By Victor Greto
You have to know who you are when you’re in an interracial relationship. Because just about everyone else acts like they don’t.
They stare, make comments. Some are even bold enough to make threats.
But most of those in interracial relationships will tell you that the stares, comments — even the threats — often drip from them like water off a duck’s back.
Not because it doesn’t hurt . It’s just because most have convinced themselves they’re numb to it.
“Fifteen years on, I don’t notice any looks,” says Jennifer Richards, 31, who is white and married to Lloyd, 37, a black Jamaican reggae musician. “And then there are the kids to watch.”
So who has time for looks?
But it’s harder when stares and comments come from members of your family.
Ask Derek Briggs, 31, who is white, how his mother reacted when he brought his black wife, Alicia, and her biracial child to his sister’s wedding in Atlanta.
Better yet, don’t ask him. Some things are just too hard to talk about.
He had to threaten his mother he wouldn’t go to the wedding at all if he weren’t allowed to bring them.
“Mom did her best to avoid us all,” Derek says of the June wedding. Only when the guests had gone, Alicia says, did her mother-in-law talk to her.
“I was polite but disgusted,” Alicia says.
“She’s embarrassed,” Derek says of his mother, “but I felt embarrassed for her because it was so obvious to everyone how she was acting.”
When Derek first told his mother he had married a black woman, nearly a year before the wedding, she “collapsed on the floor, screaming and crying,” Derek says.
“We raised you to be open-minded,’ ” Derek says she told him, “ ‘but if we knew it would lead to this…..’ ”
There are many, mostly unspoken, if onlies for the parents of children in interracial relationships.
But they get over it eventually, some couples say.
Mary Meckling, 38, grew up in Wilbraham, Mass., as Mary Roccanti, daughter of an Italian Catholic father and Irish mother.
Her boyfriends, she says, had to run the gauntlet of her father’s basement office before they could take her out. After meeting with her dad, some left without even saying goodbye to her.
It’s funny now. And with an eye toward her own 8-year-old daughter, Hannah, she says, “I’m so glad to have had parents that cared for me so much.”
When she announced to them that she was marrying Philip, whose ancestry includes Native American, African-American and German, they went ballistic.
“I told my parents over dinner,” Mary says. She was 24 at the time, on her own, and had been living in Boston. She met Philip at a nightclub where he worked as a musician in a rock band.
“My mom looked like she was going to die,” she says. “My father called me names. They had put me on a pedestal, and how could I do this to them, they said. I got a slap. I was told to leave. I didn’t see them for a year after that.”
When Mary and Philip married, only two of her five siblings came to the wedding. The rest were afraid to go because of their father.
“Now my dad says it was a shock,” Mary says. “The worst thing [about marrying Philip] they say now was that I was living with him, that that was the big thing. But then I felt it was all about race.”
Philip says he understands Mary’s parents’ initial reaction. Especially that of her father.
“I know what that flash in the head must have been for them,” Philip, 37, says. “But it all snapped into place over a period of time. [Mary’s father] realized I had a head on my shoulders.”
Based on the interviews, many black families seem to accept their sons’ or daughters’ involvement in interracial relationships more than white families.
Paradoxically, however, interracial couples receive most of their negative comments from black people, mostly women, especially if the couple is a white female and black male.
“Black girls have a problem with us,” says Delores Graham, 47, who has been married to Don, 40, for eight years.
They notice it most, they say, while standing in line or eating at restaurants.
“Why do black men always date white women?” Don says he’s heard several times.
“Both races are racist when it comes to this,” Don says. And both say the number of comments has remained steady during the time they’ve been married.
“We blow it off now,” Don says. “For every one jerk, there are two good-hearted people.”
Rocky Edison, 63, who is black, and his white wife, LindaLee LaIacona, 47, say the harassment they receive has been cyclical.
“When we first started going out [in the mid-1970s, dating interracially] was the thing to do,” LindaLee says. “Then we had a re-visiting of the prejudice. I had a lot of black women say stuff to me.”
It fell off again, but “three to four years ago, people began looking at us again.”
They’ve experienced the looks and comments for so long that LindaLee says she won’t let it go by.
“I will confront them,” she says. “Is there something I can help you with?” she says she’ll tell the black women who make comments.
Or she’ll ask: “Do you really think you’d be with him if I wasn’t?”
When they first went out, she and Rocky were sitting together at a booth in a bar when a white man gave her a headlock and whispered in her ear, “Why are you with this nigger and not your own kind?”
He just as suddenly released her, and walked away. In the alley, the white man and his friend fought with Rocky and Rocky’s friend, who both happened to know martial arts.
“He needed an ass whipping,” Rocky says, and got it.
Still, that was the exception, they say.
“We counteract any attitude by talking to them,” Rocky says of those who are openly hostile. “You have a conversation and before they realize it, they’re talking to us when they thought they shouldn’t be.”
“It’s easy to hate someone you don’t know,” LindaLee says. “If you know their names, they become real to you. I engage them. You get bold with them. You start before it gets out of hand.”
When Paul D’Entremont, 42, introduced his black wife, Sharon, 43, to his mother soon after they married, he had been prepared for the worst.
After he told his family that Sharon had moved in with him, his mother sent his sister to check the two out.
After his sister’s visit, his mother said she would come down for a visit and take them out to dinner, Paul says. Paul and Sharon drove to a local hotel where his mother and stepfather were staying.
I opened the door and brought Sharon in, and mom got up from the bed and hugged her, saying, ‘Welcome to the family’ with a big smile.”
Don Artman, 47, and who is white and Paula King, 39, who is black, say that when they first began dating in a small town near Lansing, Mich., they mainly received stares.
“I was surprised I didn’t get any snarls,” Paula says. “Mostly blacks would stare.”
“I would notice a range of reactions,” Don says, “from a mix of people. Here [in South Florida], it’s blacks only, and worse. They look and follow you with their eyes till they can’t see us anymore.”
If the couple includes a white man and a black woman, stares tend to come from elderly white women, says Zachery Anderson, 25.
A native of Minnesota, he lives with Cathy, 25, and their infant child, Tatyana, in Coconut Creek.
His family reacted negatively when he told them he was living with a black woman.
“My sister, grandmother and mother were distant” when they met Cathy, Zachery says. “My brother and his family were not.”
“Since the baby was born, my grandmother and sister haven’t called. Mother called only once.”
Cathy’s mother, Mattie York, recently visited the couple at their apartment.
Asked if she cared whether the father of her granddaughter was white, she looks almost puzzled.
“So far, he seems to be a pretty good guy,” she says.
But the question seemed as irrelevant as her pat answer. She was too busy caressing Tatyana, who was gurgling in her lap.