Yeah, okay. Answer it!

I got a question from a reader sent to the email address---which you can send any question to narrativetherapygirl@gmail.com---and it really spoke to me.

The question was: What is the challenge of being a woman in your world?

I chose to answer it here. So here we go.

I am an African-American woman in Chicago. I am single, but I am surrounded by single mothers. Most of my friends are parents, most are single moms. The dads are mostly gone. I couldn't even call them dads because they made the kids, but they left soon after. I hear questions all of the time from these women about why they are single mothers. It just shows me that the guys have no idea what they are doing. Some may do know what they are doing.

Here's the issue. These guys let them know upfront what kinds of character that they have. I will give you an example. I have a friend, we will call her Josh. Josh has a son with a married man. But he didn't tell her that he was married. He presented himself as a self-employed man that wanted to be a rapper. For some reason, she thought that this was the guy for her. He is nothing like the type of guy that she usually dated. She was in college full-time and barely had a social life. She had a baby with this guy and he took off. He made her life hell and she eventually left school. She moves out of state to start over. She comes back and returns to school. She meets this guy and he makes himself to be the best person on the planet. But there are obvious signs that he was lying. There were tiny pieces in his conversations that he had no intentions of being an honest citizen. She is pregnant again, and he is making her life hell. He has made her pregnancy some of the worst days of her life.

But I believe that this is a societal issue. We have raised a generation of heartless individuals. We have raised a generation of evil people that think that they are entitled to the world without no effort on their part. They will burn those who get in their way and if you get hurt, then that is your problem.

For me, the problem is that I do have issues with talking to male figures. I have this fear of running into these aforementioned type of guys. But I have come to learn that if I surround myself with a**holes, then I can't get mad when I am covered in s***. So I am picky about who I surround myself with. But what is it like in Chicago to be a single black woman? It is not fun at all. As an African-American woman, people expect you to have children and no father, Link card(aka food stamps) in hand, and first in line at the public aid office. I am expected to speak with the dialogue of ignorance and have a cutthroat hustle. But I am far from that in general. Sorry, I don't fit the stereotype that most guys will go for to use and abuse. The guys that I did date, they had to be creative with their abuse. They had to have serious covert operations to get my attention, time, and money. When they succeeded, it was brutal and I had to take time to recover. Unfortunately, it has made me a bit jaded about dating in general. I will admit that I have given up on people and dating in different points in life. I have not been on a real date in over 6 years. Could you say that I would be depressed? Maybe. Jaded? Definitely! I live in a city that is not safe for me to be alone at night.

I read an article about dating and Black women in the Chicago Defender that talked about dating and women that really stirs my mental process. I will link it at the end of this post. It talks about being colorblind while dating and whether or not it is a good thing. For people to say that this city is colorblind, you are insane. As someone who has dated outside of their race, I can tell you that you are far from wrong. I have been a victim of racial targeting. I have had a gun pulled on me, my life was threatened, and all because I was dating a white guy. My best friend(she is an African-American woman) was dating this white guy. They got engaged and he took her to meet his parents. The looks on their faces when he walked in with a black girl was of pure horror. They actually told him that if he married her, then they would disown him. For me, it was not the case from my guy's family. I was dating a white guy, and his mother openly accepted me. But it was his surrounding people that were not so loving. We worked at the same place, and he was working with an openly racist white man. He was an older man, and I still believe that he was a member of the KKK. He found out that I was dating my guy and he flipped out. I found items with blood on it in random places with my name on it. He told my boyfriend that he would end my life if we didn't break up. I remember my boyfriend standing up for me and got the guy fired. I remember my boyfriend telling him that if anything happened to me, then his life would end. This was in 2002 and I can see that nothing has changed in this world. I remember in 2007, I was with another white guy in Missouri, and we went to a state fair. We got stares and whispers in our direction. He was deaf, so he couldn't hear anything, but I know he could feel that negative energy. I had to tell him later on what happened. That was the last interracial relationship that I was involved in, but I will not stop dating outside of my race. We have a long way to go for true acceptance of interracial dating and marriage. Unfortunately, I may not live long enough to see the day that this will come. That is my sadness. My happiness may be haltered by the ignorance by others. That is what life is like for women in my world.

I have included a video from Beyond Black & White=---

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FohrBRCDbtA

The link to the article that I was talking about before----https://chicagodefender.com/2014/11/20/black-women-and-interracial-dating/

I have been blasting this song for a while and I want to share it with you----

Boyzone---Who We Are

https://youtu.be/Zr3fNeTiFPU

Remember, if you have any questions and you wouldn't mind if I answer them here or in a personal email, send them to narrativetherapygirl@gmail.com

#interracialdating #menandwomen