diversehighfantasy:

thelastjedicritical:

shannanigansandmisadventures replied to your post: “I’m honestly so confused about people suddenly claiming that…”:

I can’t speak for tv shows, but I watch a ton of movies and out of the last 15 films I watched, only one had an interracial couple. You’re still more likely to see what I’ve been calling a “matched pair” where two people of the same race end up together.

There is a type of racism where it’s okay to some people for different races to be together but not white people with a poc character. This still stems from the “white people are a superior race” mindset.

yes, the only difference now is that compared to a few years ago I can actually list some interracial pairings… 

And while I think it is very important to have interracial pairings in the media where both are POC I have absolutely noticed that in fandom spaces even obviously racist people had no problem declaring they ship an interracial pairing when both characters are POC but if one character is white the weird excuses suddenly begin as to why this white person has to be with another white character/or noone, and the character of colour with another character of colour/noone. It’s pretty clear POC are seen as more fitting with other POC in racist fandom spaces, while character of colour/white character seems to be a huge step or even unthinkable for many. 

Fandom likes to think that white supremacy is all white hoods and tiki torches when it’s actually something very ingrained in Western culture. The idea that approving of POC/POC IR but not white/POC IR is super progressive disregards history’s treatment of the latter.

If you look at anti-miscegenation laws in US history, they were specific to marriages, sex and procreation between a white person and a person of color, and was applied most aggressively to white/Black relationships. Those laws were specifically about not “tainting” the white race (and I’m not being histrionic when I saw that the same laws were upheld in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, applying specifically to relationships with a white person and a non-white person (including Jewish people)). Americans don’t like to think that our country is that white supremacist, but it, historically, is. And the effects of those laws influence modern American worldviews.

The main targets of these laws were Black men. Although the famous Loving vs Virginia case involved a white husband and Black wife, white men, historically, were less targeted; they were allowed to take whatever they wanted from Black women. There was no protection for Black women. White women, on the other hand, needed protection from Black men, and a Black man with a white woman was the ultimate abomination. Many lynchings of Black men were justified as protecting the sanctity of white women (even if the man had had neither assaulted nor had a consensual relationship with a white woman).

It goes deep. There’s an analogy that people still use today: A drop of sewage (black blood) in a vat of pure water (white blood) contaminates the water, while a drop of water in a vat of sewage is still sewage. (My mom is white – trust me, this analogy is still used).

Most people wouldn’t admit to believing that, but a 2016 study by the University of Washington (https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/a-hidden-bias-toward-interracial-couples/) concluded that, while white students will say they’re all for interracial relationships, many implicitly react with “disgust” when shown photos of white/Black couples.

In one part of the study, participants were asked to categorize Black/white couples, same race couples, and animals:

We predicted that when interracial couples and animals were categorized together, the participants who were primed to feel disgusted would do the task faster. Instead, we found that all participants completed the task faster when interracial couples and animals were categorized using the same button (indicating implicit dehumanization).

tl;dr: Americans are socialized to implicitly find white/Black couples repellent, even after all these years, and that is strongly reflected in fandom patterns..