so last night ricardo woke me up to read me a neat line from an interview with james earl jones; the interviewer started asking him an interacial relationship and he said it was not necessary to mention the woman's race at all. it's the kind of thing that my mom has always said, and it got me thinking.

i'm the product of an interacial marriage. clearly i'm biased when i say it was one of the better marriages i've ever seen, but it was. there are difficulties that go with being mixed race, but i don't wish i wasn't. i do wish that there was less anti-arab discrimination in my country, and i do wish for stronger connections with the arab side of my family, and with arab communities in general; but i'm an adult and i can make those connections now, inshallah.

i've tended to date other mixed people. well, as my mom's palestinian girlfriend said over dinner last night, it's hard not to in this country. at the gathering last year, a friend whose also mixed said that she used to think it was impossible for her to have a relationship that wasn't interacial--where would she find the same mix that she was? i hadn't thought about it in quite the same way. i guess most of my relationships have been with someone who shared the caucasian part of my race, one was with someone who shared the arab part. with ricardo he doesn't share either part, and with shahn we don't know cause he's adopted. so they are my first fully interacial relationships i guess, where we don't share any race, and they're the best ones!

that said i would never say that in love race doesn't matter. i can't say i'm color-blind and i can't say i want to be; everything about where my lovers come from and how they're treated in the world affects me. there's also the fact that love and empathy make me want to know more about the people who i desire; for me it isn't about blindness, it is about affectionate vision.

i am a little wistful about not having an arab lover. a lot of arabs are smart and gorgeous and extremely appealing; i would love the connection; and i also keep thinking that it would be easier to deal with the crap if i came home to somebody else who knew it first hand. but the only time i dated an arab was a miserable disaster, i am still recovering, and it has had at least one horrible current effect on my life that i pray nightly will not last forever.

talking to vidhu about that the other night--i love you vidhu, i'm sorry i'm so repetitive on this subject!-- she reminded me that one of the major reasons that i was so vulnerable to this person was because she is arab. feeling as isolated i do, and still missing my dad and the ways he kept me connected, i very quickly got in deeper than i could handle. well, also, starting to date somebody just after the first anniversary of my dad's death, immediately after dealing with my mom's asshole relatives over christmas, and while the u.s. started another highly-publicized campaign of bombings against iraq, probably was not a good idea. god. when i say it like that, it sounds so obvious, doesn't it?

i guess part of the problem was also similar to the problems i've had with lesbian relationships in general; when you both feel isolated and marginalized, it puts an awful lot of pressure on the relationship. i should reread loving in the war years; i remember she had good stuff on the subject in that. i'm always trying to figure out how to connect with people who share my marginalization without bringing in an attitude of victimhood. i think it might be harder, too, with arab americans who grew up here; our sense of alienation works differently than people who grew up in the arab world and first experienced anti-arab discrimination as adults.

what do you think?