Some Lessons in Black and White
12/21/2003 08:41 PM EDT

By DEBORAH MATHIS

Race can make for such messy business.

Take, for example, the current brouhaha at the University of Missouri, where the four-campus system’s first black president is embroiled in a controversy hot enough to evoke talk of resignation.

The ingredients are these: An interracial affair, a domestic abuse conviction, a black woman’s admonition, and a telephone recording.

The affair involved a former Missouri basketball player who is black and a white coed. The relationship ended with the man doing 60 days in jail for assaulting the woman.

…Despite this seeming acceptance of interracial relationships, black-white dating has not become blasé. Far from it. There is a simmering unease in the body politic about its implications which can hardly be ignored, history being what it is. However true the love may be, there is always the concern that black men seek white girlfriends or wives as trophies. One can say that the interracial element in the O.J. Simpson murder case did not raise the intrigue in the matter, or that the fact that Kobe Bryant’s accuser is white does not affect the mood of the case, but one would be delusional. We react to this stuff, whether with fascination, disgust, fear, hurt or envy.

To the degree that the society has not settled this issue for itself, it can be a problem for the parties directly involved. Even for the most determined and stalwart lovers, public attitudes can intrude and cause trouble. Black men, already on society’s hit list in so many ways, are particularly vulnerable to presumptions about their fitness and their intentions.

Thus did Carmento Floyd, the wife of the University of Missouri president, caution the black basketball player about his choice in women. In a telephone conversation recorded by the man’s jailers, Mrs. Floyd advised the man to look more toward Delta Sigma Theta, the famous black sorority, than to Delta Delta Delta, the famous white sorority, for dating prospects.

Because of that, white folks are accusing Mrs. Floyd of racism and, by extension, her husband and a family friend too. It could be political correctness gone amok; or payback for the January dismissal of a grade school teacher who told her class in a nearby town that she vehemently opposed interracial dating, marriage and procreation. One thing it wouldn’t seem to be is a last stand by white Missourians in defense of interracial dating. If that’s what it is, it begs examination, for it would be a phenomenon for damn sure.