“I think that America has a kind of fantasy about what an interracial relationship is like—people who understand each other from the get-go; they are the future; they will save humanity and all babies will be beige—I mean, there’s a real deep fantasy about this.”

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes on 2019-04-22 00:08Z by Steven

“I think that America has a kind of fantasy about what an interracial relationship is like—people who understand each other from the get-go; they are the future; they will save humanity and all babies will be beige—I mean, there’s a real deep fantasy about this.

But we know that can’t be true. We have too many things we misunderstand about each other. So then people assume that people who are together from different races secretly hate themselves and their culture. There is a distrust of interracial relationships, too.

What I wanted to write about was not the kumbaya fantasy or the gross assumptions, but the actual reality. It’s all of these things: We have moments of tremendous love, and we have tremendous dissonance. We have moments when we get each other, and moments when we’ve really failed each other. That’s what that love looks like. It’s complicated and it is real. The minute you’re not allowed to investigate your own interiority and complexity, you’ve lost. I wanted to stop losing.” —Mira Jacob

Amal Ahmed, “Illustrating the Messy Reality of Life as an Interracial Family,” The Atlantic, April 12, 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/04/in-mira-jacobs-good-talk-talking-about-race-with-your-family-isnt-easy/586954/.

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