Angela Chasisms: On Attraction

ON ATTRACTION

When someone asks you what your “type” is you know exactly what they mean and you know exactly how to answer. There is this entire coding system that we’ve adopted to answer that question without sounding, like, racist. When you hear someone say with a twinge of exoticism in their tone: “I like brunettes with dark features” you know that they’re talking about a “Jewish,” Moorish or, like, Middle Eastern looking person. They don’t need to name it. Or, someone will say: “Oh Jack? He only dates dark chicks. Isn’t that so weird? Would you have guessed?” That means that Jack only dates brown or black women and because it’s something to note, Jack is probably white. And yet, more often than not you’ll hear: “I don’t have a type, I just date whoever, I really am attracted to so many different ‘types.’” And on some level those people are probably telling the truth. But that doesn’t mean that they actually date the people they purport to be attracted to.

Most times, when you actually look around, people date people that look like them. Intellectually, we all know that white people aren’t only attracted to other white people. I mean, secretive interracial relations during slavery prove that people of different races have always been, like, carnally into one another.  But when it comes to being publicly with someone outside of your race, it’s like, a thing.

I guess attraction is learned, like, algebra, or, something.  So, then what about people that have been in actual interracial relationships? Are they trailblazers? Did they have to, like, unlearn the behaviors so many of us can’t seem to break from? I guess, in a way, it’s sort of heartbreaking to think about all of these people that could be together that won’t, because they can’t like, step outside of themselves.

I once learned of this guy, James W. Rouse who developed one of America’s first “planned communities” in Columbia, Maryland in, like, the late ‘60s or something. His hope was to gather people from different races, ethnicities and socio-economic classes and put them together in one place so that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s could have proof that a pro-active, self-sustaining integrated society could, like, actually exist. It was pretty forward thinking I guess. I wonder how much it worked. A part of me wishes we were all forced to live in planned communities. I envision every town and city having these billboards all over the place (no longer owned by Clear Channel) where instead of a white couple drinking Corona there’d be, like, an interracial couple drinking Budweiser. And the slogan would read “The American type of Beer.”

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.