Viv: Last week I had a date with a man, lets call him Steve, who asked me why I had my hair pulled back in all my online profile pictures (we met via a mobile app that allows you to use up to 6 photos).  We had shared a couple cocktails at this point and he must have been feeling more relaxed and inquisitive.  I thought about it for a moment, and then replied that I thought my natural hair was probably too interesting for that particular dating site (which is invitation only and typically full of white male MBA grads).  I then explained that I was mixed (black and white), and that this often lead white men to puzzle over my ethnicity.  Steve replied that, yes, he had been confused himself, and had settled on the idea that I might be Portuguese (where there are in fact a great many people of mixed heritage, but most Americans don’t know that).

This is only the most recent example of men asking me why I look the way I look.  When men ask me this, I know they are really trying to figure out “who I am”, or more crassly, “what my race is.”  To most white men I look exotic.  I have dark curly hair, strong brows, hazel eyes, olive skin leaning towards orange, and freckles.  Sometimes they ask me what my “nationality” is.  To this I reply, “very American.” If they are persistent they pause and regroup and then ask, “Oh yeah, but where are you really from?”  If I am feeling charitable I tell them I am mixed.  And invariably they say some version of, “Oh! I never would have guessed!”

I have been ethnically ambiguous for white people my entire life and I am used to it.  I expect comments and questions and requests to feel my hair (though often times people just do it without asking).  However, when dating, this ambiguity can become tricky.  As a woman who looks exotic rather than white girl next door, I can become hyper sexualized by white men who know instantly that I am not “marriage material” but who are happy to discover what I might be like in bed (though at my age I am much more aware of this and usually able to nip it in the bud).  I am also often asked to explain why I don’t look more black, and it is awkward and sometimes uncomfortable to explain that my father is very white and that my mother is a light skinned black woman who is probably light skinned because of illegitimate white ancestry in her very religious black Southern family.   If I am feeling especially annoyed, I provide an off the cuff lecture on the social fact of race in America.  There are usually no second dates if the man has to hear the lecture.

Analysis: 

Why is ethnic ambiguity an issue?

First of all, being myself isn’t an issue.  I am happy with the way I look and proud of my family heritage and of my parents for sticking together through an era of discrimination.  But it does become an issue when I can feel men trying to put me in a box or pin me down as being one “kind of person” or another based on “where I am from”.   Race (what people are often actually referring to when they say ethnicity) is a social fact in America, race and sex have a long and ugly history, and, unfortunately, the effects of this history are still very much with us.  Making oneself vulnerable via dating can highlight this history and amplify prejudicial assumptions that would otherwise go unspoken.  When a white man tells me he never would have guessed I was black or mixed, I feel unseen, or worse, like a walking impossibility.  There are many of us ambiguous people out there, we are the result of complicated and often unacknowledged historical events (sometimes involving rape, forced migration, slavery, oppression, and segregation if you look back far enough) and the white community’s lack of awareness or imagination only serves to further hide this history.

On the other hand, I do like talking about my family and my background to those who are genuinely curious and who “get” the fact that having this conversation on a first date is more of an ethically ambiguous issue than an ethnic one.

So what happened with Steve? It turns out that Steve was himself “half” Chilean, and he pointed out that many people assume he is not totally white but cannot pin down his own ethnic (or racial or national) origins.  He did not belabor the point that he never would have guessed where I was “from”, and he smartly added that he thought I was very attractive in any case.  Then we went on to talk about a host of other things.  I did not feel any desire to give him a lecture.  We had another drink, he drove me home on the back of his motorcycle, and I smooched him on the street in front of my apartment.  Let the sporgulation begin.