On Loving Black Men
On Loving Black Men
I’ve tried. I’ve dated white men. I’ve dated Hispanic men. Good men. Kind men. Men who treated me well and meant what they said. But it never felt like home.
I can’t be with a man that isn’t Black. I know how that sounds. I know people will call it limiting, or say love is love, or tell me I’m shutting doors. But I’m biracial, and I spent years walking through rooms where no one looked like me. Where my hair was a question, my skin was a guess, my existence was a debate.
Black men are beautiful to me. Not just the skin, not just the body — though yes, that too. It’s the way they carry history in their shoulders. It’s the laugh that comes from somewhere deep and defiant. It’s the gentleness that the world never gets to see, but I do. It’s the code-switching, the surviving, the joy anyway.
When I’m with a Black man, I don’t have to translate myself. I don’t have to explain why my mom was white and my dad was black and why that still aches at 51. I don’t have to teach him what “the talk” is, or why I flinch at sirens, or why I need him to exist loudly in a world that wants him quiet. He already knows. He lives it too.
I dated outside my race because I thought I should. Because people told me to “keep my options open.” Because I didn’t want to be called close-minded. But it felt like acting. Like I was on a first date with myself, explaining my own life story to a tourist.
I love Black men because when I look at them, I see my own reflection. The parts of me I got from my father’s side — the parts Salem didn’t always know what to do with. I see the struggle I rose from, the shelter I left, the waitlists I’m still on. I see dignity that isn’t given, it’s taken. Every day.
Maybe that’s trauma bonding. Maybe it’s preference. Maybe it’s just truth. I don’t need it to be political. I don’t need it to be approved. I’m 51, I’ve lived enough life to know what peace feels like in someone’s arms. For me, that peace has a Black man’s heartbeat under my ear.
I can’t date outside my race anymore. Not because I hate anyone. But because I finally stopped hating the part of me that knows what it wants. And what it wants is to be understood without a footnote. To be loved without a disclaimer. To come home to someone who knows the road I walked, because he walked it too.
That’s not exclusion. That’s recognition. That’s me choosing not to translate my life for the rest of my life.
And I’m not sorry for it.
*Cathryn m harris
