Contributed by Renee Thomas
December 16, 1999.

I'm a white woman dating an African-American man.
So what?

And I'm not "just" dating him; he's the love of my life. (ooooh, how romantic!)
But so what?

Mikael and I have been dating for just over a year. From my perspective, anyway, we haven't encountered much in the way of problems because he's black and I'm white. His family is fine with it. My family is fine with it. And anyway we are busy people, and we are pretty broke, and mostly we see each other for a couple hours a day in the evenings, and often we stay in with rented movies on the weekends.

In other words, we don't get out much.

Here in Champaign, our usual haunts are Blockbuster, the Basil Thai Cafe, Meijer, Dos Reales, and a few other places.

Maybe, when we do go out, nobody looks at us funny. Maybe people do look at us funny, but I hardly notice it. Maybe he does notice it.

When we leave Champaign things surface a bit more. There was the time in Tuscola when Mike tried to return a pair of shoes at Rockport and no one would help him. My beautiful, gentle Mike, in his pressed khakis, fresh haircut and military bearing could not get service from an oldish white woman, a youngish white man, and a young white woman. And then as we were moving away from the counter and I was a bit slow to get out of the way, the woman behind us in line said to the young white saleswoman, gesturing her head in our direction, "Is she with him?"

Patricia Williams' invisible bed (The Alchemy of Race & Rights. pp. 49). seemed pretty visible at that moment, and I wanted to do something, like kick the damn thing out of our way, yell at the damn ignorant salespeople and the damn ignorant customer. But though we were standing in the middle of a tiny everyday moment of injustice, I got the sense from Mike that an outburst from me would be out of line. And I deferred. Though we don't talk about it much, I know for a fact that as a 6' 5" black man, he's experienced much worse racism than this. And what, after all, have I experienced?

I have experienced brief moments of extreme self-consciousness, when in spite of myself I’ve cared what other people think. Not white people—who cares about them—but black people, especially black women. When they look at Mike and I together, holding hands, do they think I’ve taken one of "theirs?" Do they resent me, and think mean thoughts about him and his choices?

When Mike and I went to his cousin's wedding in Cleveland, and I was one of about four white people there, I felt "other." And I know Mike feels this all the time. I was nervous when we got up to dance, even though I know I'm a good dancer, and so is Mike, and we usually shame everyone to the outskirts of the dance floor when we get going. I was aware of that old dumb stereotype that white people can't dance and black people can. None of the other three white people danced, and so I felt on display. Mike felt my nervousness and asked what was wrong. I said I was nervous. I didn’t say "I’m nervous because I’m white." But he pulled me a little closer and I looked up into his eyes and let him lead me around the floor, and after a few minutes it didn’t matter anymore.

Because it never did matter. It's not a big deal. I just had to live that moment and learn it. And though, as I said, we’ve only been dating for a little more than a year, and there may be some rougher waters ahead, I have experienced this:  
we’re not "other" to each other.