THE MAN I LOVE IS WHITE

There are too many stereotypes that want to describe, label, shape the love that a woman must feel.

We are too beautiful we can have better - too unattractive, settle to what you get - too educated for - not educated enough for - he's a foreigner - he's too young - he's too old - he's a woman - he's of another religion - he's black, Asian, different, disabled, are you crazy, are you sure.

Like every other action in our existence, our falling in love must also be approved by the public space.

For a black woman, as it is like for any other human being, love is a complex thing.

The man I love is white.

And if I tell you this is because I am who I am. The man I love is white.

This is one of the first if not the first question people ask me when I talk about my couple:

is he white or is he black?

My response produces different effects and provokes unexpected reactions depending on the person who is in front of me.

If it is a white person, often involuntarily, there is a sigh of relief that breathes.

Luckily, everything okay, you are on the good side, you will therefore be well treated, emancipated, if you want you can study and work.

As if conjugal violence did not exist outside the "other" couples.

If it's a black or non-white person, my love choice has the effect of a high betrayal.

So you want to be like them. You do not love your race, we are not enough for you, well it is normal you were born here you are white inside.

I took the time to analyze and understand this thing, for me it has become a necessity as my falling in love is conceived as a political gesture, and by the way this has been said by the Afro-feminists for decades "Personal is political"

Depending on where I am, when I walk with my partner the people around are “reassured” as if he was my guarantee of respectability and acceptance, and integration as the norm is white and I have been totally assimilated.

“He's one of the good ones”.

There is a certain admiration in my choice to be with a white man, which catalogs him as an "open", "progressive" person (yes, we are in 2020)

Let's face it, I was unlikely for me to fall in love with a black man in Italy or France, a matter of math.

To devalue black or non-white men as if the white man was an ideal of perfection in the couple's life, demonizing love affairs between black people, firing stereotypes about mistreatment, conjugal violence, equality - it's a bit sneaky, hypocritical, as if white men understood everything ... (and everything was a niche problem of "minorities ")

Our story was so difficult precisely because we are in a so-called "mixed" couple.

The madness in all this is that we still talk about mixed couples as if they were an exotic and unreal thing, almost a surprise.

The man I love is similar to me, we have passions that match, we simply love each other.

I would have felt more "mixed" with a man who looks like me but who was born and raised in Senegal, yet from the outside no one would have called us a mixed couple.

Color is enough.

Now the man I love realizes the daily pressure, he knows he has to be careful.

He knows that he must be ready to defend us and sometimes defend himself even with the people closest to him.

When we walk down the street in my city or my country, people refer to him as if I don't exist. They take it for granted that I cannot speak Italian, or understand them.

When I answer, they insist and respond to him.

They see us together with our little girl and think or come to say it: was it a matter of papers?

It is not even imaginable that I am Italian or that I am with a white man simply because we love each other.

I don't want our little girl to grow up in a society that sees her as a mistake, an object of exchange, a transaction I made to buy an European document. When I say "I love you" to the person I have decided to build my life with, I don't want people to take it as a cover.

It's difficult, because sometimes he can't see, he doesn't notice, sometimes it's so sneaky that I feel like I'm paranoid.

And by always being under observation, the paranoia is there.

I do love him. Not because he's white, french or blond.

I just do love him.