Be Better than the Gap

       Sometimes dating is easy, care free, simple, and just makes sense.  However, I don't think I have ever experienced dating in this way.  As explained previously, some of the difficulties, confusion, and complexities I experience in dating can be attributed to the fact that interracial dating can sometimes be rather confusing and complex, and I only go on interracial dates*.  In spite of these not uncommon challenges that accompany interracial dating, interracial dating can sometimes be idealized in our culture.  This post-civil rights phenomena (very post) is well captured in the following Seinfeld clips: 

Here is the link to the second part, that has the full and only logical conclusion to finding out that you are just two white people dating.  

    While interracial couples fail to dominate our movie screens in prominent roles, the idea of interracial dating seems more common place and in many senses idealized, as aptly portrayed in this particular Seinfeld episode which aired 16 years ago.  As would be expected, the prevalence of interracial couples in the media has increased greatly.  Of the top 50 television shows currently on the air, 7 prominently feature interracial couples or dating.*  However, none of the characters in the "fictional" shows, in the interracial couples, are leading roles.  The 7 shows are, in order of most watched, The Bachelorette, The Bachelor, Modern Family, Parks and Rec, New Girl, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and Community.  Arguments can be made, both, that 7 out of 50 is an outrageously small number and that it is 7 times as many shows as one would expect.  However, it is important to note both the prominence and the portrayal of such couples.  

     In both the Bachelor and the Bachelorette, while there is often a "multiracial" cast, no non-white participant has ever won either show.  Also, for these shows "multiracial" typically means either one to two African-American suitors or one to two Asian or Latina female contestants.*  In contrast, non-anglos seem to be protrayed as the relational winners* in the national "reality" fixation, Keeping Up with the Kardashians.  While interracial relationships are prominently displayed, both Chloe and Lamar and Kanye and Kim are depicted as relational spectacles, one of which being, probably, the most hypersexualized public relationship of the 21st century.  In both New Girl and Modern Family the interracial couples are supporting characters.  While, in New Girl, the non-anglo characters are not always overtly hypersexualized, their primary sex organs or secondary sex organs are subjects of multiple subplots.  The one interracial relationship in Community is a season long coupling of a white female and an African-American male.  While this show's depiction of this union is an overall positive representation, the African-American male with a Caucasian female, is, traditionally, the most common interracial romantic pairing depicted in major North American film media.  In contrast, Parks and Recreation depicts a much less common, nonsegregated romantic union.  For Parks, interracial dating consists of Aziz Ansari's character, Tom, stringing together a series of short-term relationships, most of which are obviously destined to fail.  While Tom's relationships are never the prominent romantic focal point, Parks does portray the often asexualized Indian male, in romantic relationships, most surprisingly though, without the help of the common pop-culture trope of Incessant-Karma-Sutra-References.  

          

     Our silver-screens also serve as the canvas for our colored representations of multi-colored love.  While some form of interracial relationship is commonly depicted in film, similar issues of prominence and protrayal arise as we attempt to evaluate the affects of these representations on our corporate romantic paradigms.  In 2012 only a handful of movies featured interracial relationships, the most notable being the 23rd edition of the blockbuster James Bond franchise, Skyfall.  While the series has an illustrious history of misogyny and glorified colonialism, this particular rendition seemed to take it to exaggerated heights.  Skyfall features French actress, Bérénice Lim Marlohe, exotified to portray a probably-Asian, but definitely-despendable James Bond "sex-interest."  Marlohe caps off her twenty minutes of screen time with a sudden and unmourned death, which, coincidently, was practically immediately proceeded by a "love" scene.  Although much of this is problematic, probably the most concerting is the potential resurgence of the subtle 21st century Asian equivalent of blackface.* 

     Just about ten years after the peak of the civil rights movement, in 1978, Edward Saïd's seminal book, Orientalism was published.  In it, Saïd analyzes various misrepresentations and harmful portrayals of non"Western" peoples* and cultures in all major media sources at the time. Years of these "misrepresentations" have served to play a major role in the shaping of public assumptions and opinions, strategically used to construct the "Western World" as known in contrast to the fallaciously framed "Eastern World."  To hopefully avoid my butchering of Saïd's dynamic work serving as your only understanding of this concept* here is a link to a decent introductory description of Orientalism.  

     

     Now just about forty-five years after the peak of the civil rights movement, we live in a world, marred by the psychological affects of this Orientalism, of which the implications stretch far beyond our mental categorizations.  Interracial relationships, when depicted in the media are constantly confined to the periphery, allowing themes from their highly engineered hollywood presentation to seep into our subconscious.  What in the world does any of this mean for me as a multi-cultural individual in the world of North American dating in the 21st century?  On the surface, you could say that it means my stock is up.  After all, a couple of white people dating is just boring.  However, I feel as if I must constantly be on guard, tip-toeing my way through a vast mine field of misinformed cultural and racial assumptions and characterizations.  The unfortunate catch-twenty-two is that even if my, potentially, justified fears are not realized in my romantic settings, my necessary precautions serve as yet another layer of protective emotional fencing that keep potential loved ones at an arm's length away.  And probably even more unfortunately, the explanation of this wall building phenomenon becomes an overly academic lecture, strangely similar to the one you have just read.  Interracial dating does not have to be all doom and gloom, by any means.  I for one, am quite hopeful.  Hopeful for the exciting, complex, and fulfilling potential of interracial dating.  For all the multicultural singles out there, be better than the Gap.  

* However, most of these difficulties should probably be attributed to my knack for incessant over analysis of all things. 

*http://www.tvguide.com/top-tv-shows Many other lists have less than 7.  

*Some North American churches share the same definition of multiracial.  

*Or losers if our relational scorecard accounts for relational health.  

*Attention James Bond Franchise: China has over .7 billion women living within its boarders, anyone of these women could have more accurately played a Chinese women in the film Skyfall.  Heck, I would even have taken Lucy Liu.

*Saïd, being of Palestinian descent, focuses on Middle Eastern peoples and Asian peoples. 

*Just like I butchered those 7 sitcoms.