The Best Choice You Can Make

To some extent, every young man, or not so young man, has gone through the disapproving glare of a would-be, significant other’s parent or parents. It does not happen with every partner of course. Sometimes the families are very nice, normal. When the parent or parents are less than welcoming, there can be different reasons.

Everybody has prejudices and when it comes to one’s offspring, every parent hopes for the best for their child. Obviously, the hope is that their child - to a parent their offspring will always be a child - does not make any decision they feel could negatively impact their life. That includes who they pick as a potential partner.

As a black man north of fifty, I have encountered this prejudice many times. In my life experience, dating outside of my race has shown that for every other race dating a black person is seen as detrimental. This does not always come across as racial prejudice or even a particular dislike of black people. It is more an ingrained belief that to partner with a black person, a black man, is not a good idea.

There is, of course, racism. Every black friend of mine, who dates outside of their race, has experienced this. There are different levels. I and many friends I know, have had partners sheepishly tell us that they cannot introduce us to their parents because, ‘they would go mad’, or, “it’s difficult for them.’.

When one is young and the hormones and lust are stronger than the ethics, you allow that sort of nonsense. You only want to see her anyway. As you get older, more worldly, such things irk, offend. Staying in such a union is more difficult, especially as those closest to you tend to know about it.

The subject of black men, dating outside of their race is an especially emotive one and goes to the heart of a lot of the problems that face black people in regards to racism and the effects of slavery on a people.

Time is a strange thing. Many are wholly unaffected by the notion of slavery, thinking of it as something that happened hundreds of centuries ago. It was abolished less than two hundred years ago but…semantics. Why should it be impacting anybody now, three and four generations later? The Roman Empire happened before that yet its influence is still visible to this day.

Back to slavery. One of the foundations of enslavement is breaking the spirit. The vast majority of slaves were, due to the nature of the work they were required to do, male. A man, regardless of race, is subject to his ego. In the traditional sense, he wants to be seen as able to provide for his family or a potential mate, to be able to protect his family or a potential mate. This is not a thing of logic, it is a sociological and intrinsic drive.

A slave is not a person with rights. There is no need for me to list the treatment or mistreatment of slaves, suffice to say it did not imbue the slaves with confidence for their lot in life. Even within the confines of enslavement, there were still black families. The thought of having to be a parent whilst showing subservience to your white masters, in front of your child, is something that would break even the hardiest spirit.

Slavery ends here, 1836 in the UK, but no one will employ a black person and the former slaves are still required to work forty-five hours a week for their former bosses, unpaid. These men cannot provide for their families, cannot get any sort of paid work and are shunned by society.

Fast forward one hundred and twenty years and Britain wants to rebuild after the second world war. They needed people to do the lowly, low paid work that kept the country moving; transportation and the national health service. As a lot of the Caribbean was still under the Empire - part of the Windrush scandal comes from the fact that Jamaica became independent in 1962, in effect making all of the people who came over no longer British subjects - black people came from all over the West Indies to help the ‘Mother’ country get back on its feet.

Unfortunately, the “Mother’ country was not overly welcoming, with the large section of the white, working-class, residence threatened by the influx of blacks. Unlike the post-slavery years, black people were able to take up some sort of roots in the UK.

Moving into the sixties, the civil rights movement, mirroring today, was in the news. In the states, because of slavery and the way it was dissolved in the US, as well as it being a youthful country, black roots over there were deeper. As it is a bigger country, they had many more slaves. So when slavery was abolished, they created a ready-made community and businesses.

In the UK, with the fifties and sixties influx a second wave, there was no roots to build on and the challenges that their US counterparts faced, whilst difficult, were backed with a community. As the decades have gone by and black people have assimilated into society, the overt racism and prejudices hidden from the every day, there are still things that remind one that black people are viewed as a negative.

The likes of Barack Obama, Mariah Carey, the late Prince, these shores Shirley Bassey, Bob Marley and Lenny Kravitz, to name a few, would never have brought their various gifts and talents to the world had it not been for a black man or woman facing the backlash for love outside of their race.

To have the burden of the thought, that being black is seen as such a negative that to be associated with can harm the life prospects of your potential partner, is both saddening and frustrating. When we, black people, talk about racism and how it is difficult to explain or understand, this is the sort of thing we are talking about.