Groat in the sack: Interracial couplings
This is Jeff Groat. He’s the Runner’s sex columnist. He has only one qualification for the job: his last name sounds like a dirty word. That’s good enough for us. This week he talks about interracial relationships.
By Jeff Groat [Lifestyle Bureau Chief]
Those of us aged 18-29 seem to be much more open to the idea of interracial relationships than our parents generation.
If you’re a regular reader of this column, you know I have no business writing anything, and I apologize. But you may also know that I am some sort of advocate for freedom of expression and choice when it comes to sex and everything that goes along with it.
And of everything, if there’s only one thing that I couldn’t be more of an advocate for, it’s mixed relationships.
I would say I’m a fan of exotic women, but for the simple fact that in a city like Vancouver, does the word exotic have any meaning?
For example: How common is it now for a Caucasian family to sit down to a home cooked plate of green curry, and a family from Ghana to eat at an Italian restaurant?
Sex is like food. No, wait, relationships are like food, and the more they mix, the better they taste. Yes, I said taste.
It just so happens that the most well known places to actively prohibit interracial marriage include Nazi Germany, South Africa during Apartheid, and the United States prior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
It’s a hell of a jump to link people who frown on mixed relationships to the people who ran these overtly racist governments, but anti-miscegenation laws as they’re called, have a dark history in the twentieth century.
Luckily, we go to school in one of the most ethnically diverse schools in an already extremely diverse region of multicultural Canada.
So if you have a flair for “geography,” shall we say, then you’re in luck at Kwantlen.
But, where mixed relationships are a-okay biologically they might not be okay culturally. We all bring our own things to the table in any relationship, including biases, preferences and choices we’ve formed about sex and gender, as well as culture.
But this is Canada. We can respect people’s choices whether they resist to mix, or whether they choose to embrace it, although I hope for the latter.
