It's all well and good to make the point that people are people and that there should be no reason to single out an interracial couple as if there's anything so unusual about two people who happen to have different skin color being involved in a love relationship. But we all know that what ought to be when it comes to issues of race simply isn't. Interracial dating is a controversial issue. While no longer considered a crime, it is still considered unacceptable by many, or at the very least curious and interesting enough to the general public, that when spied, interracial couples, particularly black/white couples will often receive a few extra stares.

Interracial dating does not only involve dating between Blacks and Whites. Whenever two people who do not fall under the same racial classification become involved in a love/sex relationship, their union is labelled as interracial.

More commonly, but not exclusively, interracial relationships occur between Black men and white women, and Asian women and White men. Opinions vary as to why so many more Black men by contrast to Black women and so many more Asian women by contrast to Asian men are involved in interracial relationships.

The Ideal

Let's face it: the media is powerful. Images are powerful, whether they are images printed on the pages of a magazine or delivered in moving pictures over the television or movie screen. And words are equally powerful.

In words and pictures people have been told repeatedly over centuries that White is the ideal. The ideal woman is White. The ideal man is White. The ideal culture is White. In novels, in movies, in magazines, in television shows, the images of perfection have always been White.

Let's also face it: anything that is not White has been and arguably still is considered to be of lesser worth and value.

So what does this mean? How does it shed any light on interracial dating?

Let's use Jocelyn as our first example.

Jocelyn is a Black female, highly educated, PhD, 38 years old and successful. Jocelyn has never had any Black friends. She just couldn't ever find any Black people she could identify with. This is how she explains how she has come to have only White friends, though she grew up in a Black neighborhood, went to school with Black people.

The truth is, Jocelyn has always hated being Black. She's always hated Black people even though she has never really taken the time to get to know any outside of her family. She has always been ashamed to be Black because she has only ever seen negative images and heard negative comments made about Black people. And as a Black woman, she has always hated the physical traits of her ethnicity.

Jocelyn's ideas about beauty have always come from images in White magazines. Thus, she has always wished for silky long hair, blue eyes, a thin nose, thinner lips, even clearer skin which she has tried to obtain using bleaching creams.

Jocelyn knew from the time she was a teenager that she "could never date a black man". She just didn't find Black men attractive. How could she? She had based her decision on what was attractive and what was not on images from magazines and television. She only read "White" magazines, and she only watched "White" television programs. Therefore, what was attractive in her eyes was White. And what she thought of Black men was based on what was being said about them in the media. They were all criminals, all hoodlums.

But what about men of other races? Why were they not an option for Jocelyn? Because in Jocelyn's eyes, in her mind so effectively programmed by words and pictures she had embraced an idea of perfection -- a White boyfriend, white friends, living in a "White" world. It wouldn't make her actually white in reality, but it would separate her from her blackness.

Jocelyn represents one example of some of the complexities that lie at the heart of the issue of interracial dating. The people involved seldom will admit to themselves that their choices arise out of anything deeper than the often stressed point that "black men just aren't my type", or "black women just aren't my type", or "Asian men just aren't my type" etcetera.

By no means do all Black women who are involved in interracial relationships fit Jocelyn's image, but there are more than a few.

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