Would I ever date a white man ?

Yesterday, I had a conversation with my work bestie Nancy that left me thinking deeply about race, desire, and the uneasy space where intimacy meets power :

I don’t think I’ll ever date a white man. And yet, as my friend Jeremy likes to say, “never say never.” Still, if that day ever came, I already know it would come with a weight I’m not sure I’d want to carry. There would be too many things to explain, too many things to test, too much history sitting quietly at the table.Trust, for me, is at the center of it. If I need to date outside my race it will be with someone where we have a commun enemy: White supremacy lol.

"The lie of human hierarchy has also shaped our beauty standards. It tells us that whiteness is more desirable and worthy of love."

All the White friends I couldn’t keep

I find myself wary of white men who date exclusively Black women. And, in a different way, I’m equally uneasy with Black men who date exclusively white women. These aren’t symmetrical dynamics there’s no equivalence when it comes to history, power, or lived experience but both raise questions for me about desire, projection, and what’s really being sought in those relationships. Because whether we admit it or not, race doesn’t disappear in intimacy. Sometimes it becomes part of it. Sometimes it distorts it.There can be a kind of “race play” that exists not always explicit, not always named, but present in dynamics of dominance, fantasy, and control. And that’s where things start to feel uncomfortable to me.

Not because people date across race, but because of what can quietly sit underneath that choice.This is also why I’ve been hesitant about watching One Battle After Another. I was initially excited I’m a longtime admirer of Paul Thomas Anderson, especially There Will Be Blood, and I still think Magnolia holds some of the most compelling performances I’ve seen, including from Tom Cruise. There was a time when he gave us work like that (Vanilla Sky) and I still wonder why he moved away from those choices. But after hearing critiques especially from voices I trust I started questioning whether I wanted to give my time, my money, and my attention to another story that risks centering a familiar dynamic: the fetishization of Black women through a white lens.Maybe I’ll watch it eventually, at home, on my own terms. But not in a theater. Not as an act of support.

"We can't talk about Black freedom in any comprehensive way without talking about Black love."

All the White friends I couldn’t keep

What’s been interesting is that not everyone sees it the same way. My friend Soraya, who is half Moroccan and half Lebanese, had a very different reading. She saw something almost satirical in it something that exposes the awkwardness, even the inadequacy, of these dynamics. She was like : I’m not sure I completely agree with the criticism being made about it.      But I’d be really interested to hear your opinion. I think there’s a whole critique around the fetishization of Black women. And it also puts on a pedestal the whole imagery of Black feminist revolutionaries.        I think the men in the film are so problematic that you don’t necessarily want Black men to be associated with those kinds of “loser” behaviors, or to see Black men being subjected to violence by armed state militias. And she was honest enough to say: “But then again, I’m not part of the community, so maybe I’m wrong. I’m not a Black woman, so I don’t experience this the same way.”                           That difference in perspective matters. It reminds me that we don’t all enter these conversations from the same place. But I keep coming back to what I see around me in culture, in media, even in reality shows. Interracial relationships, especially between Black people and white partners, often carry something unspoken. Always unhealthy, always intentional, rarely neutral. And I think it’s worth asking: what is being desired, exactly? And why? Because attraction is never just attraction. It’s shaped by history, by imagery, by power, and by everything we’ve been taught consciously or not to want.

"Black women find non-Black partners, it's often because they've been overlooked by Black men, while Black men often choose nonBlack women with the language of misogynoir dripping from our lips."

All the White friends I couldn’t keep

Can we ever have an honest, healthy, dare I say, holy relationship to love when we live in a society that teaches us to desire everything we are not? How do we learn to love, and to be loved, in a world structured by violence against us? How is love even possible after your sense of humanity has been shaped and at times diminished by colonial systems? How do we love while carrying trauma that didn’t start with us, but lives through us?

Because the truth is this: spending most of our lives in a white world has, in many ways, conditioned us. It has shaped what we find beautiful, what we aspire to, what we validate. Their culture, their bodies, their standards, these things don’t just exist around us, they seep into us. And if we’re not aware of it, then the system has already done its job. We like to pretend that love is apolitical. That desire is neutral. That attraction is just “personal preference.” But that’s not true. The structures of the past, colonialism, racism, hierarchy, have not disappeared. Television, film, media, and yes, even pornography, have repeated the same narratives for decades, reinforcing who is desirable, who is dominant, who is disposable. These images don’t just entertain us. They teach us. They shape who we believe is worthy of love and who is not. Which means that even our desires are not entirely our own. They are informed by a hierarchy that has long positioned whiteness as the standard, as the ideal, as the “natural” order of things.

Love, real love, cannot exist without truth. And the truth is that love is not separate from the systems we live in. It is shaped by them, challenged by them, and sometimes distorted by them. But it is also where we have the power to resist them. Love is political.

Kristina.