Segregation Street is a Two Lane Highway

If you’re a Southern white guy who likes black women, you should probably move. It isn’t because there are no black women in the South, far from it, just that they most likely won’t date you.

Paradoxically, Mississippi (37 percent), Louisiana (32 percent), Georgia (30 percent), South Carolina (28 percent), and Alabama (26) have the largest black populations in the entire country but are among the lowest states in black woman/white man marriages. If you were international and not that familiar with US history you might think it was a slam dunk a state like Mississippi—the only state in the country that gets within leaping distance of being majority black—would have more black woman/white man marriages than a state like California which has a black population of less than 7 percent. Of course, it would surprise no one in the US that California is the top state for black woman/white man marriages and Mississippi is in the bottom ten (where their state literacy and non-obese rates join it). But the reasons for that might surprise almost anyone who’s not me.

If you were in New York reading this article your mind would short circuit to the presumed notion of “Well of course the interracial dating rate is low in the South because the KKK is running around.” Perhaps it would surprise them to learn that I haven’t seen the Ku Klux Klan except in the movies and that even though I’ll be the first to admit there are a lot of white racists, their 2011 agenda isn’t primarily focused on interracial relationships so much as stopping the leader of the free world who’s a product of one. I’ll clarify further and say, not interracial relationships between a white man and a black woman.

Would they care if Cam Newton came to an Auburn frat party with a white woman on his arm? I’m sure there would be some guys that might have a confederate flag in their truck that would shoot them dirty looks (but not say anything) and I’m also sure there would be future Wall Street broker frat boys that would slap him on the back (but despise him in their mind). Every once and a while there will probably be some jackass that says something, or—more likely—trashes him on the internet, but the majority of hate Cam Newton could expect would be from black women.

They feel like that white woman is “stealing” him even if he wasn’t there’s to begin with.  They might say “She only wants him because he’s good looking, athletic, and probably going to be rich,” which is a presumption that ignores the obvious: that these attributes are what make him so appealing to black women too. They might not be interested if he were a 300 pound cafeteria worker, but somehow their shallowness is justified because they are the same race and deserve a shot with him (despite that similarity applying to a “mere” 26 percent of the state).

When I asked a woman to explain this further it followed that if a black man is desirable, good looking, and probably destined for fame and fortune it is somehow selling out to be with a white woman. This is a Freudian pretzel of logic that would save every woman a lot of time if she just admitted that she wanted to be with him instead and if the woman he’s with wasn’t white, she would probably dislike her for another reason. Race provides a shortcut to hating something without cause. And if someone you like is with someone who looks nothing like you a cocktail of sexual jealousy mixes itself in your brain that can bring out the worst.

You can take that and multiply it by ten when discussing white man/black woman relationships. You may have noticed I might have singled out wm/bw romance in the first two paragraphs instead of using the blanket phrase of “interracial relationships” which falsely implies people that hate seeing one type of IR relationship hate all types. In fact, most people have different levels of tolerance, from support to shoulder shrug to shit hits the fan, depending on what the gender/racial makeup is of the couple. If a Hispanic woman and Asian man—the least likely interracial couple in America according to the 2009 census—are walking down the street in Memphis, you could probably expect no one to really care. If it were a white man and black woman, you might expect an argument to break out.

Black men might be supportive of other black men dating white women, but make it pretty hard on their female cousin’s new white boyfriend. Non-coincidentally, a lot of black women won’t even consider dating white men in Alabama. The ones that don’t shoot you down flat might just gradually blow you off. Making it impossible for you to date them due to a “busy” schedule of texting and American Idol watching, picking fights for things no one would really care about if they weren’t looking to fight, running hot and cold until eventually you lose interest. This isn’t just accidental or happenstance or the way things worked out because it will work that way 99 times out of a hundred because they just aren’t open minded to dating you.

Now people will say “What if they just aren’t interested in dating that one white guy,” but that is rarely the case because they do it with every white guy in that situation. They’ll make up a hundred different excuses for why each white guy that asks them out isn’t “their type” without saying what their type is: black. They say “I’m open minded to white guys” but open minded isn’t never having dated one, never had sex with one, and saying yes to one only if Justin Timberlake landed a jet on Martin Luther King Boulevard and asked you to the Bahamas with him. I heard one woman say, out loud and without irony, “The race of a guy doesn’t matter, but he should be black.”

The heat has been put on white people for so long for being racist in the South (and I’m not denying that they are) that black people might be oblivious when they do it too.