African Americans and Interracial Dating: Who’s Dating Whom?
Posted on 29. Aug, 2007 in Dating Tips, Friends & Sex, Relationships Advice
Important change is said to be occurring according to TV Programming Shows.
When it comes to interracial dating and marrying for African Americans, an important difference is being made between women and men. This gender difference is actually quite substantial and it seems to be changing. The changes frequency is increasing in the last few years, it being especially proved by popular television programs.
This gender imbalance felt by African American women when dating and marrying people of different races is still substantial according to 2000 Census. All these facts, including the one to say that it is harder for African American women to find men to date and to marry, most of all because of the gender imbalance, have been thoroughly discussed in magazines and popular daytime shows.
It says that African American men were more likely to date and marry white women than African American women were to date and marry white men. According to the statistics, the couples where the husband was black and the wife was white composed circa 73 percent of African American/white interracial couples, because the percentage of African American women having white husbands was 2 (1/2) times less than the percentage of African American men having white wives. More than that, in unmarried African American/white couples living together, this percentage was even five times less.
According to the annual Current Population Survey reports published by the Census Bureau, after the 2000 Census has been issued, the number of white husband/African American wife couples was higher than before, but all these statistics were in the same time too little reliable for they were based on too small sample sizes. There has been made a small survey of college students who have also proved that there is a shift in the gender balances of African American/white interracial couples.
The survey was made among the students of 629 East Carolina University. They had completed an anonymous questionnaire based on the students willingness to have an interracial relationship. The number of those who were open towards this kind of relationship was almost a half of the students, among them nearly one-fourth that were already involved in an interracial relationship. More than that, ninety-two of those who had already had experience with this kind of relationships were not against repeating the experience. Even if there were more African Americans than whites who were eager to accept an interracial relationship, still there were no important gender differences between the students who were open to African American/white interracial relationships and those who were not.
If popular culture is to be considered a reflection of its participants experience, then why not revise a few television programs that promote interracial dating and marriage, especially with African American wife/white husband couples? Let’s look through some of them…
Let’s remind ourselves of the so much popular Friends series. In some episodes at the end of the series, there are two white men (Joey and Ross, the last one being Jewish) who dated an African American beautiful woman, an anthropologist by profession. In the end, she goes back to the white university professor she was dating before dating Joey. In the Firefly series, by Joss Whedon, which were shown first on Fox and then on SciFi channel, prior to the hit movie Serenity, there was a couple, where the wife, Zoe, was an African American kick-butt right-hand-’man’ to the Captain and the husband, Wash, was a white man, Firefly’s pilot. And in the so much criticized and well-known series of Lost, its viewers were shocked when the African American woman Rose’s husband, Bernard, was found alive and, besides all, he was found to be white too! And when you come to think that there were a lot of viewers who were almost sure Bernard to be an African American…
Another popular show, a Fox’s medical show, House, M.D., in its second season now, has shown a few interracial couples in its episodes. In “Maternity” of Season One, there was a funny scene with an African American woman working intensely and her white husband, who, because of an epidemic in the hospital, was turned away from it. In Season Two there is another episode that shows us an interracial couple of a white man and an African American wife. Apparently, she is very stressed by the loss of her husband’s ability of expressing himself verbally. And in the series of Supernatural, a new hit shown on Bothered is also an episode where one of the two white male main characters remembers a girl, whose mother was white and whose father was an African American, with whom he used to have an interracial relationship a time before. There are absolutely no racial differences shown in these episodes, all we see is just a nice and loving relationship between the two of them.
In conclusion, the entire previous example have proved us that race in a relationship is a non-issue. The couples of African American females and white males were not shown as tragic, heroic or melodramatic, but simply as normal relationships. This is a significant shift from the interracial relationships so-much portrayed a few years ago, where the male was African American and the female was white. Is this the end or the story is to be continued more on? We can only hope so and wait to see what happens next, so just stay tuned…
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