As a South Asian woman with a long and pluralistic dating history, I am amazed these days to see two couples comprised of Asian women and Black men every week. The sugary romance between the excessively noble characters played by Parminder Nagra and Shafiq Atkins on ER follows the much hotter one between Ming Na Wen and Mekhi Phifer that ended two seasons ago. What accounts for such interest? The representations tread the line between cultural authenticity, sometimes considered stereotype, and colorblindness. The women exhibit some level of conflict with their cultures and are slightly neurotic: Ming Na dreaded telling her immigrant parents that she was having a baby out of wedlock; Nagra quit her job in a bout of rebellion against family expectation to work as a convenience store clerk. The men are dangerous but tender. Phifer grew up without a father and has a temper; Gallant went off to serve in Iraq. White is the Hindu color of mourning. Web-surfing indicates that younger people do indeed draw those lines, at least for purposes of fulfilling their attractions. On Tribe NY, I found a group for Asian women who love Black men, and on Blasian. The website African and Asian American Unity has tools for getting to know the other culture that include instructions on how to keep a bonsai, cook Chinese greens and participate in Kwanzaa. The vast majority of questions were from people under 25 wanting to know how they could find, keep or correct their Black or Asian partner. An Analysis of Desire While the number of such actual couples remains small an unknown but undoubtedly tiny portion of the 2 percent of U. Particular neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Los Angeles seem to have become havens for Black men seeking Asian women and vice versa. While sitting on her stoop in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, a Japanese friend was approached by an Asian woman walking with her baby stroller. The woman asked whether my friend had any kids. She was searching for potential members of a group for kids with a Black father and Asian mother. What accounts for the sudden attraction? Hamamoto gained some notoriety as the producer of a pornographic film featuring Asian sex, his effort to complicate and abandon the stereotypes of oversexed Asian women and impotent Asian men. He asserts that the U. These men see Asian women as subjects of the American—and, by implication, their own—empire. It seems likely that the increase in this kind of dating owes more to demographics than anything else, and such couples continue to face challenges. The identity of Asian immigrants has shifted from mostly middle-class professionals to working-class economic refugees, and these people have moved into urban centers and suburbs simultaneously with upwardly mobile Black families. The couples I spoke to met after finding themselves in the same place at the same time. Aarti, a 26-year-old activist of Indian descent, found her first Black boyfriend at 15 when she left her fully multiracial public school for a scholarship to a prep school where the students were polarized between Black and white. Aarti does not discuss her dating life with her parents. Mark is a 42-year-old Black chiropractor living with his 44-year-old Filipina wife of 16 years in Vallejo, California. The couple draws the same number of stares from Blacks and Asians as they did in the 1980s, and also faced family conflict in spite of having grown up together. The only way I can put it is, African Americans in America are at the bottom. I am familiar with our so-called seductress image. To see all these Asian women who might also have been high-school nerds paired up with the most sexualized actors in American culture has been, I will admit it, a thrill. Rigg cites the generations-old Black obsession with martial arts movies, as well as the Asian adoption of hip-hop culture. And Asians look up to Blacks as the standard-bearers for civil rights activism. A Black person is less likely to be as racist as a white person when it comes to dating an Asian girl. And a Black person might not feel as oppressed as they would by a white person in their family structure. The real breakthrough would be to pair a Black woman and an Asian man. There has been no Black woman doctor on ER since Michael Michele left in the early years. There have been no Asian men in either cast. A television hospital coupling would surely help them.
