Marrying Black Girls for Guys who aren’t Black

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

It is scarcely necessary to point out that the intellectual superiority of the mulatto over the negro affords no sufficient ground for advocating the amalgamation of the negro and white races. If the mulatto has a better mind than the negro, he is apparently inferior to him in physique and is inferior in every way to the whites. Any system of cross breeding which means the substitution of mulatto for white children cannot be viewed as anything but a serious menace. It is to be condemned, not only from the biological standpoint, but because it would lead to social and moral deterioration. To say that negro-white crosses are undesirable on biological grounds, however, is not to assert that race crossing is bad per se. If races are on the same level of inherent physical and intellectual endowment their fusion may produce a very desirable combination of qualities and might give rise to a diversity of traits which would be socially valuable. We have insufficient grounds for condemning crosses of races or peoples per se but only those crosses which substitute an intermediate product for the most highly endowed stock. It is the very best inheritance that should be conserved at all costs. Out of it come the rare minds that rise like mountain peaks above the general level of humanity. And it is to these minds, small in number, but incalculably great in influence, that advancement in civilization and culture is largely due.

Samuel J. Holmes, The Trend of the Race: A Study of Present Tendencies in the Biological Development of Civilized Mankind (New York: Hourcourt, Brace and Company, 1921), 264-265.

Marrying Black Girls for Guys who aren’t Black

Marrying Black Girls for Guys who aren’t Black

Jacana Media
October 2013
256 pages
198 x 130mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781920601287
d-PDF ISBN: 9781920601294
ePUB ISBN: 9781920601300
mobi file ISBN: 9781920601317

Hagen Engler

White guy Hagen Engler had been married to his black wife for a couple of years before he realised he was still a racist! Marrying Black Girls for Guys Who Aren’t Black describes his journey from being the whitest person this side of a Smokie concert to being slightly blacker, if not visibly so. Combining anecdotes, rhymes, essays and freestyle political discourse, the book charts a personal route to an integrated society in Unit 2, Sandown Court, Johannesburg. As the newly disenfranchised minority in his lounge, Hagen has gained a fresh insight into the struggles of the oppressed. Living with a gorgeous, militant black woman has helped this armchair liberal understand cultural and economic reality and also realise that while he can appreciate the kwaito-house works of Oskido and the later releases of Letta Mbuli, he will never enjoy Basketball Wives, Kenny Lattimore, or boiled tripe. The jury’s still out on umleqwa too. Once you make your peace with skin colour, does race even exist? Or is culture what distinguishes us? What happens when a surfer/bungee-jumper/rock ’n’ roll goofball hooks up with a black-diamond struggle veteran and shoe fetishist?

It’s hard to be a neoliberal hardliner when your partner’s real-life experience undermines all your prejudices. It’s cultural exchange over the TV remote; race relations in the contested space between the sink, the toaster and the microwave, as yet another mixed marriage cocks up the race debate. Hagen Engler learns about himself and our emerging, common culture as much as his lovely black wife in How to Marry a Black Chick for Guys who are White.

He has surfed Hawaii, run the Comrades, climbed Kilimanjaro, been sued by a clown and eaten a praying mantis. So a lot of the bucket-list boxes have been ticked.

Tags: Hagen Engler, Jacana Media

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2016 at 14:48Z and is filed under Africa, Autobiography, Books, Media Archive, Monographs, South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Marrying Black Girls for Guys who aren’t Black

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