The question…

Hi Christelyn,

I’ve been lurking on your site and your Youtube channel for a couple of weeks now (I know, shame on me lol).  I encountered a situation on a date recently: not necessarily “bad,” but kind of awkward and certainly dangerous.

A little background: I’m a 26-year-old white guy from New Jersey.  I have a slight preference for black women, but I haven’t really dated black girls until recently due to a number of factors, so unfortunately, the whole swirling thing is really new to me.  Over the past couple of months, I’ve been on several dates with black women thanks to OKCupid, and it’s on one of these dates that I have a question.

I was having coffee with my date (let’s call her Emily), and she was telling funny stories about her inner city life: specifically, how she would freak her friends out with exaggerated renditions of how dangerous her neighborhood was.  I didn’t have that many stories of this nature to share, so I shared a story of how my dad and his friends got mistaken for a gang in college by a blustering Baltimore police officer.

What Emily responded with seemed to be in the same vein at first: she told me about HER father when he was around the same age.  He was getting pizza with his friends in the middle of the night when a cop stopped them.  But then, she said at the end: “Five black guys out in the dead of night; you just knew something was going to go wrong.”

I was shocked, to say the least.  Emily certainly wasn’t accusing me of anything; I really think she was trying to keep some humor in the conversation.  But it brought the date to the edge of a cliff, and I knew it.  I didn’t want to continue in this thread, risking saying something insensitive and offending her, so I awkwardly changed the subject.  It wasn’t smooth or suave, but I just really wanted to get away from the precipice.  Was there a better way I could have done that?

My take…