Having run an interracial dating website for the past three years, I can’t add up how many times I’ve heard that phrase. “GET ME A WHITE MAN,” as if acquiring a white rainbeau is like buying a pair of shoes with the matching purse. It conjures images of scantily clad white beef cake at the ready to parade in an assembly line for a black woman to pick the one she likes best. And somehow, I’m at the helm, wrangling all these white guys for consumption. Some of you cringe at the thought that your fellow sisters blurt out such crassness. Others of you suck your teeth in disgust by the apparent desperation of these women. But I’m here to tell you that you’re 99.99% wrong about them. Because what they’re saying isn’t necessarily what they’re meaning.

“GET ME A WHITE MAN” is a catch-all phrase that means the following:

Black woman sees another of her sisters happy with a rainbeau, and her response is, “GET ME ONE!!” But what she really means to ask is, “How did you find him? What did you do?? Is there a top-secret white boy clearing house that I can tap into and get one too?” Much of this is about access. Whether voluntarily or not, black women are often segregated from non-black people outside of work and school situations. Many black women have grown up in neighborhoods that are at or almost 100% African American, and often lack the comfort level needed to associate outside of the hood. Yet, she wants it. And this is her crude but earnest way of asking black women who have successfully found love how they can follow suit.

“The fact is….there are plenty of black women that are willing to date outside of their race, but for one reason or another, they are not meeting the other races of men that wants to swirl. Some of the black women that’s already in interracial relationships won’t give somebody like me a heads up on how and where to meet these men. They want want to keep it to themselves so they can feel like they’re part of an exclusive bunch,” says Shaun, who commented on this subject on our Facebook fan page.

Some of us who have successfully swirled turn our noses up at such women, and say unkind things, or give them meaningless platitudes like, “Just be yourself,” which means…oh…absolutely NUH-THING. Would you tell a child who wanted to be a doctor to “just be yourself,” or would you tell them that they first need to get good grades in elementary school, take AP classes in high school, maintain a high GPA, score well on the SATS, then take biology course in undergrad and then apply to medical school? These women are asking, in a very non-politically correct way, how they can maximize their options and date a rainbeau. And don’t tell me you can’t compare. Because social acuity is just as important as academic success, and you can take that to the bank, chica.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when I hear black women say, “What’s the big deal? I’ve been swirling for years. There’s nothing to it!” Well if there were the case, then Swirling wouldn’t keep selling. Is it a class thing? Not necessarily. Black women interracially dating isn’t limited to double-majored nerds who were raised in the Hamptons. Black woman are finding love with other races of men at every class level. Granted, you’ll always have more of a percentage of non-black men interested in dating a spectrum where there is access to such women on a regular basis, such as in college or the military. But the key word is ACCESS. These GET-ME-A-WHITE-MAN women are really asking about how to get access. Are we happily-swirled black ladies too “uppity” to share with them what we’ve learned? I don’t think so. Not too many BB&W readers fall into the “special snowflake” category.

So why don’t we do this. Let’s talk about how we meet and happily couple with non-black men. I’ll start first. I met my husband in 1999 in a Yahoo chat room. The internet is the great location equalizer. Even if you live in “the hood” you have access to men who don’t. At the time that I met my husband, I was living with my parents in Lancaster, California. Have you heard of it? It was once bestowed with the title of “Meth capital of the world.” My husband lived in Beverly Hills. The internet brought us together, and we would have never met otherwise, because no way in hell a preppy blue-blood from Connecticut would have any reason at all to visit.

Boom.

Okay; your turn. Spill the details of how you met your rainbeau, and SHARE you advice to your fellow sisters in waiting.