Chocolate Junkie...

The Prologue: Secure, wonderful, strong black men, this does not apply to you.


God bless you, and I hope that one day I will get out of this rut I am in, and smile at you, pray with you, marry one of you and make some chocolate babies… All others:

Well, I am..how can I say this, rooting for the brothas because they will always have my heart, but having trouble watching the star players switch teams.

Let me go on record saying all the PC stuff we should say. Race doesn’t matter, if you really love somebody that is what counts, that people have a right to their choices, and it is hard out here for a pimp, after all…

Those platitudes may sound nice, but real life is a little more complex. I have dated a man of another race twice. Once was my first love, who was dark chocolate. I almost don’t count him because he grew up in the hood and eats grits. Went out with a white guy once as a friend, and it was…different. I did feel the spotlight on me.

The thing is I have always loved Black men. I have always loved how most of them, if they didn’t get anything else understood that look I get on my face when I am/have experienced the race issue, and the world is yet again reminding me that I should know my place. I have loved them regardless of the amount of money they had, or what the world called their brand of asthetic, or what their educational papers said. I have loved them with an everlasting, at last my love, free at last, last one standing, deeply rooted, deeply spiritual, deep longing love.

And yet, I have yet to find one who truly loved me back in the way every human deserves to be loved.

The brothas aren’t the only guilty ones. I’ve met plenty of “others” who have not loved us well, either. It just hurts more with the brothas.

That said, I have had a very real hurt from being chosen over a white woman and I will self admit here: it hurts. Maybe not a waiting to exhale wanna burn your car up kind of irritation, but a hurt nonetheless.

Now I know that I should just say, well he was a man who made choices, and her being white had nothing to do with his immaturity, but my mind sees it as a difference without distinction.

Imagine a man who tells you that any man would want to marry you, daily praises you for being what he sees as attractive, accomplished, faithful and loving. A dream woman, but still not ..a white girl. Did I mention this is a man who you've have known since I was 14?…not some other brotha off the street…but a homie?

Well, you say. That's indicative of men, not Black men. Race is incidental. And you'd be right. But humor me.

So, I saw the movie “Something New” because Sanaa Lathan is one of my favorite actresses, and although I was completely turned off by the idea of a white man teaching a black woman how to love her blackness (for obvious reasons) for the first time since I read Malcolm X, for the first time since I kissed NM’s smooth cocoa lips, for the first time since I screamed at a Morris Chestnut picture and dang near fainted off of Ice Cube’s jherri curl juice drippin’ self, I thought..well maybe they have a point.

Race my be incidental, but it is not accidental. There is a reason why the more successful Black men get, the less "comprable" partners there are to choose from, and the more desirable they become.

Maybe Black men, for all that they say, really don’t want us anymore. Maybe they have outgrown us (if they are successful) or we have “outgrown” them (if they are not). Maybe it is nothing personal, and we are being over sensitive. Maybe they really don’t like their mothers.

I don’t know. But I do know that what I used to dismiss as Black woman paranoia is starting to make sense to me as I soujourn east toward the big 30.

Used to say that if Black men only dated white women, and would not date a black woman-- we didn’t want him anyway. Still true. But the question is, given the state of our men, then who will?

Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow and feel inspired and enlightened by the brown beauty of some brotha in the coffee line next to me.

But today,like Ms. “A” I am looking out at the morning rain….