Interracial Sex #2. The Sleazy White Male, The Polical Activist, And The G.I. Joe.

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His behavior is frequently motivated by the belief that White
women are naturally asexual and meant for marriage and
motherhood, not unbridled sexual activity.
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But just as concern for women's equality shouldn't blind us to the various forms of oppression men have faced in society, the experience of White male partners of minority women shouldn't be overlooked either. Some White men have suffered on account of their relationships - particularly marriages - with women of other races. A well-known example was Richard Loving, who with his Black wife Mildred successfully challenged the state of Virginia's ban on mixed marriages (this case, it should be noted, led to the eradication of anti-miscegenation laws throughout the United States).

Like their Caucasian female (and minority male) counterparts, White men in mixed race unions have been subjected to stereotypes, most of which are not very flattering. Some of these stereotypes have grounds in current or historical reality. For example, the Sleazy White Male goes back to the days of slavery and colonialism, while the Political Activist emerged during the civil rights struggles of the 1960's and the GI Joe with the women's movement of the 1970's and '80's. These stereotypes are more fiction than fact as far as the majority of miscegenous White males are concerned. However, in order to challenge and disprove them, it's necessary to examine them. So here goes:

The Sleazy White Male

The Sleazy White Male (SWM) is a White man who goes after women of color for sex and nothing but. His behavior is frequently motivated by the belief that White women are naturally asexual and meant for marriage and motherhood, not unbridled sexual activity. With women of other races, though, he can give free rein to his baser instincts. In some ways the Sleazy White Male is the male equivalent of the Slut, the White woman who consorts with men of color. But like male fornicators, adulterers and other sexual transgressors, the SWM faces much less criticism than she does. As long as his relationships with minority women don't get too serious, they're usually tacitly tolerated and at times even encouraged. In the Old South, for instance, it was said that a boy did not become a real man until he had sex with a Black woman.

Sleazy White Males positively abounded during the age of European imperialism and the days of slavery in the United States. Several factors facilitated their emergence, not least of which was the enormous social, economic and political power they wielded. Black female slaves, for example, usually had no choice but to submit to the sexual demands of their White masters. At other times women of color seemingly chose to enter into unions with their conquerors in order to gain privileges for themselves and their resulting children. In colonial Latin America, for instance, many Indian women sought to become pregnant by Spanish men because mestizo children were exempt from the taxes imposed on Indians and occasionally received other benefits for being half-White. But even in this case the woman's "consent" to such relationships was somewhat doubtful.

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The abolition of slavery, the erosion of the sexual double
standard for White women, and the growing social acceptance of
interracial marriage have taken the SWM out of mainstream society.
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Nonetheless, Sleazy White Males often took a "devil made me do it" approach to their escapades with women of other races. The devil in this case was the woman in question: she tempted him. Nineteenth-century commentator Sinibaldo de Mas used this theory to explain why so many Spanish priests in the Philippines fell into sin with native women: "the garb of the native women is very seductive and girls, far from being unattainable, regard themselves as lucky to attract the attention of the curate... what virtue and stoicism does not a friar need to possess!" (Curiously, in more recent times some Arab publications have attributed the rape of Filipina domestic workers in the Middle East to the women's supposedly short - knee-length - skirts, even though by Western standards both Filipinas and their clothing are fairly conservative.) Closer to home, historian Deborah Gray White says that in the Old South “Black… women were thought to have such insatiable sexual appetites that they had to go beyond the boundary of their race to get satisfaction.”

But the glory days of the Sleazy White Male are long gone. The abolition of slavery, the erosion of the sexual double standard for White women, and the growing social acceptance of interracial marriage have taken the SWM out of mainstream society. Today he's by and large relegated to the realm of the sexual deviant, whether the criminal (such as Gary Heidnick, the Philadelphia serial killer of several Black women) or the kinky eccentric (like the Italian-American politician in San Francisco who had Black prostitutes give him oral sex and call him Daddy). Right now the closest equivalent of yesterday's SWM is the North American, European or Middle Eastern man who engages in sexual tourism in Third World countries, even if unlike his predecessors he usually has to pay to assuage his carnal appetites.

The Political Activist

The Political Activist (PA) is the male equivalent of the female stereotype of the same name. Like her, he sees marriage to a minority, especially a Black, as a means of fighting racism. Such a union also helps him expiate his guilt over the privileges he enjoys on account of not only his skin color but his gender and, more often than not, social class (most PA's are middle or upper rather than lower class).

But the PA's actions are greeted with uneasiness at best and hostility at worst by many people of colour. Most rightly doubt that intermarriage is going to solve the problem of racial discrimination, given that five centuries of race mixing in places as diverse as the Philippines, the Caribbean, Latin America and even the good old U.S. of A. haven't eliminated the advantages held by White or White-looking people vis-à-vis those with darker complexions. Carol Camper, an African-Canadian writer who was herself once married to a White man, suggests that under the Political Activist's leftist, socially conscious exterior lurks a Sleazy White Male. Some Whites who married Blacks in the 1970's, she says, were motivated by the desire to experience a so-called “exotic” lifestyle.

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...he sees marriage to a minority, especially a Black,
as a means of fighting racism.
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Finally, as I've mentioned in previous articles, the very noble wish to eliminate racism just isn't by itself a very solid basis for a relationship with an individual. Take the case of a White man I'll call Ron. The minister of a liberal Protestant church, Ron married a Black woman named Marie in order to set an example of interracial harmony for his congregation. Ron and Marie, however, had nearly nothing in common with regards to anything from temperament to preferred leisure activities to childrearing philosophies. They divorced four years later. Their difference in skin color literally paled (pardon the pun) before those in other areas of life. Ron's mistake lay in choosing a marriage partner on the basis of her membership in a group rather than her personal qualities. Of course some people who enter into "political statement" marriages find they share a good many qualities besides their commitment to racial equality, and their relationships stand the test of time. But as Ron's story shows, a political statement alone isn't the best grounds for a marriage.

The GI Joe

The GI Joe is a White man who seeks out minority women to recover the ideals of femininity, wifely devotion, and self-sacrifice that his own women have supposedly left by the wayside in their rush out of the home and into the workplace. Usually his targets are Asian women (thanks in part to movies such as The World of Suzie Wong and plays like Miss Saigon), although Latin American women are also sometimes portrayed as more "domestic" than the average White American woman. Interracial marriage gives the GI Joe a taste of the Father Knows Best lifestyle familiar to him only through re-runs of old sit-coms.

The GI Joe often tries to find his Madame Butterfly through the mail-order bride business, in which women from Asia, Latin America, and other places offer themselves as wives to men in industrialized countries. In her essay “Recipe” (featured in the book The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writing by Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women), Chinese-Canadian writer C. Allyson Lee gives a humorous description of the GI Joe's search of a submissive Asian woman: “Attractive Straight White Male, middle-aged business executive looking for that special little China Doll, preferably short, petite and obedient. Object: to fulfill typical fantasies of the stereotype of Oriental ladies anxious to marry a Canadian in order to get out of Hong Kong or the Philippines and willing to do anything to pamper and please her man.”

However, the vast majority of White men married to Asian or Latin American women did not meet their wives through a mail-order bride outlet (nor is the mail-order bride business an exclusively White male-minority female phenomenon, as many such brides are White women from Eastern Europe and some clients are Japanese men), and most aren't necessarily looking for a Suzy Wong to lord over. A study in Hawaii, for example, found that White husbands of Asian women were actually less domineering than their counterparts with Caucasian wives and that Asian women who married outside their race weren't any more or less submissive than their in-married sisters. Similarly, according to a study on interracial marriages in the US as a whole, Asian women married to White men were more likely than White women in same-race marriages to work, which challenges the notion that Caucasian men with Asian partners are looking for a June Cleaver incarnation. When faced with scientific studies, the GI Joe, like most stereotypes, falls flat on his face.

I'll end the discussion by describing a real-life White man in an interracial relationship. My cousin Bill is engaged to a Korean woman. She's an engineer with a thriving career, so if he's looking for a geisha girl, he's barking up the wrong tree. Nor does he seem to be making a political statement, especially as nowadays interracial marriage, especially Asian-White marriage, isn't the hotbed of controversy it once was (in fact, a very conservative White woman I knew, a traditional Catholic woman who thought the local abortion provider was more evil than King Herod, told me she'd be delighted to see her daughter marry a Chinese man). And the fact that Bill is planning to marry his Korean fiancée disqualifies him as a Sleazy White Male, although most White men involved in interracial relationships that don't lead to marriage aren't necessarily SWM's either.

My feeling is that once interracial relationships become more commonplace and more accepted, stereotypes about people who engage in them will gradually disappear. This is kind of what's happened with the Sleazy White Male, for example. Now that White women aren't confined by the same sexual straightjackets as they were in the past, a naturally sleazy White man can just as easily satisfy his urges with a White woman as with one of another race. The same goes for the Political Activist: with the growing public acceptance of interracial marriage, aspiring PA's of either sex will find, perhaps to their disappointment, that marriage to a minority won't create a stir among anyone other than the extreme right wing (and even here there's a big question mark; for example, Terry Nichols, Timothy McVeigh's partner-in-crime in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, was married to a Filipina).

Of course we don't know how the future of interracial relationships and the stereotypes that accompany them is going to unfold. There's even a chance that mixed-race unions could be stigmatized all over again. As a sociology professor once said, history is not an upward straight line of progress. In the early days of the Netherland's colonization of South Africa, for instance, relationships between Dutchmen and native women were socially accepted; later, though, such unions were prohibited by law (until the abolition of apartheid, they fell under the so-called Immorality Act). But it seems that given current social trends, those who find stereotypes of interracial sex interesting, thought-provoking and even amusing should enjoy them while they can.