Interracial Love
All this talk about race has really got me thinking about movies in the last decade or so and how they are portraying interracial romance. The movie industry has been branching out and producing more movies that present love between different races; movies like Save the Last Dance and Guess Who. Although these are steps in the right direction, are they really representing a society that supposedly does not care about the color of peoples skin? Interracial romance movies seem to be all the same, the couple is content with falling in love and the yet it is those people that surround them that tell them it is unethical. Like in Save the Last Dance, Sarah, a caucasian teen who has moved from the suburbs of Chicago to the ghetto projects of the east side to live with her dad, falls in love with an African American named Derek. This couple is happy to have found one another until their peers begin to get in the way calling Sarah a man steeler. It is society that drags these two apart. A society in which Caucasian women and African American men do not interact romantically. It is unfamiliar for them to see, thus they do all in their power to right the wrong they see. In Guess Who it is the same situation except the man in Caucasian and the women is African American and instead of peer it is her family. The couple, Simon and Teresa, have neglected to tell her parents that Simon is Caucasian when they come to spend a weekend with the family. When Teresa’s parents find out, her father is out to dig up dirt because when it comes to race there is a huge mistrust. It is the family in this movie, well mostly the father, that causes a wedge in the newly engaged couples relationship. Culture today has deemd interracial marriages and relationships to fail, is this really fair?
Having an African American boyfriend myself I see the the looks people give us when we walk down the street holding hands and the comments that are whispered behind our backs. It all still awes me. For a country that has overcome so many obstacle in its history in regard to race, it just shocks me how people cannot accept couple’s choices on love. One cannot help who they love. One does not fall in love with the color of a persons skin but rather what is inside. It does not matter whether someone is black, white, yellow, pink, or polka dot, it is whats on the inside that truly matters most!
