, pornography and advertising.
So when you say ‘I’m really into Black women’ it’s not the same as just saying ‘I’m really into Blonde women’ – it upholds centuries of historical sexual stereotyping and exploitation.
This is just one example, but there are plenty of other racial groups that have had to deal with similar histories of racial fetishisation. East and South East Asian women have often been stereotyped as being sexually subservient in the writings of white men. This really started in the 1840s, following the end of the First Opium War, as the treaty port cities in China, Japan, and Korea became used by Western Powers. The Korean and Vietnam wars solidified this fetishisation, often described derogatorily as ‘yellow fever’, where military camp towns cropped up around the US bases in these countries and a local industry of brothels was created with the sole purpose of servicing the US soldiers. With the universal draft, American men who may not have held preconceived ideas of Asian women were now shipped to Asia, where they would be confronted with local women working in the sex industry.
The power dynamics that existed from these transactions of sex still affect the way Asian women are stereotyped today. This is why, when you say ‘I’m really into Asian girls’ or ‘Asian girls are better in bed’ there is a deeper more insidious history behind this.
I am not an expert here – there are a lot of people who are a lot more knowledgeable about the histories behind the sexualisation of different racial groups (generally through the white gaze) than I am. But part of me wonders whether that even matters. Why do we even need to understand history and power dynamic structures to understand why these kind of comments are not okay. If an Asian person tells you they feel uncomfortable when you call them exotic, or say you are really into people of their racial group, here’s a crazy idea: listen to them and BELIEVE them. My rule of thumb is – if someone from a marginalised group finds something racist – then it probably is racist.
Okay fine, we get it, don’t be racist – but what about people of colour who only date within their race?
Okay this is one where, in the words of my absolute fave, Rebecca Bunch from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend: the situation’s a lot more nuanced (another great show for racially diverse casting that isn’t one-dimensional – also there are songs about not being murdered on a tinder date, yeast infections and period sex so that should be enough to watch it in itself).
If you’d have asked me a few years ago I’d have said that race shouldn’t factor into anyone’s dating life – that everyone should be open and indifferent to dating people of any ethnic group. And while that is still how I feel personally about the people I choose to date, I have come to this realisation that actually the world doesn’t revolve around me (it’s hard to believe I know) and not everyone has the same world view and lived experiences as I do.
Some people may have dealt with so much racial fetishisation from white people that they genuinely don’t feel safe dating them, or they assume that any white person that approaches them has an ulterior creepy racist motive. As someone that hasn’t had to deal with that, I really don’t think I can comment on whether that’s fair or not and so my conclusion is to just respect a decision to date within their own race, or only date people who are also in marginalised racial communities that may have had similar lived experiences.
For others looking for more serious relationships, it may be really important to them that the person they are dating speaks their language, or shares other aspects of their culture or religion. Again, not a big deal for me as my Tamil is poor and I personally still feel that I can be myself as a loud and proud Indian even if I am with someone who is not. For me, it’s more important that someone shares my values – for example, I couldn’t date someone who didn’t appreciate the tragedy of Doctor Doofenshmirtz’ backstory. But once again I have to accept that not everyone is the same as me, for some people their culture is more than just Phineas and Ferb: it is also their language, their heritage and their customs and they want to be with someone who shares that with them.
What about white people that only want to date white people? Well to be honest, it feels racist – although I don’t think I quite know why. Maybe it’s because people do not get systemically marginalised or oppressed for being white in Western society, or maybe it’s because whiteness is always deemed to be the norm – I don’t know what it is but, like an English flag in an Instagram bio, it’s one of those things that feels racist but we can’t quite explain why. If any white people have any thoughts on this (perhaps you don’t think it’s racist – which is cool too) I’d love to hear it.
Fine, fine – we’ll allow it, but you forgot about people of colour that only date white people
This does happen too to be honest, we see a lot of Black and brown men choose to date white or light-skinned women only. Also side note to say that I know this blog is probably approaching this whole topic around dating from a heteronormative perspective and that’s just because I don’t know enough or have the lived experiences to talk about interracial dating within the LGBT+ community – one thing I have heard though is that like many dating apps, Grindr (a dating app for gay men) is notorious for people having dating preferences that say things like ‘No Asians’. But I would love to learn more about this from any of you that are in the LGBT+ community, as I’m sure there are a lot of intersectional factors that feed into how racism can be experienced in this space.
But yeah – given that Eurocentric features and light skin is presented in the media as being the epitome of beauty, it’s not hugely surprising that lots of people of colour seem to value dating white people or light-skinned people of colour rather than darker-skinned people. As someone who is in a relationship with a white person and who has mainly dated white people (let’s be honest, depending on how you define dating), I do worry whether I have any internalised preferences like that – although I’ve come to the conclusion that my dating sample size is too small to draw such a conclusion, and I’m also attracted to pretty much every character on Bridgeton who are all from a variety of racial backgrounds, so I’m going to conclude I’m probably more guilty of perving on fictional characters, rather than having racial dating preferences.
I read an article once (which I will try to find and link) that talked about how when women of colour date white men it can actually improve their social standing – and this does make sense to me as aligning yourself to whiteness generally brings you closer to sharing some of the benefits of white privilege. The same does not happen when men of colour date white women though – their social standing stays the same, even though men of colour are more likely to solely date white women than women of colour are to date white men. Again, I don’t know what the stats are for interracial same-sex relationships, but if anyone has any more information on this I would love to hear it.
To be honest, people of colour only dating white or light-skinned people feels problematic to me – and by this I mean making a conscious decision to do this rather than coincidentally only happening to date these people because they have a relatively small sample size of people they have dated overall (okay fine, I’m talking about me again because guess what THE WORLD DOES REVOLVE AROUND ME). It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly it is that’s causes this to be problematic, is it internalised racism, colourism, the media promoting whiteness as the ideal standard of beauty, trying to gain access to white privilege? Is there even some fetishisation going on here, towards white folk? I honestly don’t know – maybe it’s a mix of all of these things, but again, like a lady called Karen with a bob haircut and a Chihuahua, it feels racist even though I don’t know why.
Dating is hard – and dating apps often don’t make it easier. While its great that people can use apps that pinpoint exactly what they are looking for – hook-ups, serious relationships, marriage or any other kinks people may be into – the algorithms can often amplify some of these racial preferences and people do often have to deal with unsolicited and offensive comments from strangers on them.
Let’s also remember that it wasn’t that long ago that interracial dating was completely taboo, even illegal in many places, and some people may still be experiencing these views from family members. But as every supermarket advert shows, interracial dating is really the norm now – and maybe one day we’ll be living in a Bridgerton-style paradise where race plays absolutely no factor when it comes to dating (well, Bridgerton minus the rampant misogyny and lack of sex education for women).
Also another side note to all the major Supermarket advertisers reading this – interracial relationships aren’t just between white men and light-skinned black women. In fact, believe it or not you don’t even need a white person there for the relationship to be interracial – although of course white people may get confused and think they can’t buy your carrots if the couple eating them in your advert are mixed Korean and Nigerian. But I digress.
In conclusion dating is hard, but so is Rege-Jean Page in Bridgerton, episode 5, 43 minutes in, so honestly you should probably just not bother reading this and go and watch that instead.