Let’s stop pretending for one second.

Let’s stop saying the world is full of rainbows and sunshine and everything sweet.

The world is cold. Sometimes the taste is too bitter. And sometimes rainbows are just colors stuck together that never mix.

And when they do, they create a stir. No pun intended. Kanye West once again is in your social media and gossip columns, but this time for physically assaulting an 18 year old white male, who hurled a bunch of racial slurs at his fiancé Kim Kardashian. One of the slurs he called Kim a “n***er lover.” Gosh, racism never gets old. You’d think like bell bottoms and iron corsets, people would say “Hey that’s no longer cool!”But some just can’t let it go.

It’s funny how people feel privileged to say such things to celebrities they one, don’t personally know and two, celebrities that personally don’t know them. Being famous does have its cons. But it also gives us insight in where the general public stands with racial issues. When we see individuals consistently in the limelight, sometimes the lives they live can easily reveal how we perceive others.

 

Tamara Mowry was given such backlash for marrying a white man that she was in tears in an interview on Oprah’s OWN. Her sister Tia Mowry was by her side, shocked by some of the comments people wrote about her sister.

Being called a “white man’s whore” has a sting to it. Stating that the intimacy between Tamara and her husband would’ve been simply a transaction of money and sex “back in the day,” but now supposedly it’s given for free?  Being seen as someone’s property and also a subject of sexual objectivity, truly shows that people still stigmatize Black women. Black women are stigmatized as the mistress, the whore, the exotic fling that shouldn’t go public. And that’s contrary to non-Black women who are seen as trophies. Either way, they’re both objectified. And having an intimate relationship with a member of one’s ethnicity doesn’t validate anyone as a “real” anything.

I remember when Scandal came to television and we saw the fierce Olivia Pope deal with an on again off again affair with the President Fitzgerald. Oh the SCANDAL to see a Black woman and a White man getting it on! I applaud Shonda Rhimes for making such a show with such dynamics and a big scoop of interracial love.

The idea that there cannot be a deeper level of intimacy with a Black person, reveals the racial undertones that still exist when such backlash is given to fictional and famous people, from Black and non-Black alike.

I personally think Kanye West had a right to defend himself to such a verbal attack. You can only allow people to inflict their hate upon you for so long. You can only bite your tongue and pretend that with patience and self-restraint that a person will change. I think we all can agree that verbal abuse does just as much harm as physical abuse. In this case, you only get what you put out. I also think a person should not have to accept such hateful attacks just because they are in an interracial relationship.

Interracial relationships are nothing new. They never have been. A person that doesn’t have the same physical features as you doesn’t disqualify them as a potential mate. We’re not lions and tigers. We’re simply one race. The human race, regardless of our geographical backgrounds or the physicals features we use as reason to segregate ourselves. And when someone can step outside of the limitations society sets for us, we’re able to see what lies within. When it comes to love, that should be the only requirement.

Please view Tamara Mowry’s moving response to the the harsh critcism of her interracial relationship.