On Love

The other day I went to my Twitter and had typed out “seeing so many interracial couples warms my soul”. In my short 23 years I have seen change.

In high school I found My first boyfriend, my first love, a young black man. I will never forget the night we were out to dinner and it wasn’t even just us we were with a group of our friends and sitting next to each other, his arm around me. This older white woman at the table next to us kept making an effort to turn around and glare at him and then me. She then leaned over to the man she was with and said see that nice girl with a boy like that. He was so angry, I was so angry. A boy like that? Little did she know this boy was accepted into a private school, star of the football team, lived a life so challenged and was not only surviving but thriving greatly AND “that boy” could make me laugh like no one else in the world could. This woman made an extra effort to suggest to us that she didn’t agree with what we were doing. He was so upset he wanted to leave I begged for him to stay. We ended up sitting outside waiting for our friends to finish their food. As I grow older it infuriates me even more that at the end of the day we left a place we should have been comfortable being, just a local pizza place. Throughout our relationship we were stopped, questioned, and judged by people. One night At a sporting event we were play fighting like a lot of young couples do when a cop stopped us and asked me if I was ok. He didn’t stop because I was a female and he was a male. He stopped us because I was white and he was black. And because he was black he must be doing something wrong. Here we are 10 years later and I walk through my city and see interracial couples everywhere. These days going on a date with a black man I rarely experience negativity from others. To know that change is happening warms my soul but to know that there is still so much to do in this cold world is a reality. I dream of a world where people see differences and color as beauty and not as a sole definition for who a human is.