A couple of years ago I introduced a certain blog to my friend because I'd seen an article that I thought he'd like, then promptly forgot about the blog. About a week ago, my friend sent me a link to this same blog, and though I thought the article he linked me to was pretty funny, it's another article I came across that I felt deserved some mention here.<\/p>\n
The name of the blog is I Date White<\/b>, and the particular post is titled Question From A 15 Year Old<\/b>. The question posed, which I have to post here otherwise anything I say won't make sense, was thus:<\/p>\n
\"I am 15 year old white female, and my parents don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care if I date, but when I became interested with a half black boy and he asked me out they forbade me to date him. They said that they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have anything against the boy but that I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand how society and other people would treat us and that they were looking out for my best interests. I wanted to know, is this normal?<\/b>\"<\/p>\n
What struck me about this issue wasn't the question so much as the fact that the parents statement sounded like the kinds of statements I used to hear when I was a kid back in the 70's. I didn't date until I was in college, and let's just say that I didn't go to either a high school or a college where there was much of a racial mixture. Therefore, when I did finally start dating, I dated outside of my race, and really didn't think anything about it. I was a military kid, where that sort of thing happened on the base so often that it never occurred to me all that much that it would be such a big deal off base, even though I didn't see it happening on TV at the time.<\/p>\n
The strangest thing to me was that I remembered my parents, though I'm not sure which one, saying something similar to me before I even started dating, while I was in college, when I brought home a bunch of female friends and one other male friend before we all went on a two week long college choir tour. At the time I thought it was a strange statement with our background, but I'd put it aside, and when I was finally having my first real date they never said anything, but the memory came back to me at the time and I always wondered how they would handle it. They handled it just fine, as did my girlfriend's parents, though I understand they did tell her something similar at the time.<\/p>\n
So, as I read this particular question and blog post, I once again came to this question about just how far we've really come in this day and age when America has elected a black president, while at the same time small towns in Texas like Tenaha are pulling over black drivers<\/b><\/a> and taking their money and property for no reason other than accusing them of being drug runners, never filing charges, and not being contrite while they're now facing a class action lawsuit. In our supposedly diverse world, though I know there are pockets where there are few minorities across our country, is this really still as big a deal as it was 30 years ago? And why?<\/p>\n