Interracial Sex

By Emily Monroy

In a hilarious article entitled “White Sex,” sexual politics author Susie Bright discusses stereotypes about the sexual behavior of White Americans. These include the GWM (Gay White Male), Yankee Whore, Scary White Guys and more. One stereotype that particularly struck me was the White Bitch in Heat. It refers to the White woman who flouts society’s moral standards to seek sexual satisfaction in the arms of Black men. Such a woman naturally falls from the good graces of other White folk, but the pedestal is a small price to pay for her hard-won sexual fulfillment. 

White female-minority male sex continues to be a burning issue in Caucasian America, much more so than sex the other way around. A look at the entertainment industry confirms this. Spike Lee’s film Jungle Fever about an affair between an African-American architect and his Italian secretary was talked about for ages, whereas Zebrahead, in which a White man dates a Black woman, raised much less discussion. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine the movie Star Maps receiving the same amount of attention if it had dealt with a White man chasing after Mexican girls instead of a White woman pursuing Mexican boys. Most on-screen/stage romances between women of color and Caucasian men are soppy sentimental tearjerkers (Miss Saigon, Pocahontas) that don’t cause a great deal of controversy in mainstream society. 

Interracial sex has generated its own set of stereotypes. Men of color who sleep with women of European descent tend to be slotted into a single category, that of the “Other” male who lusts dangerously after White (or White Christian) women. This designation was assigned variously to Black men in the Old South, Filipino men in the Western United States during the Depression, and Jewish men in Nazi Germany. Stereotypes of miscegenous White women, though, don’t fall into one category. Some - the political activist, for example - have a grain of truth to them, while others - the slut - are based more on society’s fear of White female sexuality than on reality. What these archetypes basically represent is a way for people to understand behavior that they condemn and in a certain sense fear.

 Here are the three most common stereotypes of White women who sleep with men of color: 

The Slut

 A variant of Susie Bright’s White Bitch in Heat. A White girl who willingly sleeps with a man of color is a slut, or so goes the conventional wisdom. It therefore follows that she lacks any sexual restraint whatsoever. In places like the Old South, such a woman faced public whipping, indentured servitude, rejection from her family and community, and violence from the Ku Klux Klan. Though now the legal consequences of the slut’s behavior have disappeared and the social ones diminished somewhat, the stereotype remains. For instance, while in the company of an African-American male friend feminist writer Gloria Steinem was leered at by a White man who assumed that any White woman with a Black man was fair game. 

As with fornication, adultery, and promiscuity, a double standard exists around interracial sex. A White woman involved with a man of color commits the cardinal sin of allowing an “Other” male to enter her vagina, whereas a White man who sticks his private parts into those of non-White women draws little criticism as long as his relationships don’t get too serious. White society’s outrage over miscegenation has less to do with the purity of the European gene pool than that of the Caucasian female reproductive system. 

Several theories have been offered to account for this racial/sexual disparity. The authors of the book The Color Complex, when discussing Black-White relations in the days of American slavery, state that “mulattoes in the slave quarters [i.e. the children of White men and Black women] were an economic asset, in the form of slave property” whereas those “in the big house [i.e. the offspring of White women and Black men]... disrupted the patriarchy.” With regard to more modern times, Susie Bright puts forth another viewpoint: “When a white woman is called a ‘nigger-lover’, it means that she puts her sexual satisfaction before her racial unity. The crucial thing about this little notion is that white women aren’t supposed to put their sexual satisfaction before anything.” 

The Political Activist 

The political activist stereotype, unlike the slut, can apply to both White males and females, though here I’ll use it in reference to women. The political activist is a left-wing, socially conscious woman who views involvement with a non-White man (especially a Black) as an act of solidarity with an oppressed group and perhaps as a means of thumbing her nose at society and rebelling against her family. If she and her partner have children, she is further praised in some circles for holding the key to the future of race relations. 

But many minorities and left-wingers are skeptical of her actions. People of color rightly doubt whether miscegenation will really sound the death knell for racism, given that five hundred years of race mixing on this continent and others hasn’t achieved that goal yet. As a White person who has dated interracially for the past decade, I would add that the desire to strike a blow against discrimination, while noble, isn’t by itself a very sound basis for a relationship. After all, you’re going out with an individual, not a whole race. If you want to do something about discrimination, join an anti-racist organization instead. 

The Ugly Duckling 

The ugly duckling is a White woman who might not necessarily get billed as the Ugliest Woman in the World at the circus but who doesn’t turn heads either. In White circles, that is. As soon as she steps out of Fortress Caucasia, she’s the belle of the ball. Men of color shower her with attention. In some ways she’s the female heterosexual equivalent of Chinese-Canadian writer Richard Fung’s rice queen abroad, a gay White man considered unattractive at home but desired in poor Asian countries because of his economic and social status. But the ugly duckling’s greatest asset isn’t her money or social position. It’s her Whiteness, which in some communities of color is a precious commodity (just look at the number of Caucasian-looking movie stars in the Philippines, for example). In The Color Complex, a Black filmmaker humorously describes the allure of the ugly duckling: “Over the years a group of black boys grew up masturbating with the white girls in Penthouse... This caused them to go out and date any 250-pound greasy white woman they could find, whose only redeeming quality was that they had blond hair, blue eyes, and white skin.”

 I’ve played the role of the ugly duckling more than once. While in my 95% Euro-American high school I only had one admirer - who didn’t interest me in any case – a trip to a Hispanic neighborhood one Saturday morning brought me requests for dates from two different men. In first-year college my cousin’s Anglo engineering buddies treated me like their little sister. Two years later my boyfriend was a South Asian engineer with a Master’s degree. Some lovers have informed me that my skin color made me desirable in their eyes. A Filipino boyfriend said that on our first night together he could not believe he had a White woman, not just any woman but a White woman, in his bed. A Mexican mestizo assured me that we’d make beautiful babies because they would be three-quarters White. My race probably wasn’t the only thing that attracted these men, but I’m sure it helped.

The flip side of the ugly duckling stereotype is the implication that she goes out with men of color because she’s not “good enough.” If she were, she could do better (i.e. catch a White man). But I’ve come to cherish my role as the ugly duckling. First, White men no longer attract me sexually (even in my days of pining for White men, it was Greeks and Italians rather than Anglo-Saxons I fell for). Second, the sad thing about the ugly duckling stereotype is not so much that it reflects on the individual woman’s attractiveness or lack of it but that it shows how much the “White is right” mentality has taken hold of people of color. 

As I mentioned above, these three pictures, like most stereotypes, are ways of simplifying complex behavior so that it’s easier to understand. Anti-miscegenists can explain away the White woman who consorts with men of color by saying that she’s immoral (the slut), that she’s caught up in hopelessly utopian ideals (the political activist), or that we don’t want her anyway (the ugly duckling). But in real life things aren’t so clear-cut. True, some White female partners of minority men might be seeking a sexual adventure, trying to fight racism, or turning to interracial romance for lack of any other choice. But most of these women have simply found the right person who, as one White woman interviewed in The Color Complex reported, happens to be of another color. 

Which is basically the motive behind my relationships with non-White men. But I can still see each of the three stereotypes in myself. I’ve related the ugly duckling scenario to my situation. I’ll even admit that the slut archetype rings true in some ways; at this point in my life copulating with a man of color seems more exciting. And perhaps it’s the political activist in me who feels a certain elation at the thought that when I have a child with my current partner, I’ll be disrupting the patriarchy a little bit.

"Emily Monroy is a secretary, translator and freelance writer of Italian, Irish and Norwegian descent.  She lives in Toronto, Canada."

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