Students express concerns during forum about interracial dating

By: Marshand Boone

Posted: 10/28/03

The rules were simple: "Agree to disagree" and "have an open mind."

Those decrees governed a forum about interracial dating hosted by the Multicultural Experience and Students Advocating Multicultural Equality on Monday night in Room 500 in the Hall of Languages.

The forum also gave many multiracial students the opportunity to confront stereotypes about themselves, namely that they were "not pure," "sellouts" and "too light to be black and too dark to be white."

Jasmine Hall, a senior policy studies and political science major and president of Multicultural Experience, said the forum was needed for people to express how they feel. She said the topic is controversial because it touches on personal identities and how people fit into society.

One only has to look at history to back up her claim. Interracial marriage between blacks and whites was legalized in this country only after the Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

Many of the 45 students who attended the forum, especially those who were the products of interracial marriages, used it as an opportunity to sound off.

"Society doesn't give us a place to fit in. We're blatantly different from everybody else," said Kim Davidson, a senior public relations and international relations major, of her black and Asian heritage. "We don't fit into any one category. To do so would deny one parent."

She cited the United States census, which recently changed its policy to allow people to check more than one ethnicity, as a sign of progress.

Most students felt that people should be able to date and marry as they please. Still, more students stated that their parents have a strong influence over who they date.

Matt Fastow, an undeclared freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences, said his mother told him not to marry a black woman.

"She wouldn't want that difference in the family. She's thinking of how I'd deal with it, how I'd be look[ed] at in society," he said. "In a sense, they're closet racists. They have their own generalizations and stereotypes."

He has not dated a black woman, but has not shunned the experience, either.

"If it happens, it happens. I don't really think it would affect me," Fastow said.

Roger Samuels, a senior management major, recounted an incident that happened when he was in the seventh grade.

"At an early age, I was forced to deal with my racial identity," he said.

Samuels's mother is German, and his father is black. His white girlfriend's parents became upset when they learned she was dating a biracial man. He said her parents asked her questions like, "Have you thought about what your children would look like?"

Most students, like Rachel Aminah Williams, an information management technology and women's studies major, felt that people should date and marry whomever they want as long as the relationships are based on love and not trying to raise one's status by dating someone outside their race.

But Jamaall Knight, a senior economics major, believes that people should stick with their own race. He doesn't agree with interracial dating, and said he'd never date someone who was not his own color.

"I have so much love for my black sisters right now," he said.