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"general misogyny" 

"Biracial, baby" 

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First of all, context: "awkward biracial babies" isn't a term I use pejoratively. Not to play the whole "my best friend is black, so I'm not racist" card, but my dad is biracial. So is Justin. So are a bunch of my cousins. I don't mean to objectify them as a race, at all, but there's a whole historical subtext regarding, specifically, biracial people with black and white parents. The Tragic Mulatto shows up in literature just as often as the Angry Black Man, the Sapphire.

"Awkward," an illustration: when Justin was ten, neither his mom nor his dad knew what to do with his thick, curly hair--his mom has cornsilk, his dad has an Afro. In the absence of an at-home role model, Justin started using the same products his white friends used to gel their hair. It left his hair flaky, stiff and discolored. Awkward. White parent or not, Justin himsef is black, and no amount of spiking gel designed for white hair is going to do a thing for his curls. (Let's be fair, I don't think that issue applies to anyone of mixed race more than it does to someone who's half black.)

More "awkward": when my dad went to college, it bothered him that other black people never censored themselves from complaining about white people around him. Again, while a person with a brown face may have a white parent, to the outside world, black is black. One drop, and whatnot. My dad had kind of a weird relationship with his white father, but he still feels loyalty to his paternal heritage, and it bothered him being included in conversations that poked fun at white guys like his dad.

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More context: when it comes to interracial dating, the black man/white woman matchup is about as contentious as it gets. It's a powderkeg for two reasons:

1. Historically, the white woman is the most coveted being on the planet. With obvious individual exceptions, men of all cultures praise long hair and creamy skin in their art, their literature, their personal dating choices. White men are attracted to white women. Black men are attracted to white women. Hispanic men are attracted to white women. My half-Brazilian, half-Eastern European male friend claims to be into "ethnic" girls, but has only ever fallen in love with a string of white women. Culturally, for a lot of black men, dating or marrying a white woman is a status symbol. Survey the rich black NBA players, music producers, other moguls--disproportionately, they have white wives, or nonblack ones. Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Russell Simmons. Seal. David Alan Grier. Et cetera. Numbers-wise, this wouldn't be a problem at all, but:

2. There is a tragic shortage of eligible black men in the United States. "Eligible," here, has the meaning of "alive, functional and not incarcerated." NAACP reports estimate that there are, at this point, seven eligible black women for every one eligible black man in America. You see this manifested clearly on black college campuses: at Hampton University, for instance, the ratio is even starker at fourteen-to-one. Comparatively, black women are not nearly as desired as white women to men outside their own race. I can think of endless interracial matchups involving white women, but I only know two or three examples of black female celebrities who date nonblack guys, and no one I know personally has ever made that scenario last long-term.

Add in the breakdown of the black family over the last forty years, the fact that black men seem to enjoy making babies with black women, then making families with white ones, and you can see, hopefully, that it isn't just a problem of snobbishness, or whatever it is people think.

That is to say, I don't defend the behavior of black women who shoot dirty looks at black men and their white girlfriends in the mall, or who sabotage their male friends' and brothers' relationships with white women because they'd rather they found nice black girls, but I understand that the historical and cultural undertones make so much white-girl worship frustrating. I believe in love, I think it's beautiful, I'm happy for anyone who finds it, no matter with whom. But I'm completely sick of hearing guys tell me they only date white girls, or that white women are so much more articulate, or bright, or loving, or whatever, because that could not be more narrow or less accurate.

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Um, relevance? Ever since I got to San Francisco, I have yet to see a single black couple anywhere. I have seen dozens of white couples, Asian couples, Asian-white couples, black men with white women, Hispanic couples, Hispanic men with white women, and so on. I noticed that around the third day I was here, and I started looking more closely, and I noticed, subsequently, that I haven't seen any black women wearing wedding rings. Which I know is cultural, sometimes, but this includes the women in my office, women in power suits, women having lunch with a bunch of married white friends.

So, okay. I haven't seen the whole of San Francisco, or anything, but it's clear that it's a liberal community, and that interracial dating is higher here, proportionally, than in most of the places I've been. I think that's great, honestly! I love to see people loving each other. I actually even love the idea of interracial couples, of two people putting in all the work it takes to get around cultural barriers, not giving a fuck what the naysayers think, et cetera.

But, and here's the origin of my offhanded comment from before, often I see some variation on the same couple. Handsome black man in corporate attire, well-groomed, wearing his wedding band. He's holding hands with a pretty white woman in a flowy skirt, her ponytail professionally streaked and swinging behind her. They have a kid who is cute, deeply tanned or all-the-way brown with wild hair. They probably live in a neighborhood full of famillies like theirs. Their friends are black men with white wives. Their kid is too young to know that, white mom notwithstanding, people will, at first glance, apply the black label, and all the prejudices that accompany it.

So again, my thing is, I respect these black guys' right to love and marry whomever they want. But given that white wives are shaping into the aforementioned status symbol, and that some of the men, at least, are vocal about preferring white women for one reason or another, and know that lots of their peers feel the same way, how do they even feel comfortable producing black daughters who are going to spend their whole lives muddling through that, on top of everything else?

Maybe I should have gendered that question. Maybe I'm still wrong. Who knows.