Mixed Race Studies

Modern Love: Navigating New Trenches After a Breakup

The New York Times
2012-05-18

Kate McGovern
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Some years ago, when I was living in Britain, I received an e-mail from a college friend who had recently announced her first pregnancy. “We have become good friends with a black/white couple,” she wrote. “They have a precious baby boy — you and Dan are going to have the cutest kids!”

Yes, Daniel was black and I was white — a British Jamaican and an American half-Jew, respectively — and yes, I suspected that we would have cute kids. But her well-intentioned e-mail made me roll my eyes. It was hard to imagine commenting to a white couple that their future children would be attractive simply because you’d seen some other white parents with a good-looking child.

Now that Daniel and I have broken up, no one tells me how cute my kids are going to be anymore. To be fair, that’s probably because I’m 30 and single again and my friends are trying to be sensitive by not talking about my future children at all. But to me, this is all part of a strange new landscape I am navigating, as I renegotiate both my singleness and my whiteness.

O.K., let’s not mince words. Whiteness is indelible. With and without Daniel, my skin color has allowed me countless minuscule and immense privileges, most of which I don’t even notice unless I choose to.

But when I fell in love with Daniel, my whiteness no longer told the whole story. With Daniel, I was white as ever, but I was also part of a unit that was half white and half black. Coming out of that, I’ve learned, is complicated…

…And for us, race was part and parcel of all of those things. Daniel and I talked about race a lot. Some of our friends, other mixed-race couples, never really acknowledged their differences: they chose the path of “colorblindness,” whatever that means. This approach wasn’t for us. Daniel often joked that if our children came out of the womb without Afros, he was putting them back. His blackness mattered to him and was a source of pride and power; it was a cornerstone of his identity. If I failed to see that, I failed to see him.

When Daniel and I talked about our future, our eventual children were ever-present. Peggy Orenstein once wrote that when she was pregnant, she imagined that as the woman in the relationship, she would be in charge of talking to her daughter about gender, and that her Japanese-American husband, as the person of color, would be in charge of race. She learned that this was not the case: they were both responsible for nurturing their daughter’s gendered and racial identities.

Becoming the kind of white woman who was equipped to do that, who was able to be a valuable partner to a black man and eventually a strong parent to black children, required not only learning how to respond effectively to racial bias, but also learning to accept that my loved ones would inevitably experience the world in ways I’d never fully understand. This was an active, continuing process: love isn’t enough. I was working on it. Working on it became part of who I was…

Read the entire essay here.