Interracial Family Organization

The Robertsons

// October 28th, 2009 // written by Kat Robertson

AUTHOR BIO:

KATHLEEN is a co-founder for Interracial Family Organization and blogs at For the Love of Chaos.

My husband and I have had quite the life together… I mean that in every sense of the phrase – every good sense, and every bad one. It’s extremely frustrating to have people just not ‘get it’ … to have them tell you that dating a black man means that your life is going to be full of illegitimate children for whom you will be pulling drive-bys just to try to get some child support out of him, and if you are lucky enough for him to stick around then he’s going to cheat on you, beat on you, and never hold down a job. {Wow.} People can be pretty ridiculous and they have these overly imaginative views of ‘the black man’ without realizing how many white men fit the same categories. It’s silly. ANY man can be any combination of those things. My mother was abused by a white man. Oddly enough, despite alllll the stereotypes, I’ve never been abused by my husband. And, yes, he has pulled an income the entire time we’ve been together. Even when he was unemployed, he sold his DREAM truck that he bought when he was in the NFL and used the money to start buying and selling cars to turn a profit until he found a job. My man is good like that. Family first. Frills later.

I think the one thing that intrigues people about us is that neither of us got ‘lost’ in our relationship. One of the stereotypes I’ve heard about black/white interracial couples is that the white person tends to act “ghetto” or “black” (the “black” really gets to me…. how can you consider someone to be “acting” black unless you generalize the entire black population to fit one specific type? RACISM… check.) or the black person tends to act “proper” or “white” (again, the “white” thing really gets to me too, much for the same reason). I don’t like stereotypes. At.all. Yes, there are types of people, and there is no denying that. But to view a person a certain way simply because of how they look is absurd. If you get to know a person or are around them for any length of time, I can understand acknowledging that they act like a certain “type” of person, but not that they act “white” or “black” – that’s just stupid.

Anyway, one of the negative associations that have become connected to interracial couples where the woman is white and the man is black seems to always be one of two things: either she is a freak (promiscuous, easy, down-for-whatever) so she is considered trashy or he is an Uncle Tom (the whole ‘tries to act white’ thing again) which basically means that he makes very focused attempts at conforming to mainstream ‘white’ society and thus abandoning and/or ignoring his roots and his black heritage. While YES I will admit I’ve seen BOTH of those “types” of people, that is by NO means an honest representation of the interracial culture. Just because we’ve joined our lives does not mean that we’ve blended into one another. Can’t we swirl? Keep our own culture while adopting the other? Oh, yeah… we can swirl – and we do it beautifully.

My husband and I have had a ROCKY 12 years, no doubt about that. We started dating in high school and had our first child barely 2 years later when I was 17 and he was 18. We got married directly out of high school. I was 18 and he was 19. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no help; we had no examples. We just had each other and one mutual idea: we would do this, and we would do it together. No matter what we went through, we stayed true to that. Three months later, we had our second child. Three months after that, he started college. 8 months after that, I started college. 5 months later, we had our third child. 2 weeks later, I was starting my second semester. We didn’t have time to slow down. We didn’t have time to breathe. We still didn’t know what we were doing. By this time, I was 19 and he was 20. We were broke, we were in college, and we had three kids. But, we still had each other and no matter how badly we wanted to claw one another’s eyes out at any given time… no matter how much we resented the way life was going or how hard things had become… no matter how much we wanted to give up on it all and just accept our losses, somehow we stayed loyal to that pact: we were determined to do this thing called life… and we were determined to do it together.

Fast forward, here we are nearly 12 years in the future… college grads, 5 children, and things have started to slow down a bit. We’ve settled into our own. No marriage is ever perfect… especially one that the whole world seems to be against. But the fact that we jumped every hurdle and overcame every obstacle stacked against us attests for one thing: we’re in this; and we’re in it together. There is no giving up; there is no counting losses. There is accepting the bad with the good, nursing the sickness and appreciating the health, waiting out the lack in preparation for abundance, and through whatever circumstances we face, always knowing that our love can conquer anything – because it already has. I cherish this man because he was made for me. We’re complete opposites. He’s rap. I’m Gospel… R&B… Alternative… Rock… Country… He’s a smoker. I’m not. He’s TV. I’m computer. He’s old school cars. I’m mommy vans. He’s Ebonics. I’m proper English. He’s sexy. I’m sexy. Ok, so we have that. But the point is, he doesn’t have to be like me for me to accept him… and I don’t have to act like someone I’m not to impress him.

That’s what it’s all about. Being you. And being loved for it.