Monday, July 6, 2009

Pcitures of False Hope

One of the "selling points" of the White Knight Savior movement is the photographic "evidence" that white men are interested in dating and marrying all types of black women. The bloggers post pictures of alleged couples so that their readers can think, "Ohh look, she looks like me I can get me a white man!"

Let me start by saying that I am not against interracial dating. I feel like it is a person's INDIVIDUAL choice who they choose to date/marry and in reality the number of people who "date out" is not large enough to pose any significant "harm" to any gender or racial group. So my criticism of these bloggers has nothing to do with any ill feelings toward interrcial dating. My problem is that the pictures are used to create an unrealistic dating environment on two fronts: first being the idea that white men do not practice colorism, weight-ism, hair-ism, etc and the second is that MOST black men do practice colorism and hair-ism. By highlighting what THEY consider to be "average" black women with white men they are essentially feeding their audience false hope while simultanesously demonizing black men because the same "average looking" black women are dating and married to black men as I type this.

The problem with a picture is just that....it's a picture. There is no back story, no proof of a real relationship and even more importantly no real validation of the beauty of black women in white man's eyes (which is the ultimate goal).

Another problem I have with pictures is that you can never really get a complete "picture" of a relationship. Anyone can pose for a picture and voila! this is the happiest couple on earth (cuz she ain't with a black man!!). This is why I try to highlight actual couples on my site because I don't want to be accused of spreading the "black love" mantra. Most of us sane, rational black people know not only are FUNCTIONAL black relationships a reality, many of us are currently in them or have been in them in the past. I can't speak for the Clucking Hens, though.

Let's take a look at some of the pictures on the sidebar of Interracial Love and Spice. I'm not going to even adress the obvious stock photography Sara uses because it's obvious to any one with a brain that it is STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY. Anyway, here are some "real life couples":

Here is supermodel Alek Wec with what Sara claims is her ""fiance". But in reality:

This is Alex's BOYFRIEND of four years, Riccardo Sala, an Italian real estate developer. They have been together for four years with NO marriage or engagement.

This is The Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie. Sara said that the woman in the photograph was his longtime love. I'll let Wikipedia fill you in on the details of his romantic life:

Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar. His second wife was the American novelist Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988 and divorced in 1993. His third wife, from 1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan. In 2004, he married the Indian American actress and supermodel Padma Lakshmi, the host of the American reality-television show Top Chef. The marriage ended on 2 July 2007 with Lakshmi indicating that it was her desire to end the marriage. In the Bollywood press, he was, in 2008, romantically linked to the Indian model Riya Sen, with whom he was otherwise a friend.[7] In response to the media speculation about their friendship, she simply stated "I think when you are Salman Rushdie, you must get bored with people who always want to talk to you about literature.
I found another picture of Salman at a party:

See how easy it is to just post pictures of people "together"? Rushdie has two children "out there" as he is no longer married to the mothers of his sons.

Actress Golden Brooks was featured on the sidebar with her "boyfriend" too bad...

In REALITY she is pregnant by actor D.B. Woodside. The couple is not married and Golden is almost 40 years old.

Is she even "black"? She looks like she could be Filipino or something. This is also the stock photography I was talking about so it doesn't really matter. But what constitutes "black" for these bloggers? Because if she were dating a dark-skinned black man he'd be all kinds of self-hating, ape monkey, mama killer, etc etc etc. Moving on...

In one of the pictures he looks mixed in the other he looks...mixed. Joy Bryant is actually married to the man in the picture and his name is David Pope. The Clucking Hens so depserately wanted him to be all white.

They have been married for over a year. They recently released photos from their wedding to Essence magazine.

Mellody Hobson (Sara didn't even know the woman's name!) has been dating Star Wars king George Lucas for about three years now. Mellody is a financial guru and SERIOUS power player. She is on the board of a number of big corporations and CEO of her own financial firm. She also used to date Chris Albrecht, the former CEO of HBO. She clearly has a "type" of man she dates: high powered and well paid. I am not mad at her for that at all, just stating the obvious. The social circles that Ms. Hobson is in puts her amongst some of the richest and most powerful men in the country. She is not yet married and that has probably been HER CHOICE. But let's say that it wasn't her choice to be single and those wealthy white men (the group of men she sepnds the most time around) have been "passing her over" for younger, whiter women. Why aren't they being strung up by their testicles and beaten for THAT?

Sara also featured chef Wolfgang Puck and his wife, handbag designer Gelila Assefa. I wonder how long this marriage will last considering...

Puck left his second wife, business partner and the mother of two of his sons, Barbara Lazaroff for a fling with Gelila who was answering phones at his restaurant Spago. Gelila gave birth to two of his children out of wedlock before he married her in 2007. He also used his ex-wife's money to help finance the PR affair, I mean, wedding. By the way, Gelila is Ethiopian, not African-American. Wanna read more about l'affaire Assefa? Click here.

Looks like another bed wench waited long enough for marriage and what I am sure is an iron-clad prenup. Way to go, Sara! Encourage your fellow sisters to sleep with married white men so they can "come up".

6 comments:

  1. And don't for the couples who aren't even together anymore! Double homerun!

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  2. Damn. That was a hit to the gut.

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  3. Oh my God. Sarah and crew should be so embarrassed.

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  4. Raina,

    I haven't even touched on Evia's gallery because it would take too much time. Most of those pictures are old and those relationships have long been over.

    I will, however, touch on the general ugliness, disorganization and amateur graphics of her site. It is truly one of the messiest things I have ever seen and so hard to follow. Marketing and branding is an important tool for anyone trying to create a following and she is failing big time.

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  5. You beat me to it, LOL. I was planning on doing something like this. Evia has a picture of Eve and the guy from Survivor an it says they are engaged. I went Eve's wikipedia page and it makes no mention of them as a couple and I went to the Survivor guys blog and he makes no mention of Eve. I could have missed it but I don't think they are engaged.

    Even if they were, is that guy that big of a prize for someone of Eve's stature? I thought they were against "dating down".

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