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Article about dating a black man
Here',s how three Black women are navigating the dating scene. How Black Women Are Taking Their Power Back In A Discriminatory Dating Landscape. Tiffany Crawford still vividly remembers the first boy who made her feel like she wasn&rsquo,t good enough&mdash,just because she was Black.
As a teenager, she mostly dated people who weren&rsquo,t Black, but that never presented any issues. &ldquo,My attraction kind of was towards people outside of my race, because that&rsquo,s who I was surrounded by,&rdquo, the now 27-year-old TV producer from Toronto, Canada recalls. Then, at 17, she dated a boy who opened her eyes to the ways that Black girls and women are often dismissed and cast aside. &ldquo,I remember him saying to me that if he brought me home, his grandma would not let me in the house,&rdquo, she says. &ldquo,It made me think, &lsquo,I&rsquo,m good enough to hook up with, but I&rsquo,m not good enough to be this person&rsquo,s partner.&rsquo,&rdquo, The comment stuck with Crawford. After that, whenever a future relationship with a non-Black person reached the point of meeting their parents, Crawford worried about what they were going to think. &ldquo,I just got it stuck in my head that no matter what, there&rsquo,s a chance that this person&rsquo,s family&rsquo,s not going to like me, and that means that I&rsquo,m not worth considering as a real partner because of my race,&rdquo, she says. Crawford&rsquo,s experience isn't rare, unfortunately. The dating landscape for Black women is often bleak and unwelcoming. Both online and IRL, Black women are navigating a dating world filled with microaggressions, colorism, and outright racism. Black women are the demographic most likely to be unmarried, per a 2019 Pew Research analysis. &ldquo,[When] we&rsquo,re thinking about Black women trying to find a Black partner, I think that there is a lot of talk about the hardness of it all,&rdquo, says Giitou Neor, a therapist and licensed medical social worker based in New York. Neor notes there are several reasons Black women might face difficulties finding a suitable partner of any race. Despite these hurdles (and the resulting mental health struggles), experts agree that there&rsquo,s still plenty of hope for Black women in the dating world. Here&rsquo,s a look at some of the struggles Black women are facing, and how three women healed from past negative experiences, unlearned harmful dating patterns, and found the support they needed. Systemic racism and white supremacy have played a big role in labeling black women as "undesirable." These issues prop up women of other races, and make it more difficult for Black women to be recognized for their beauty, says Taryn Codner-Alexander, a licensed mental health counselor and owner of Tea for the Soul Mental Health Counseling in the Bronx, New York. Throughout history, Black features like darker skin and kinky hair have been greatly disparaged, while more Eurocentric features like long hair and fairer skin are favored, according to the Journal of Black Psychology . This devaluing of Black women&rsquo,s bodies can present major issues for Black women dating outside their race. For Iman Abbaro, a 26-year-old Sudanese community organizer and multidisciplinary artist, growing up in the Middle East meant being forced to endure a fixation on proximity to whiteness. As the only Black girl in a predominantly Arab society, her skin tone, hair texture, and curves were degraded, which had serious impacts on her self-image. &ldquo,My best friend, who was kind of my first love, would always make comments like, &lsquo,You look so much prettier with your hair straight,&rsquo, and that pushed me to start straightening my hair all the time, which led to a lot of heat damage,&rdquo, she says. He would also make comments about her curves, pushing her to work out so she could fit the Eurocentric ideal of a skinny, straight-haired girl. &ldquo,I still struggle with standing up for myself and accepting myself in the way that I look, and that was one of the things that contributed to the body dysmorphia that I currently have.&rdquo, Abbaro says she didn&rsquo,t know just how big an impact that relationship had on her mental state until she moved to Canada at 19. &ldquo,I took a [hard] look at myself and the experience, and that led me to being celibate for over a year,&rdquo, she said. These biases around physical appearance also manifest themselves in the digital dating space. Online, Black women are considered far less desirable than white women, according to data from a 2014 study by OKCupid. After looking at millions of interactions on the site between 2009 and 2014, studying how people rated potential dates on a scale of one to five based only on a view of their profiles, researchers found that Black women received the lowest ratings of all women on the platform. It&rsquo,s not unusual for Black women to feel they&rsquo,re not being seen or valued, says Celeste Vaughan Curington, assistant professor of sociology at North Carolina State University and co-author of The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance . &ldquo,I think of this one interviewee who did talk about feeling very invisible when online dating, and she questioned: &lsquo,Is it because I&rsquo,m a dark-skinned Black woman? Is it because I&rsquo,m not traditionally feminine?&rsquo,&rdquo, The notion that Black women aren&rsquo,t feminine is also a product of the historical racist stereotyping of Black women, one that persists in popular media today. For example, tennis legend Serena Williams is consistently being called &ldquo,manly&rdquo, on social media. White women tend to be characterized as feminine, delicate, or frail, while these traits are usually not afforded to Black women. Instead, Black women are often masculinized and vilified, especially when they don&rsquo,t fit into these Eurocentric versions of femininity, according to a study from the journal Race and Social Problems . Black women in the LGBTQ community also face structural barriers to finding a partner. They still face the &ldquo, person-of-color outsider &rdquo, status in LGBTQ communities, meaning that they are still othered for being a POC, despite being a part of or identifying with the larger queer group. And that othering makes it harder to date people outside of their race. What&rsquo,s more, research published by Fordham University found that LGBTQ people of color have historically been pushed out of &ldquo,gayborhoods&rdquo, in the U.S. That, in turn, creates a kind of segregation that further hinders the establishment of meaningful and equitable connections. Colorism is a challenge for many Black women as well. Unrealistic beauty standards are also a hurdle for Black women dating Black men who have internalized colorism, and who have been socialized to find women more desirable and valuable if they fit into Eurocentric &ldquo,ideals.&rdquo, &ldquo,We do see that privilege in having lighter skin, lighter eyes, looser hair&mdash,really, anything that is closer to this white standard of beauty,&rdquo, says Codner-Alexander. That&rsquo,s a reality that Montreal-based Melissa Murphy understands well. When she was a sophomore in college, she walked in on a conversation about her among a group of Black men. &ldquo,I was kind of taken aback, and then ironically, the darkest guy in the room was like, &lsquo,Yeah, but you have to remember, you&rsquo,re really pretty for a dark-skinned girl.&rsquo,&rdquo, The comment was both offensive and jarring. Growing up in Trinidad and having attended a multi-racial high school in Canada, it was the first time in her life that she was put in the position of comparing herself to other Black women.
