Modern Living: Black & White Dating

“THE ghettos may be churning and racial tensions rising, but at the same time a social phenomenon is on the rise: the black and white date. The barriers that once stopped black and white youngsters from socializing are coming down fast in many parts of the land. On weekends, mixed couples by the dozens stroll in Manhattan’s Central Park, through Chicago’s Old Town and Hyde Park areas, in San Francisco’s North Beach. The strongest enclave for interracial dating is the school or college campus. A poll taken recently at Detroit’s Wayne State University showed that 279 out of 365 students had dated, or intended to date, members of another race. Says Jim Nabors, vice chairman of the Afro-American Student Union at Berkeley: “It’s no longer avantgarde. It’s just a little avant-garde.”

Campus Leaders. What has made the difference? Some highly publicized interracial marriages have helped pave the way. The civil rights movement has recast the Negro in a heroic image. As one university counselor put it, with a measure of euphoria : “Discrimination is out of vogue. Black is no longer a color—it’s a choice.” It is easy to exaggerate the picture. Mixed dating is still practiced only by a small minority of the student population, and by no means on all campuses (though it is generally accepted at the biggest ones). It is virtually out in the South. Most parents almost anywhere are still deeply troubled if not outraged by it, and “Guess who’s coming to dinner, Mom?” is a line to frighten not a few households. But compared with a few years ago, the custom has increased dramatically. “It’s no big thing any more,” says a blonde 17-year-old who graduated from California’s El Cerrito High School. Nor need mixed couples date furtively and clandestinely. Today they do it openly, and often they are the campus elite.

Two such young people are Robert Hall, a 20-year-old Seattle Negro whose skin is so black it is bluish, and his strawberry blonde fiancée Nancy Mitton, also 20. Inseparable since grade school, both were honor students in high school and won scholarships to Western Washington State College. There, both have become campus leaders—and Hall, who intends to become a chemical engineer, finished the school’s four-year chemistry curriculum before the end of his sophomore year. The couple plan to be married in September, then enter the University of Washington to begin their junior year. They have the complete approval of his father, an Alabama-born Seattle longshoreman, and her widowed mother, a Boeing Co. stenographer.

No Spook Chicks. The overwhelmingly prevalent pattern in interracial dating, TIME correspondents report, is black boy with white girl. To many Negro men, going out with a white girl is a symbol of success and achievement. Says a University of California Negro student: “Black cats consciously play with white chicks. It’s a challenge. For him, the white woman is shrouded in mystery. She is revered, you dig?” Adds Mrs. Anita Jones of Seattle’s Urban League: “Oh, there’s pride in it, all right. Dating Caucasians is part of the Negro’s establishment of his identity as a man, and an attractive white girl is the last citadel.”

Episcopal Minister Malcolm Boyd of Washington, D.C., observes: “It’s a whole new dimension to some people. A girl who knows a white man can get to know him very well—and it gets boring. She finds the prospect of a Negro man exciting.” There is no denying that for many girls, interracial dating is a very stimulating prospect. “I just think brown skin looks healthier,” insists one California student. “Negro boys are carried away with pretty white faces and long flashy hair,” snaps an admittedly jealous black high school girl in Washington, D.C. On some campuses with a high ratio of Negro athletes, mixed dating is inevitable. “There just weren’t any spook chicks around,” says Harold Busby, a U.C.L.A. student and star athlete. “Who were we supposed to date?”

Mistress & Keeper. To a surprising extent, it is the white woman who is the aggressor. “Negro men are more hunted than hunter,” declares Dr. Maurice F. Freehill, professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington. “Black is In this year,” beams a Negro Washington. D.C., student and he has been making the most of it. Handsome and athletic, he drives a Cadillac, walks a Doberman pinscher and holds court under the shade trees of Washington’s Dupont Circle. He has more white girl friends than he knows what to do with. “They pass me around,” he says with amazement. “They think I’m this potent black Adonis, this ebony god.”

Legends of Negro sexual prowess aside, there are other drives as well. Some white girls see mixed dating as their way to break down barriers and help the Negro “overcome.” Some are simply rebelling. “If a white girl wants to do her parents in,” explains Dr. Lewis Yablonsky, head of the sociology department at San Fernando Valley State College, “the classic pattern is to go out with someone black.”

Whatever the cause, Negro women resent the pattern, fearing that whites will steal away their most promising young men. Yet most black girls refuse to play the game with white men, who, they say scornfully, lack today’s essential Quality of “soul.” There is a deeper deterrent too. Many Negro girls say they are still haunted by the image of the white “massa” coming down the hill to take his pick of slave women. Observes Nancy Lou Smith, a svelte 24-year-old Manhattan career girl from Texas: “For many white males, my skin is still a badge that identifies me as a sexual plaything.”

No Place Is Safe. Bill Alexander, 26, recalls that as a small boy in the Negro section of Stroudsburg, Pa., he was often offered money by white college boys who came through on the prowl for black girls. “It has been taken for granted since slavery that white men can seek out black women any time they want,” he says.

Alexander, who graduated from Temple University and broke through Philadelphia’s color line to become a respected radio newsman, has been going out with both whites and blacks for ten years. He notices an encouraging change in the attitudes of the community. “A couple of years back, I don’t know if it took courage to walk about Philadelphia with a white girl, but you could sense the uneasiness. I don’t feel that nervousness any more.”

Despite increasing U.S. tolerance, the fact is that it is still far from easy for blacks to be seen with whites. On the campus, white girls who date blacks risk rejection by white male classmates. “Off campus no place is really safe,” says a young Negro journalist in Detroit. “When I have a white girl in my car, I don’t stop at red lights, I make sure my car’s in good condition with the gas tank full and a good spare. God forbid I should have to stop somewhere with a white girl.”

He speaks from experience. Two angry Southerners followed him and his date out of a Detroit restaurant one night, announced they were going to teach him that colored boys should leave white girls alone. “One guy started to pull a pistol,” he recalls, “but I was able to grab it before he could quite get it out of his pocket. I had to fight him in the street to get the gun.”

Deep Down Inside. Parental horror is another thing that mixed couples encounter. “Parents are a real hang-up about that part of my life,” complains Candy Reuben, 21, a recent University of California graduate whose mother refuses to allow a black man in the house.

” ‘We’re just thinking about what’s best for you,’ they tell me.” One Seattle family sent their daughter to a psychiatrist when they found out that she had dated a Negro, and the parents of another girl turned her over to juvenile police as “ungovernable.” Even parents who consider themselves liberals are likely to quail. “My mother is a typical American clandestine bigot,” says a New York girl whose family brought her up to be color blind—until she brought home her black suitor.

Many Negro parents are equally adamant in opposing mixed matches. “My parents are pretty liberal, but they don’t want me to bring home a white girl,” says a Long Island Negro. In Washington, D.C., Vickie Hatcher, who has been dating both white boys and blacks throughout high school, reports: “My family has told me that really deep down inside, they would rather that I marry a Negro. They say I have a good personality and a good intelligence and they would rather that I pass these things on in the Negro race. I sort of agree with them.”

“Look How Beautiful.” Black Power advocates are even more militantly opposed. “Since the Black Power movement, the kids will talk a little if you date a fellow not of your race. You feel it a little bit,” Vickie Hatcher says. So far, however, the Black Power exhortation to “look to your own first” is often ignored, even by Negroes who consider themselves confirmed Black Nationalists. Typical is Patrick Kelley, a 24-year-old Negro from Detroit, who calls himself “a living contradiction, thinking black but not being black. If I take a white girl into a black community, they will figuratively, with their eyes, pull over to the side and say, ‘Brother, get hip. You’re living a lie. Come over to the winning side, your side.’ ” He is not yet ready to stop dating whites. “Maybe next year,” he says.

Some Negro girls see in the Black Power movement a turning of the tide. “I really support the black cultural revolution,” says Howard University’s Stephanie Garrett. “Here they hold up the black woman and say, ‘Look how beautiful she is.'” Other Negro girls are more leary. Huffs a Manhattan Negro career girl: “The ‘black is beautiful’ idea has affected very few Negro males. They still think that kinky hair and Negro lips are unattractive. A white woman is still a status symbol. It is for my brother. He married one.”

“I Didn’t Belong.” In fact most interracial romances seem to be mostly exploratory; few so far have led to the altar. “These relationships really only go so far,” explains Tinoa Rodgers, 25, a New York Negro who works as a Rockefeller aide. “There’s a point where they break down.” Adds Rodgers: “There is always the same question when a girl agrees to date: Is it me, or the ‘difference’ she’s interested in?” Says a Howard University graduate: “I’ve dated two white boys, but I don’t think I’d be comfortable any more. I think what really did it was when one of the white guys proposed to me. I asked myself why I was so scared? Was it because he was white or because I wasn’t really in love with him?”

The pressures from within and without must at times seem all but over whelming to mixed couples, and the danger of emotional damage can be considerable. Georgia Herrick, 26, an editorial assistant in Manhattan, blames herself for the breakup of her own six-months’-love affair with a Negro. “In the beginning,” she said, “I was trying to prove something to myself, a reaffirmation of the liberal beliefs I had been brought up under.” The beliefs didn’t carry her far enough. The one time that her black beau took her to a Negro hangout, she found “the language was incredible. But he couldn’t say anything because then he would be labeled a ‘white nigger.’ ” Adds Georgia sadly: “I guess the real problem was me. I didn’t belong in his world.”

The Whole Bit. But many couples insist that they do belong in the same world. Says San Francisco Negro Drama Student Toni Johns, 20: “I feel proud that I can date white boys, that my companion can do it, that we have no hang-ups, that we have enough sense and our heads are in the right place.” And when it is a case of true love, the reaction can be fiery. Says Seattle Negro Musician Ernie Hatfield, 18, of his white fiancee: “We’re not trying to prove anything. We love each other, that’s all. To me Linda is Linda, my girl. If you don’t feel this coming, man, you’re way out of step.”

U.C.L.A. Co-ed Jacqueline Thomas, a Negro, appraises her experience more poignantly: “I’ve gone through the whole bit. There was a time when I was ‘thinking white’ like everyone else; then I went through a period of hating everybody. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are always a few people who understand you and know how you feel. When you find them, it doesn’t matter what they are—red, black, white, or whatever—you’ve got to take a chance with those people.”