I feel deeply sorry for all of the women who have had to endure this kind of marginalization. Here are a few thoughts that might point us in the direction of fixing this. Because I don’t have the necessary direct experience, I am probably missing some things that would be obvious to those who have to cope with this issue. I would welcome their feedback.
Black men are only about 12% of the dating pool. You might consider the possibility of dating someone in the other 88%. Many of those men are strongly attracted to certain women because those women are black, not in spite of it. This kind of attachment is often disparaged as “fetishistic“, but it seems to me that this is true of all sexual attachments. When we are born, we are thrown into a racist sexist patriarchal culture, and our only hope is to transform those energies into something loving and nourishing to those we love. When we start that task, We have to work with what we’ve got.
One group who deserves a shout-out are the professionally beautiful white women who are gradually and subtly changing their make up to emphasize or simulate African ancestry. For years, these blonde fair skinned women set the standard for beauty that is so eloquently critiqued here. I think we should applaud those who used their power over that standard to diversify it. If they make themselves look like you, the men who are attracted to them will be attracted to you. That seems to get to the heart of the problem. I realize that some people believe that this kind of behavior should be discouraged as “cultural appropriation“, but I do not share that view. More on this here.
This strategy also has another advantage: after a few generations, it will lead us towards a world where the concept of race will be too amorphous to be impactful even as a socially constructed illusion. This doesn’t mean that all of our currently existing different shades will blur into a single gray. On the contrary, it means that each of us will be so different from the rest of us that it will be impossible to use the category of race at all. I expect and hope that this will be the world inhabited by my biracial descendants.
We are naturally attracted to those who are different from us, in the perhaps forlorn hope that they will help complete us. We can use this human foible to help build a diverse and tolerant future.
