What About Heterochromatic Love?

queenesther has left a new comment on your post "When Loving a White Woman is Better":

whew. this was a little dizzying, reading all of this commentary. i know so many african-american women like ms. boo who toe a hard line with black men and interracial relationships. aside from the fact that it's your life and you are responsible for your own happiness, the bottom line is, just because someone is black doesn't mean that they will understand you. or appreciate you. or respect you. or love you. sometimes, what you get is the exact opposite. and this is coming from someone who loves black men very much -- but not more than i love myself.

i've dated way too many african-american men that didn't get where i was coming from at all. more often than not, the fact that i'm young, single, black, female, college-educated (BA so far) with a great career, never married, no kids/no pregnancies/no abortions (i've never even had a cavity) -- and i've got good credit -- seems to offend and intimidate, and (strangely enough) somehow makes me suspect.

and no, you're probably not going to believe this, but i'll say it anyway: i could honestly care less about material possessions. i just want a good guy.

check out this article "marriage is for white people" by joy jones and then check out the stats: there are a lot of sisters out there like me -- black women who are willing to marry a good man, regardless of his race. or not get married to anyone at all, rather than invite someone into their life just for the sake of being with a black man.

mr. holland is right, on all counts. real love (not fetishism, mind you -- because i don't know if what he had with "eva" was real or not) is so rare that when it comes along, you have to say yes, no matter what racial package it's wrapped up in.

who knows? that white guy or that white girl could very well be the one that God wants you to be with. (the Bible speaks of not marrying outside yours beliefs/religion. it doesn't say anything about race.) and if your union is one that God condones and sanctifies, who are the ms. boos of the world to spit on that?

LA Times Article Points to Physiological Reactions to Color-Aroused Emotions, Ideation and Behavior

The Backyard Beacon blog quotes an LA Times article that says, " 'We have always thought of race-based discrimination as producing a kind of attitude,” says Vickie Mays, psychologist and director of the UCLA Center on Research, Education, Training and Strategic Communication on Minority Health Disparities. ' Now we think we have sufficient information to say that it’s more than just affecting your attitude. A person experiences it, has a response, and the response brings about a physiological reaction."

This response is part of what I'll call (today) "color-associated ideation, emotion and behavior response." Regardless of skin color, in a color-activated society we learn to have color-activated ideation, emotion and behavior that affects us in many ways. However, the ways they affect us, as well as our color-activated emotion, ideation and behavior vary according to a number of factors, principle among which is our skin color and our skin-color determined sociological position in society.

I propose that whether Black or white, we all may need to be screened and, in some cases, diagnosed and treated for ideation, emotion and behavior conditions that result from denigration, subjugation and exploitation on the basis of skin color, whether as members of the exploiting class or the exploited class. And I propose that the denigration, subjugation and exploitation that whites engage in is the manifestation of a disease learned through experience in our society while many Blacks experience ideation, emotion and behavior, as well as physiological reactions that are also manifestations of a disease learned through experience in our society.

Although many aspects vary according to our role in society, what we share with whites is that we may experience, to varying degrees, an illness learned through color-associated experience in our society.

As with any illness white and Black resist the idea that we may be ill at all, because such an acknowledgment would be extremely upsetting, requiring immense reconfiguration of our lives, just as the acknowledgment of pedophilia, diabetes, alcoholism or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder causes immense upset and reconfiguration of our lives, with lifelong consequences.