The way I as A White Girl Have Always Been Unlearning Dangerous Intimate Stereotypes About Ebony and Brown Guys

Content note: this short article contains recommendations to rape.

He is standing in front of a blonde girl when I pick my son up at the library. I hear them talking, laughing, flirting in that awkward early-teen way as I move closer. We stop, get my son’s eye, and provide them their area. She demonstrably likes my son, and i will see him basking into the attention.

We acknowledge for some motherly pride that somebody besides their grandmothers and me personally acknowledges their attractiveness. But, during the exact same time, we begin to view the doorway. I’m unexpectedly anxious.

“Why?” I ask myself.

I understand I’m looking the girl’s moms and dads. My son just isn’t white. The old idea that men of color are sexually dangerous continues to circulate from Donald Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants being “drug dealers” and “rapists” to Dylann Roof’s comments about Black men raping white women. And I realize it’s not just white supremacists who help keep this idea in circulation as I watch my son with a pretty white girl.