I’m white. A few days ago I was standing waiting for a bus and a black guy also waiting struck up a conversation with me - friendly, a bit flirty, not that serious. We were chatting about various things, and then at a certain point he said ‘can I ask: would you date a black guy? Have you ever?’ He wasn’t asking me out as far as I could tell (my bus was about to come), it was more like he just wanted to know.
It reminded me though of a couple of times in the past when I have been on dates with people who happened to be of colour (one first date which went nowhere, one first date that turned into a four year relationship), in both cases they asked me the same thing. AIBU to think this is a strange question, and not really understand the motivation for asking it? My reply to the guy at the bus stop is that I would like to date a nice person, and that is my answer, basically. I don’t want to be naive about the fact that racism both overt and covert still exists in the UK, it obviously very much does, but I really would not expect the vast majority of people my age or younger (I’m late 30s), or honestly most people ten years older, to see an interracial relationship as an issue or really even think about it in those terms, unless they had some very specific issues like an overtly racist/BNP type family (if white) or maybe a fairly traditional recent immigrant family who were hoping their child would marry someone of the same cultural heritage/religion (if of colour).
However the fact that people of colour have repeatedly asked me this question on dates suggests they clearly feel it is a potential issue for at least some white people, and I don’t want to be clueless as I assume if they’re feeling that, it’s based on some experiences with white people that they’re having. Maybe the aim of the question is to try and suss out stealth racism, but surely a white person who is on a date with a person of colour, even if they do have covert racism or unconscious bias, is not going to admit to it so in that sense I don’t get what the question is intended to achieve? And I don’t understand the point of asking if you’ve been in a relationship with a person of colour before? If you say yes, is that somehow going to make this current completely different relationship better? Or is the aim to try and suss out if you’ve got some weird fetish and only date people of a particular race (like some white men are meant to have a weird fetishising thing about Asian women)?
I know I should have asked the person why they were asking the question, either in the bus stop conversation or more productively the person I had a long relationship with, but somehow at the time I didn’t think to do it, the conversation moved on and we had other things to talk about. It’s only looking back that I’m wondering why this question repeatedly gets asked. AIBU?
YABU - it’s obvious why someone would ask, and here’s why
YANBU - it’s a strange question