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We danced to hip-hop in his living room - and he could dance, something I had rarely experienced with my white boyfriends. Most of all, we reveled in our Blackness. He even took me to a (socially distanced) visit with my grandmother on her birthday. He took me to Baltimore’s National Aquarium. We packed a lot into that four-day first date. I was flying 3,000 miles to have our “first date.” On the other, the whole thing felt like something out of a movie. On the one hand, it seemed wild and reckless, jumping on a plane to visit someone I barely knew. I suggested flying out to Baltimore to see him, and he agreed. We had a couple of video calls that were awkward at first but became more natural. And I’ll be honest - I had always felt a kind of shame around that, as though my not dating Black men reflected a deep-seated insecurity with my own Blackness.īut here was an eligible Black bachelor offering me a chance at love, and a chance at embracing my Blackness. In fact, it had become a running joke among my friends and family: If the guy was basic and white, he was my type.īut I had never, not once, dated a Black man. Up to that point, the vast majority of my relationships had been with white men, the predictable result of years spent in a Maryland prep school and at a Massachusetts liberal arts college.
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I soon found out through mutual friends that his marriage had ended before we connected, but seeing as we lived 3,000 miles apart, I figured there was no point in trying to pursue anything.īut here he was now, reading my manifesto and submitting an actual application to date me. We had flirted, but I remembered from Facebook that he’d gotten married, so I flew back to California at the end of the conference with a wistful “what-if” feeling fluttering in my chest. I’d briefly reconnected with him at a bar in Baltimore in 2018 when I was in town for a work conference. He was tall, handsome, smart, funny and successful. The message was from Josh, whom I went to high school with 18 years earlier in Maryland. White allies thanking me and promising to “do the work.” I felt so vindicated.Īnd then this popped up on Facebook Messenger: Black people saying that they’d had similar experiences. To my amazement, the likes and comments started pouring in. I ended my ramblings with the call for applicants. White people had called me “not Black” for liking Taylor Swift, told me they were “more Black than me” because they grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood (or had an especially dark tan), and fetishized my “exoticness” and ethnic ambiguity. Specifically, I railed against a white society that clearly didn’t see me as white but insisted on rejecting my Blackness because of my appearance (fair-skinned) and upbringing (middle class). So one afternoon, I wrote a half-crazed manifesto on my Facebook page. In short, I was fed up with white people.