“Is My Body Being Colonized?”: A Perspective on Interracial Dating
From frozen yogurt to Taylor Swift, whiteness has invaded all aspects of our lives. So how does it affect dating as a person of colour?
BY: RYANNE KAP
By: Ryanne Kap // THE UNDERGROUND
In her 2016 stand-up special “Baby Cobra”, Ali Wong says, “Nothing makes me feel more powerful than when a white dude eats my pussy.” For Wong, who’s half-Chinese and half-Vietnamese, it makes her feel like she’s “absorbing all of that privilege and entitlement.” Plus, it helps that the man is in such a vulnerable position. “I’m like, ‘I could just crush your head at any moment, white man!’” she says. “Colonize the colonizer, you know!”
The bit called to mind something I heard at an AGO event on “Love, Sex & Romance.” During the Q&A portion of a guest lecture, an Asian woman asked, “How do I balance the fact that my boyfriend is white, and that every time we have sex he is colonizing my body?” My first instinct was to laugh, but the crowd only murmured and slam-poetry snapped in agreement.
To me, the larger dynamics behind that question were evident enough. But I thought of colonization within a relationship as more of a joke, closer to good stand-up rather than a serious argument. But is there any merit to this idea? Can bodies really be colonized? And if so, does that mean white people are colonizing their non-white partners?
As explained in National Geographic, colonization “occurs when one nation subjugates another, conquering its population and exploiting it, often while forcing its own language and cultural values upon its people.” For examples, look up European history.
So what about bodies? In a piece for the Huffington Post, Vania Phiditis argues that women’s bodies are colonized through capitalism and the patriarchy, which feed them ideas that are oppressive and counterintuitive to their needs and best interests. In purely ideological terms, a body can be colonized just like a nation.
By: Ryanne Kap // THE UNDERGROUND
Now, when you apply this line of thinking to an interracial relationship, it doesn’t exactly hold up. At least not directly. If you’re Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Colour (BIPOC), dating a white person doesn’t mean you’re automatically being subjugated to the forces of whiteness. You’re probably just dating someone who likes quinoa and listening to true crime podcasts.
But what Ali Wong’s stand-up and that random woman are getting at is something that’s a little more subtle, yet acutely felt: white privilege.
When I was 17, I started dating a guy I’d had a crush on for years. Let’s call him F. I fell in love with F hard and fast, the way you do when it’s your first time. It was the same on his end. We thought we were going to marry each other.
F is white. I’m Chinese. About four months into our relationship, we had this conversation:
A screenshot of a conversation between me and my then-boyfriend. // THE UNDERGROUND
I’d like to say that we broke up after this exchange, or that it at least turned into a discussion about what not to say to your Asian girlfriend—or anyone, for that matter. Instead I continued to be annoyed with him, and then apologized for not being more flattered. He said he was being silly, but reading it over now, it’s really not that funny.
For this white boy, my non-whiteness was exciting in the most tokenizing way. I was an achievement for him, a way to “rebel” against the homogeneity of his lineage. Which, if you’ll notice, he was still pretty proud of. And if that wasn’t uncomfortable enough, he hit me with the all-too familiar mixed babies are cute rhetoric. Many people of colour will recognize this as a backhanded compliment. “Don’t you know that adding white to your race makes it better?”
When we talk about white privilege, it’s often to point out how it fuels and derives from systemic racism. You may think of white people being able to protest against the police while unarmed Black people are shot by them. Or you might think about matters of discrimination in the workplace and wealth inequality.
These are all crucial aspects of white privilege to consider. In the context of relationships, however, white privilege can be more intimate and unsettling than one might think.
The above conversation is just one example of how F’s white privilege played into our relationship.
I’m not saying that white privilege automatically equals racism. White privilege is a product of racism, but having it doesn’t necessarily make someone racist. You can be non-white and perpetuate racist systems and biases; just look at anti-Blackness in the Asian community. White privilege is more like a blind spot. When the world treats you like the default, it makes it more difficult to understand anyone who deviates from that standard.
When I was with F, this was glaringly apparent. Though not at the time—back then, I barely knew what white privilege was. I knew that I was upset, that I felt diminished in some way. I remember how self-conscious I was about my background and how defensive I felt at this weird comment. But I didn’t have the full language to express why it was so frustrating, so I learned to dismiss it. Besides, the interracial aspect of our relationship was never the most central one; we had plenty of issues that were much larger and not related to race.
The things he said were textbook microaggressions, which I know now. To him, and many others who make similar comments, they were really just compliments. Because as a white guy, my race was only significant in relation to how it made him feel. And it made him feel like an anti-conformist, which was pretty thrilling for a guy raised in a town with less than 2,000 people. Plus, he could get cute babies.
He didn’t have to deal with the ugly part of our differing backgrounds, though he must’ve been aware of it. He told me that one day in class, he opened his phone next to a random guy. He had a photo of us as his lock screen, which the guy noticed. Their conversation went something like this:
Random Guy, looking at the photo, eyeing him warily: Is that your girlfriend?
F, cheerful about his very cute and awesome girlfriend: Yes!
Random Guy, in a hushed tone: You know she’s Asian, right?
F, decidedly less cheerful: …Yes.
The guy looked disgusted and stopped speaking to him. For F, it was just a weird encounter. For me, it was a reminder that to some people, our relationship was unnatural, abhorrent even, and it wasn’t because of him.
I felt further alienated at a Christmas dinner with F’s family, where his grandpa casually asked if there was something about rice that called out to me.
“I guess so,” I said, laughing nervously. I don’t remember F saying anything, even after when it was just the two of us. What was embarrassing and uncomfortable for me was barely even on his radar.
That’s another example of white privilege—not feeling the need to speak up when these incidents happen, or failing to even recognize them as offensive. You’re never the one feeling left out at the table; it’s always set just for you.
Granted, some of these problems might have existed if I was dating someone Black or Latinx or any other race. It’s not to say that prejudices and privilege only exist in interracial relationships if one of the individuals is white. But the reason why, laughable or not, some envision dating a white person as colonization is because historically and systemically, white people have the most privilege—and people of colour have the most to lose.
In Shien Lee’s article “Why Asian Women Date White Men”, she offers the explanation that since sexism is dominant in Asian societies, some Asian women “may prefer pairing with Western men because they feel like they are treated more as an equal, and enjoy greater independence in a relationship.”
But there’s also the troubling fact that in North America, Asian men have been characterized and stereotyped as “passive, effeminate, and weak.” On screen they’re shy nerds or comic relief, and only rarely the love interest. Take Raj from The Big Bang Theory as an example. For much of the series, he can’t even talk to women properly, and the running gag is always played for laughs.
When we don’t envision Asian men in our fictional love stories, is it that surprising that they’re missing from our real ones?
And it’s not just white people who exclude minorities. Look at Mindy Kaling, one of the few South Asian writers in Hollywood. As of now, she’s created not one but two shows in which the Indian protagonist is set up with a white love interest. In The Mindy Project, which Kaling both wrote and starred in, Mindy only dates white men.
When asked about this criticism of the show, Kaling replied, “Do people really wonder on other shows if female leads are dating multicultural people? Like I owe it to every race and minority and beleaguered person. I have to become the United Nations of shows?”
To answer Kaling’s question—no, nobody needs you to be the “United Nations of shows”. It’s true that there’s an unfair pressure placed on the stories that marginalized folks choose to tell; they’re expected to somehow speak for the entire community and represent everyone’s experiences perfectly. But that doesn’t mean they don’t share in any representational responsibilities. What we see on screen matters, and when we reinforce the narrative that only white men are suitable partners, it dismisses so many other communities.
It’s another subtle effect of living in a white-dominated society. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re all receiving and internalizing the message that white is synonymous with superior.
All three of the people I’ve dated have been white. It’s a pretty small sample size, but beyond official relationships, most of the guys I’ve been interested in were white as well (and they number far beyond three). Part of this may have to do with my upbringing. I grew up in a small, mostly white town where I was one out of a handful of Asian people. I was surrounded by whiteness; it was all I had to go by.
But even when I moved to Scarborough, one of the most diverse places in the GTA, I noticed that I still tended to fixate on white guys first. It felt like the norm to me, romantically.
Photo courtesy of the City Planning 2016 Census Profile
As uncomfortable as it is to admit, my default image of a boyfriend is a white guy. Even though they’re the ones who’ve said hilariously ignorant things to me. Even though I constantly worry they have an Asian fetish. And although I find plenty of non-white men attractive, I know that I automatically pay just a little more attention to Eurocentric features.
It’s one of the effects of—can you guess it?—colonialism. When the Europeans colonized many parts of the world, they imposed not only constructions of race, but also ideals of beauty. Naturally, their beauty standards were all based on European traits, so as to maintain their (white) dominance.
An article that explains this in more depth is called “Why I Learnt To Decolonise Eurocentric Beauty Standards”. Let’s focus on that important action word: decolonize (with a z, because we’re Canadian). If colonization is all about imposing certain constructs and values, then decolonization is rejecting those constructs and values.
Both of those processes exist on larger, nation-sized scales. But when we localize decolonization to our bodies and our minds, it looks a lot like stepping outside of the Western bubble and consciously dismissing the subtle (and not so subtle) messages we’re bombarded with on a daily basis. White is not better, white is not the definition of beauty—I mean, look at Henry Golding.
Or don’t just look at Henry Golding. Look at literally anyone other than a white Chris, whether Pine or Pratt. Forget your Henry Cavills and Zac Efrons, your George Clooneys and Brad Pitts. And please don’t tell me that Blake Shelton was ever the same degree of sexy as Idris Elba, because that is some next-level white privilege/delusion that we cannot stand by in 2020.
Part of effectively decolonizing oneself is realizing you’ve been colonized in the first place. Ideologically speaking—we cannot equate this to the colonization of Indigenous peoples. It is not the same. But because we live in North America, we’ve all inherited the legacy of colonialism. We’ve grown up with its nasty side effects, and it’s shaped our perspective in ways that aren’t always easy to acknowledge.
Recognizing the problem is the first step. Taking action is the solution. As an Asian, whether I date a white guy or an Asian guy is not what matters. What matters is that I don’t prefer one over the other because of racist social cues. What matters is that I unlearn the prejudices passed down by colonialism and replace them with more equitable ways of looking at the world, and all the hot guys in it.
