Till it happens in your neiborhood..

[Anubis_]

An old friend of mine called me last night for some advice about her interracial relationship..

Seems her boyfriend.. "from trinidad" isn't really accepted by her white family..

her mother tells him after he drives her to the family yacht, maybe you should wait in the car.. Your kind isn't suited for this kind of formal Caucasian event.

On top of that.. none of his family like her at all.. she tells me they think she's not good enough for him. They also have a problem with the fact she's white..

Her family is threatening to disown her if she ever marys him. They also told her, if she breaks up with him they'll pay her rent and pay her enough money to go back to school. She currently works for a living and makes her own way though, so I dont know.

The reason she called me is because I'm in an interracial engagement dealing with the same kinda problem with her step father (whos like a father to her..)

Her mother likes me alot... But her Step father has come within three inches of me before and never made Eye contact. He wont even let me inside the house..

Our wedding is soon and I've tried to set it up so that it would be as comfortable as possible for him to come.. But I'm not sure he will.

I hope one day to smooth things out with him so that he'll reallize he doesn't have to shove a stereotype on me, cause thats what my fiance says that he's doing.. But if he never gives me a chance.. It won't put a dent in my fender.


The girl tells me last night, "I can't believe this was happening to us.. It was like.. wow.. its a movie or something.. like it was happening to someone else.. I thought that the United States had advanced to a point that this kinda thing didn't happen anymore." *We laughed at some Dave Chapell jokes after she said that.*

I said yeah.. i thought that back in the like the 7th grade. But it's different for me than you.. I grew up in Louisiana...

I guess I'm pretty calm about the situation though. From a logical stand point though, I can't understand why people act like that. It only complicates everyones lives..

[AlexCraig]

Damn. That really blows. I f&%$ing hate racists. Best thing for both you and your friend to do is to live your lives your way, and not march to the beat of her parents. If they disown her, then that just shows how much they love her. You said she is capable of handling herself, working for a living and all. In that case, she would not need them to pay her rent and all. If they can't accept the man she loves because he is a different race, then they need to get back to reality. The 1800's and early-mid 1900's are over, and they need to come to grips with this.

[Darkly]

a lot of current generation parents have racism still in them. I live in the uk but i know that my dad especially resents certain immigrants...

anyway these situations are tough but with something as stupid as racism i think she should fight back. It might take the extreme for the parents to realise skin colour means nothing but people are so set in their ways that only something radical will change them.

Then again i dont know the parents so they may well be totally set in their ways, its just personally i would disown my parents if they had something against me dating someone of another race.

[KodiaX987]

Tell that old friend of yours that she ought to give the finger to her family and the Trinidadian guy should do the same to his own.

If they can't accept something as simple as love between two people with a different shade of skin, then I don't see why anybody should give them any respect.

Bonus points if the happy couple manages to earn good money and live well afterwards. It'll add insult to injury.

[ABDUR101]

The old saying "Family is forever", doesn't really apply to this one. I certainly would'nt even want involved with a family thats so blatantly racist, and to the extent of trying to buy off the other person to leave.

I suggest they have a private ceremony, only close friends and any family that actually DO support their wedding. Otherwise its going to be alot of fighting and not a day that should be remembered.

But that is how it goes, and if the family has the balls to draw the line and say "If you do this we'll disown you", hey, fine, they drew the line. Personally, if my family told me "If you get with a guy, we won't have anything to do with you", I'd tell them great, because if thats how they feel I don't want to be around them.

People either learn to deal with things, not hold to stereotypes and see people for the person that they are, and not what they see on TV(or hear about by word of mouth), then thats their issue and their loss. I've had alot of great people in my life, gay, straight and every color. Hopefully their family and your girlfriend's stepfather will learn to look at the individual and not the overall cascade that he's slammed you with.

[amtalx]

All I can tell you is that it can work out in the end. One of my best friend's parents are in a Puerto Rican-German marriage. His mother's (Puerto Rican) parents disowned them for 20 years for marrying a German man. They were happily married the whole time.

[Powder Keg]

We'll be long gone before people stop separating each other by race. All we can really do is point the finger at them and laugh.

[Raine_Loire]

hmmm, my husband's family hates me... it's a race issue also- they're from cuba and I'm so white you can't see me in the winter... They wanted him to marry a nice cuban girl. They've always treated me like dirt- like they refuse to speak English around me, and for holidays don't send anything for me. They're REALLY nice to his sisters' boyfriends, but you know- whatever. It doesn't help that they're a family of REALLY small people and I am almost 6 feet tall. They call me sasquatch behind my back.

They've had to get used to it though, we've been married almost 6 years, and they have to kiss my ass if they want pictures of our son or any contact with us at all. It's funny, my husband just got sick of their crap and stopped talking to them a few years ago. I keep in contact with them even though I know how they feel about me for my son's sake. It's more important for me to know he has family that loves him on both sides than to avenge my hurt feelings.

It's really ironic because I was raised in a really upperclass area, there really weren't any minorities in my city, and I grew up thinking all hispanics were mexican gang bangers... yet I'm the one being targeted by racism! Ha ha ha...

[Anubis_]

On 2008-01-16 05:45, Raine_Loire wrote:
hmmm, my husband's family hates me... it's a race issue also- they're from cuba and I'm so white you can't see me in the winter... They wanted him to marry a nice cuban girl. They've always treated me like dirt- like they refuse to speak English around me, and for holidays don't send anything for me. They're REALLY nice to his sisters' boyfriends, but you know- whatever. It doesn't help that they're a family of REALLY small people and I am almost 6 feet tall. They call me sasquatch behind my back.

They've had to get used to it though, we've been married almost 6 years, and they have to kiss my ass if they want pictures of our son or any contact with us at all. It's funny, my husband just got sick of their crap and stopped talking to them a few years ago. I keep in contact with them even though I know how they feel about me for my son's sake. It's more important for me to know he has family that loves him on both sides than to avenge my hurt feelings.

It's really ironic because I was raised in a really upperclass area, there really weren't any minorities in my city, and I grew up thinking all hispanics were mexican gang bangers... yet I'm the one being targeted by racism! Ha ha ha...



My Fiance has two boy.. They both are calling me daddy already.. We love each other so much we cant get them to stop calling me that since we know the marriage is comming anyway..

Her Step father once disowned my fiance for having the boys.. but now he loves them to death. But still hates me for some reason..

Her mother once asked her.. What are you going to do when the boys get older and ask you why there father never comes here?? What are you going to say to them?

Her Step Father never said anything, He just sat there quiet and dumbfounded..

I know that if things are the same between us when we get married that I have to teach my sons not to hate people who act like that.. But it's going to be hard to give the a good reason not too.. But otherwise.. they just end up becoming just like them..

[Kent]

As sad as it is, flagrant racism will not die out any time soon, because there are still people around that don't have the mental capacity to realize that race doesn't really matter.

I have a stepfather who's just as bad. It's gotten to the point where we (that is, anyone who isn't him or his wife) can't even sit down at the same dinner table together. One night it's all sorts of racial slurs and demeaning speak of non-caucasians, the next night it's "women are inferior to men," and the next, it's things like "and I think that way, because the Bible told me to."

There was a point where his youngest daughter and the neighbor started to get along really well - naturally, he was not only let inside the house, but also threatened with police calls citing trespassing if he ever came onto his property, even accidentally... And he was a nice kid, too. Didn't cause trouble, didn't get on anyone's nerves, he was just of a difference race. :/

Blatant idiocy, at its worst.

Naturally, it doesn't help that, for most of my schooling, I was in an area where caucasians were a severe minority. Now I, personally, don't have a problem with that - diversity is a good thing, but being of the minority in an area will often lead to less of a percieved risk of persecution by the majority, and then herd instinct kicking in, and it's just a slippery slope from there on out.

One interesting thing I've noticed about racists, is that they can never provide a logical reason for being so filled with ideas of hate and segregation. You ask them why, and they can usually never get past something along the lines of "because they're different," without citing some source of religion (which they usually cite incorrectly, anyway, because basically no legitimate religion teaches such things).

Don't hate the racists. I won't get into a discussion about their factual inferiority, or anything like that, but I will say to pity them - specifically, pity the fact that they make an issue out of something that is, realistically speaking, completely irrelevant. All they're doing, is creating more trouble for themselves.