Negotiating Interracial Relationships

One might think that after more than a decade of experience with dating interracially and at least half a dozen partners who were of a different race and/or ethnicity than me, I'd be used to it by now...the truth is, I don't think that I'll ever not think that race is an issue in my relationship with lovers.

Double negatives aside, that is to say more simply that I think race will always matter in my relationships--with lovers, but with friends, too. And, while the subject of this post is interracial relationships, let me say now that I think race would matter even if I was in a relationship with another person who was a one-and-a-half generation Philippine born U.S. immigrant.

But back to the topic at hand...

RACE MATTERS

Despite my deep longings to get back to the west coast (and my dream of securing a position in so. cal. university upon graduation), I can't deny how influential living in the metro DC area has been to my own racial development and understanding. Coming from Daly City, CA, where more than 50% of the city's population is Asian (according to the 2000 Census) and 52% are foreign born, you would think that I would have had a solid understanding of what it means to be an immigrant from the Philippines. (I mean, there was a running joke that referred to the local shopping center, Serramonte, as "Little Manila.")

On the contrary, I tend to think growing up in Daly City had the opposite effect on me--foreign born folk, Asian folk, and foreign born Asian folk were everywhere so much so that being in that kind of environment became naturalized for me. I use "naturalized" here in the sense that Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star write in their book, Sorting Things Out (1999), to refer to the situation where, "the more at home you are in a community of practice, the more you forget the strange and contingent nature of its categories seen from the outside" (294-295).

Living in the metro DC area these past eight years has certainly (and at times, painfully) led me to examine my assumptions and beliefs of racialization through a process of denaturalization, which in turn allowed me to see more explicitly the ways in which definitions and understandings of race and who counts as a person of color are constructed within different communities of practice, geographical and otherwise.

Plainly, I've never felt so white before living in DC--specifically because my non-whiteness is of the non-black variety.

My first year of living in DC and taking the metro from northern Virginia to College Park, MD made clear the geographical racial divisions. It was amazing to me to see how white dominated the trains were in NOVA, and how scarce non-black people were after a certain point traveling north on the green line (the most dramatic change happening around the Chinatown/Gallery Place metro stop). The looks I felt I was getting often made me feel as if I might as well as have been white, because I sure wasn't black, and that seemed to be THE color that mattered.

More recently, in August, I struggled once again (not that I've really ever stopped struggling along these lines all these years) with my racial identity. I wanted to take my white girlfriend to a Blush event, but worried what that might be like. An extensive look through Blush's on-line gallery demonstrated just how much of a black women's party it is, and frankly I didn't know if I wanted to be one of the few folks who brought a white girl along, especially since I felt my own racial identity to be only tenuously accepted in such a black-dominated venue.

It wasn't so much her I was worried about, but more so my own feelings of being scrutinized and judged by other party goers.

In the end, after much thought and a little agonizing on my part, we went and had a blast. (Still, I justified going in large part to the fact that I contacted two other folks of color (one Black, one Asian) who were also supposed to join me and the gf that night.)

Why am I bringing this up now?

Well, it seems my queer Asian group is having an event this weekend, and once again I find myself having to negotiate being in an interracial relationship with a non-Asian (not that there aren't a set of negotiations when you date an Asian not of your ethnic group!).

I deeply believe in the need for affinity groups, whether they are constructed along racial, gender, ethnic, geographic, etc. lines, and firmly uphold the belief in the rights of such groups to gather with only those who consider themselves members of those identity categories. (Of course, this itself isn't hardly as cut-and-dry and some think because of the inherent limitations of such binary based--one/other--identity categories.) But, I also think that coalitions are also of utmost importance, and that continued and self-selected segregation is ultimately damaging to all.

What does this mean when it comes to negotiating such social events? Well, as with so many things, it seems the only answer is that "it depends"...

Oh, to accept the things that I cannot change, but to change the things I can!