Woke up this morning with my inbox full of folks wanting my take on the big news that celebrity Eve is swirled up pretty serious with her British boo, Maximillion (or should be call him, Maxibillion?). Geez, that’s some name, huh?

The bloggosphere was abuzz with Eve’s apparent surprise at finding serious, deep, and lasting love with a white guy, while in virtually in the same breath complaining how it’s 2012 and people should stop making such a big deal about interracial relationships.

The Black Woman’s Dilemma

Therein, my dears, in plain view of everyone, lies the soul-wrenching dilemma black women in American face when they think about, act on, and pursue interracial relationships. It’s also the reason why I wrote SWIRLING. Yes, in 2012, MOST people can love folks of another race without most folks blinking an eye. But not so for black women. It is beat into our psyches almost from birth that no man, except a black man can legitimately appreciate our non-Western-ideal beauty, and any man of any other race (including and especially white men) should be viewed with rabid suspicion and subjected to paying the “white boy tax” in which he will have to jump through hoops, have a degree in African studies, self-flagellate in pittance for his privileged birth, and be absolutely gorgeous, because why else would you date a white guy unless he looked like Brad Pitt in his glory days?  And if he’s ugly or even just average, he BETTER have a lot of money. In other words, the GAT-DL demands a REASON for why a black woman would want to date interracially. Has she dated all the plumbers, FedEx delivery guys and felons FIRST before she decided to “play in the snow?” Does she need to be partially left deaf in one ear by Wesley Snipes before it’s okay to “go white?” Basically…yeah.

Such ideas are ground into our minds so far that we end up being more shocked that anyone around us when we find ourselves in an interracial relationship. Many of us are shocked, simply because we’ve been told that no non-black man would be caught dead in public with us. Some of us are shocked because we have always pictured ourselves coupled and married to black men because that’s what we truly believe is all that is available to us.

So yes, Eve, it’s 2012. But for many black women swirling for the first time, it might as well be 1912–at least in their own mind and the self-imposed limitations they put upon themselves.

And then there’s the plethora of blogs dedicated to discouraging black women from acting upon all their dating options. Here’s their central arguments: Only a teeny-tiny number of black women actually will find white mates because non-black men mostly find black women disgusting; only black women who look white are appealing to white men (but, why not just date a white woman? That logic fails these idiots);  interracial marriage between white men and black women are such a small number as to not be counted and, “NEE-NER NEE-NER NEE-NER” black men do it twice as much and non-black women and black women d*ck ride us, so THERE!!; and never mind that black men swirl twice as much, only black women are sell outs when they swirl. You’d be shocked and surprised at how many black women internalize these messages, which is the point of why these psychopaths establish those blogs anyway.

The good news? It may be 2012, but only for another month. Things are getting better for us everyday.