By TaRessa Stovall

“What do you think about black men with white women?”

By high school, I thought I’d pretty much grappled with most of the thornier questions that came with being both biracial and ethnically ambiguous-looking. But when my two high school running buddies asked how I felt about interracial couples, I found myself facing a whole ‘nother dilemma.

Their question didn’t interest me. At 14, I was busy integrating a school in Seattle’s north end; trying to crack the mysteries of boys and romance; and figuring out my identity in the wake of the Black Power Movement and its new anthem, James Brown’s “Say It Loud! I’m Black and I’m Proud!” while secretly mastering the African Twist in my room.

My first response to the question was to shrug. But my girlfriends, both black, had shared their (completely negative) opinions of black men who chose white girls/women over black-and not for the first time-on a bus ride to school. This time, they pressed me to weigh in on the topic, still controversial in 1969.

I studied the couple on the bus that had ignited their tirade. Aside from their contrasting complexions, they didn’t stand out in any way. I shrugged again, bored.

“They always go for the fat, ugly white ones,” one girlfriend fussed, just loudly enough for the couple to hear.

“Yeah,” the other girlfriend agreed at high volume. “He could at least get a pretty white girl!”

“Well?” they asked me again.

“I don’t know,” I sighed, annoyed at their stereotyping. “My mama’s not ugly. Or fat.”

My girlfriends agreed. “But your mom is cool,” they insisted, trying to get me on board.  “We’re talking about the guys who pick the nastiest white ones they can get. And they’ll step over a black woman to get to them.”

Their question took root and grew. Seattle was full of such couples, along with news stories on the topic in Essence and Ebony magazines, and articles in the local papers: “Why Black Women in Seattle Can’t Find Black Men.” Plus, as I matured, many black men and white women sought my blessing of their boundary-crossing liaisons.

What did I think of black guys with white girls? My research began close to home.

Mom with Taressa and her daughter, Mariah

I considered my mother. Despite the struggles of rearing my brother and me without a penny or any other help from my father, she was a masterful cook, an amazing domestic goddess, so glamorous that people literally stopped her on the street to compliment her beauty. She was also classy, smart and industrious.

It wasn’t hard to see why Dad had chosen her. What wasn’t clear was whether they had gotten together before or after his drunken tirades against “black bitches” and how he’d never let one into his house. My father hated being black. I hated him for that and other reasons. I was intolerant of his preference for white women (never mind that it probably led to my existence) because it came from the same sick place as his contempt for dark-skinned blacks.

My mother, on the other hand, made it clear that my father had been the love of her life. She didn’t just say it; she never remarried after their divorce. Despite his many dysfunctions, she never said one bad word about him to my brother or me. She told us how they had grown up together on the North Side of Minneapolis, and she’d known, even as a child, that they were destined to be together. She described his early days as a dancer (“Like the Nicholas Brothers”) and his talents as a jazz drummer.

I grew up in a community of black jazz musicians married to white women. They migrated to Seattle, where “miscegenation” was legal, and had kids around the same time. We kids grew up with varying ways of self-identifying racially. I’m not sure whether a parent influences such leanings one way or the other, but my mother, the only Jew among the wives, somehow knew a thing or two about rearing healthy mixed (that’s what we were called) children in turbulent racial times, while dancing on the tightrope of poverty.

She was comfortable in her own skin, so that we could be comfortable in ours. She was at ease in any setting, with any and all kinds of people. I was relieved that she wasn’t like some white women in interracial relationships who were sloppy, loud and tried to “talk black” to seem cool.

She didn’t try to influence how my brother and I self-identified. My mother was from the Khalil Gibran school of parenting, often quoting from The Prophet:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

After listening to other parents of biracial kids try to be clever when answering their childrens’ “what am I?” queries, I was glad that Mom didn’t disrespect my brother and me by suggesting cutesy, totally useless ways of identifying ourselves such as “caramel,” “beige,” “toffee,” or “Neapolitan (like the ice cream.)” She told us we had to love ourselves, be honest with ourselves, and appreciate that we had “the best of both worlds,” encouraging us to embrace all of our ancestry, even when people said we couldn’t.

She sent us to Hebrew School, “so you’ll know something about this side of your heritage,” though I don’t think anyone in her family was religious. She wasn’t fazed when I left the synagogue to hang out at the headquarters of the newly-formed Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (I didn’t tell her about the sandbags or rifles). She didn’t question my love of black revolutionary literature. She expressed only mild annoyance when I tagged along to the grocery store to make sure she didn’t buy iceberg lettuce or green grapes, in solidarity with Cesar Chavez and the Chicano farm workers’ movement. She didn’t fuss about my brother’s giant Afro, or my despair that my hair didn’t grow that way. She did occasionally tell us to “stop that foolishness” when my brother and I argued about who looked blacker (he always won).

Her position: “People are just people. When anyone asks you what you are, just say you’re human. That’s it.”

While I realized that the times demanded deeper, more definitive answers from me, I knew her views were genuine because she lived them. Mom valued diversity long before it was trendy. She didn’t pretend to be color-blind; rather, she embraced the richness of variety with an open mind, arms and heart. And always with the utmost respect.

When my brother’s interest in martial arts grew into an affinity for Asian culture and an attraction to Asian girls, Mom asked his Filipina girlfriend to teach her to cook Chicken Adobo. When I brought home an Ethiopian boyfriend, she mastered the classic dish of Doro Wat. This was no surprise, since she could throw down on soul food, chitlins and pigs’ feet included, to the point where many black people insisted she was passing.

I grew into adulthood, secure in my identity as a biracial black/Jewish African American.  With that came the painful realization that many black men in my environment viewed me as inferior. In their eyes, and my father’s, I was just another black female, undeserving of anything but contempt. That made me angry, sad and contemptuous of them right back.

Seattle was full of black men and boys who delighted in telling black girls (myself included) “why I’d rather be with a white girl than with you.” I was especially critical of those who freely articulated a rigid policy of dating anything except black females. So I developed my own policy of not respecting or affirming “Jungle Fever” couples-those who pick mates not because of who they are, but because of what they are not.

Through the years, dozens of black men and white women have felt compelled to tell me why they would never be with someone of their own race. I always hope these people don’t have biracial children to burden with their skewed self-hatred.

Before my father died in 1991, we made our peace. Still, I am impatient with black men who refuse to consider a woman who looks like them. As for the white women who freely make it known that they have “gone black and aren’t going back,” I wonder whether they realize the difference between a partner who wants them for themselves and one propelled into their arms by self-rejection.

People often ask why I have such a strong, grounded sense of identity. For that, I credit Rosalyn Weisberg Stone, who graced the world with her presence from 1923 to just before Mother’s Day 2008, when she made the transition to Ancestor.

Each year since I was seven, I wrote her a poem for Mother’s Day. The one I wrote in 1994 best describes her. It says, in part:

She is the child of Russians who fled
Their motherland on foot
To find new life in a new world,
A woman who erases colorlines
Just by being her genuine self,
A mother who broke the constraints of the day
And gave birth to rainbows after the storm.

She speaks Yiddish and jazz*
Cooks collard greens and chitlins
Flavored with matzoh ball humor…
Blends cultures into a bee-bop gumbo
While jammin’ to a very smooth groove.

If every white woman in a relationship with a black man were like my mother, there wouldn’t be any more of the stereotypically confused “Tragic Mulatto” children whose uncertainty comes not from being biracial, but from the lack of a strong, cohesive foundation upon which to build their own sense of self amid the tensions between black and white in America. My mother made it possible for my brother and me-and by extension, our children-to navigate the world on our own terms.

She often told me how her family waited to see what my brother, who was born after my parents split, looked like. “When they saw him, they told me to move to Hawaii, where nobody would know what you are. I told them that wasn’t right. I couldn’t do that. They thought I was making a terrible mistake.” I was three when my brother was born, and close to my father then. I was fully aware of race, my own included, so that Hawaii thing wouldn’t have worked anyway. But Mom’s refusal to play the passing game made me love and respect her just that much more.

I worked for decades to find a term of identification that represented my braided ancestry and allegiance to black culture while including my mother without equivocation or apology. When I realized that “black,” and “African American” are inclusive enough that Mom was always in the mix, I rejoiced and embraced them with gratitude and pride.

As for interracial couples, I still care less about them than their children, for whom I wish at least one parent as wise, perceptive and self-loving as my Mom. With that, they can be healthy, proud and equipped to handle whatever questions come their way.

TaRessa Stovall is Managing Editor of TheDefendersOnline and Web Content Manager for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

*I borrowed this line from the wonderful book, Bulletproof Diva, by Lisa Jones, the daughter of legendary poet/playwright Amiri Baraka and author Hettie Jones.