RACE IN DATING

BE A HUMAN IN YOUR EYES

Race and Dating – An Autoethnography

BE A HUMAN IN YOUR EYES

What does dating mean for you? I usually started the interviews with this question. Depending on who and where you are, this question leads to completely different stories: some about love, some about self-image, some about politics, some about responsibility. For me, as a Taiwanese woman dating in Germany, this question is intertwined with issues about race and differences. In this research project, I investigate how people experience race in dating and romantic context.

MOTIVATION AND BIOGRAPHY

I am a twenty-seven year-old philosophy and gender studies student living in Berlin since 2015. In 2014, one year before I officially moved to Berlin, I visited this city with a six-month working holiday visa and signed myself up for language classes. In the end, I only stayed for three months – I changed my flight and fled back to Taiwan. I was defeated by the crashing anxiety and loneliness caused by all the differences in how I was perceived by others and how others behave toward me compared to back home.

Apparently, this disastrous experience did not stop me from coming back and settling down in Berlin after nine months. But one particular memory continued to haunt me after I have overcome other barriers such as language, culture, life-style, and bureaucracy. 

By the end of my very first three-month stay in Berlin, I went to a coffee shop and found the guy working there mesmerizingly attractive (I was a twenty-two year-old first time in Europe). We chatted a few times and he soon noticed my interest. One day, he handed me a note with his number and said, “hey, sorry, I already have a girlfriend, but maybe we can hang out before you go back to Taiwan.” I was completely thrilled, I have only seen this kind of “moves” in movies, nobody does this in Taiwan. We met up the next day, had a city-tour. We chatted, he told me I look cute. He told me his girlfriend is from Korea. Then he walked me home. We made out in my room even though he was already late for the next appointment. He left in a hurry and said he will text me that night. He never did.

I was shocked and remained in that state even after my plane landed in Taipei. It is not that I had never encountered a ‘Westerner’ in a romantic context in Taiwan, and it is not that I found ‘the love of my life.’ Yet I was transformed by this experience – the first time being looked at in a context completely forgeign to me. It was only a few years later when I understood the meaning of ‘being-looked-at-ness’[1] and its entanglement with a more political struggle. ‘Being looked at’ and adapting my identity accordingly because of my gender; being looked at differently because of the cultural context. But do not forget, race tinted both gender and culture.

I was well exposed to feminist theories before I moved to Berlin, but I would be unbelievably naive if I only use gender framework to make sense of my experiences in Berlin, as an Asian woman. Yet it took me years to get a glimpse of what does being Asian mean in Berlin. Of course, I am immensely lucky to be a gender studies student in the twenty-first century and having many amazing, fierce, creative black feminist thinkers, like Patricia Hill Collins, bell hook, and Kimberle Crenshaw, to be my inspirations. However, the canonical literature on race is oriented to American context in the late twentieth century and causes confusion alongside inspiration when applied in current Berliner context. We must, I think, start our own conversations about race right here and right now, with our own voices and stories.

METHOD AND RESEARCH DESIGN

The ways we talk about race or talk in relation to race are themselves parts of the racialization process. But so much can go wrong, when we discuss race without addressing the context and the personal experiences and histories. It is common to observe, in public or in classrooms, how a discussion about race quickly accelerates into blaming, name-calling, and guilt-tripping. We feel that there is a lot at stake, someone is deeply wronged, and justice needs to be restored; therefore we try very hard to police whether things are racism or what people are racists. On the contrary, race as an idea is often referred to indirectly and unconsciously in our daily life, but that is exactly why it has such a pervasive impact in our perceptions. A big part of our self-understanding is shaped by not only what people tell us what we are, but who like us, who get intimate with us, how people see us. If we want to understand how race influences our lives, we need to jump out of the box of judgment and dive deep into the lived stories and emotions of each walk of life.

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• Autoethnography

Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that allows us to do this delicate work. In autoethnography, the researcher is as vulnerable as the being-researched. We reveal the reasons why certain research topics strike us as important and interesting, and such reasons are often deeply personal. We make clear that we do not possess an unique ‘objective’ stance in this topic but, instead, stand amongst our research participants with our own subjectivity and blind-spots. It is by being very honest with our fallibility and at the same time courageous and sensitive to shameful or embarrassing experiences, the researchers earn a clearer perspective in a foggy field that is worth scientific attention.

Race and dating are both intricate topics tangled with the earliest memories and deepest emotions in us. In my autoethnographic research on race and dating, I use emergent and interactive interviewing to gain insight into participants’ experiences. Emergent interviewing is the process “in which informal interactions lead to more structured question-and-answer sessions.”[2] Interactive interviewing, on the other hand, is the process in which “researchers and participants share personal/cultural experiences and tell their stories in the context of their relationship.” Interactive interviewing requires less previous personal connection than emergent interviewing. 

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• Fieldwork and Analysis

In this research, I did emergent interviewing with 3 of my friends and interactive interviewing with 3 other participants. The biographies of participants are diverse along the spectrums of gender, sexuality, race, and cultural background. However, my participants are similar in regard to class, age, and religion.

The structured interviews usually lasted 30 to 60 minutes and took place in environments that are parts of participants’ daily lives. I did not use a set of questions to structure the interview. What I had is the following short list of topics I would like to touch upon and I let the rest of the conversation unfold freely toward whatever concerns the participants:

1. participants’ understanding of dating, 

2. their experiences of race in dating, and 

3. their unasked questions in this topic. 

Because of the structure of the interviews, I did not transcript the total recorded interview. Instead, I reheard the record and wrote down sentences that surprised me or sounded contradictory or interesting. After I have the collection of sentences from each interview, I started to use “hashtags” to collage these sentences. The “hashtags” I extracted from the sentences are:

Awareness, anxiety, difference, confusion, they/we, fetishizing, human-connection, identity, attraction, and lack-of-experiences.

RESULTS

I spend almost a whole month struggling with extracting any kind of result out of my data. There is no pattern. There is no confirmation of existing theories. The stories are as different from each other as mathematics is from literature. In fact, some stories about dating and race do have a mathematical tone, while others are like journeys with heros and adventures.

Then I realized that I have to use my own voice and write down the recurring thoughts I had while listening and revisiting the stories I collected. Like Stacy Holman Jones says in Autoethnography, as an autoethnographer, you need to be “starting where you are and finding yourself in story.” So, let me start.

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• “Dating” and Connection

When I asked my participants “what does dating mean for you,” I was expecting some, perhaps hesitant, but relatively straightforward definition, such as “it is a process in which I get to know a potential partner.” But what I heard are 

“I don’t really date – it’s either a serious relationship or just casual hookups.”

“I sucked at dating.”

“I don’t have much experience in dating.”

It seems like a commonly used notion of dating does not exist but, nevertheless, we somehow “get” what dating means when it is mentioned. To my surprise, some of my participants state that they do not have much experience in dating, but still have some significant relationships. Beth (alias) told me that, growing up feeling like an outcast, she has never “dated in that sense.” However, in her last significant relationship, she had a very acceptant and loving partner. “He’s the first person who’ll just let me be.” Natasha (alias) also told me about her three-year-long relationship back home in Mexico. Both of them had partners of a different skin color and, of course, the differences shaped some of their experiences with their partners, but at the core, they and their partners shared mutual understanding as human beings. It became obvious to me that the stories I was hearing are not about “just dating” but deep connections between people.

But what is “just dating”? Looking back to the existing research on race and dating, researchers often equate “marriage” to “dating” in this context[3], which is misleadingly far from what is happening in our lives. Some other researchers use “sexuality” to capture a different layer in this topic[4], which, I think, failed to cover the emotional dimension in dating. It is understandable why these research are structured this way – who has married whom of what race are hard facts and easy to trace, and cultural analysis focusing on power relations between massive social groups has statistics that back up the narrative. 

But certainly we are not only recipients of hierarchical ideologies who try to get married according to our socialization history. When we look at particular stories, we immediately see that lives are incomparably more sophisticated and messy than models and statistics. Kathy (alias) is a Taiwanese woman of my age, who experienced similar treatments from people in Berlin like I did. However, our stories are narrated in such different ways that I will not even consider her as “having a similar view” just because of our similar positionality in the society. As a young Asian woman living in Berlin, I experience gendered and racist stereotyping from people around me. For example, I often suspect that people assume me to be quiet and timid. These assumptions are difficult to spot, exactly because they are assumptions from individuals – people do not tell me straightforwardly that they think I am quiet and timid, but they show me these assumptions when we, for example, have conflicting interests or are making decisions. I cope with these uncomfortable suspicions by relentlessly demanding respect from my peers and partners. On the other hand, Kathy did not find these stereotypes bothering and, quite on the contrary, turned them into her advantages in dating. “They like Asian girls because we’re not so independent, tough, and arrogant.” 

“But wouldn’t you worry that some people like you just because of your race,” I asked. “If I sense that they’re into me just because I’m Asian, I wouldn’t take the relationship seriously anymore.” Kathy then told me how she felt seen as “simply a pretty girl” (in a positive way) by her ex-partner: “He never asked me about my culture, because he didn’t try to make sense of me based on my background.” I was perplexed at first, until another participant shared with me a similar view on this issue. One of Doreen’s (alias) parents is from Senegal, so, even though Doreen was born and grew up in a very white German city, she was often asked by others “where are you from” and found it very frustrating. She told me about the person she was currently dating: “He never asked me where I’m from, and I found it very interesting.”

When do we feel that we are being reduced to “just our race”? Is it, when people ask us where we are from, or when people do not ask us where we are from, because of our color? I contemplated this question. Certainly, this is one of our core concerns as people of color. What I have learnt from my research participants is that there are more than one way to feel (or not feel) being seen as humans and not just members of some “fictional groups”[5]. How we should be treated in order to feel seen as human beings is closely connected to how we forge our senses of identity. In Kathy’s case, she relies on her attractiveness as the source of self-worth and the pillar of her sense of identity. For Doreen, it is important that people do not doubt her German identity by asking where she is from. For me, being recognized as a person with deep thoughts and great capability is what makes me feel seen.

So, we all looked out from our specific standpoints of self-understanding, and, from here, we make experiences in the world. The non-aggressive assumption about Asian women can be a compliment for Kathy and an insult for me. This makes the claim of feminist standpoint theorists, that knowledge is socially situated, only correct to the extend that we will have different standpoints because of our social positions. However, having similar social positions does not entail that we will have closer standpoints. Social positions might influence a big part of our experience, but they do not determine how we make sense out of our experience. Standpoint theory is a good inspiration but far from being adequately sophisticated when it comes to real walks of lives.

We all strive to understand and make sense of ourselves, and we all want to be humans in others’ eyes. These two forces can drive each of us in different directions in different places and times, and create infinitely diverse stories of lives.

• Privilege: Different Indifferences, Indifferent Differences 

When it comes to the topic of race, many of us intuitively assume that white people or the “privileged” group are the source of the problem. However, in reality, the concept of “privilege” just does not get us much further, at least not anymore. When I interviewed Ben (alias), a 26 year-old German man, he told me: “I reflect on this a lot. I think race definitely has influence on me. But influence can be conscious or unconscious. I don’t think race has a conscious influence on me, but I think, unconsciously, I’m influenced.” Beside the confusing logic of being conscious about one’s unconsciousness, I asked myself, what is the difference between being open-minded and being aware of one’s “privilege.” Am I really “less privileged”? Are privileges comparable? Moreover, what are the racial privileges in the dating context?

Natasha told me, when she was growing up in Mexico, “I quickly realized that being white makes me more desirable…I get more attention from people in general.” Now, you may point the finger at this testimony and say, “see? That’s privilege.” But what about Kathy and I, who are also perceived as “more desirable” because of stereotypes about Asian women? “But those are disparaging,” you may argue. But by making this verdict, you are denying Kathy’s understanding on who she really is.

Political correctness demands us to have a sense of indifference – we should not be treated and should not treat others differently because of our differences. However, the narrative of privilege makes us paranoid about the differences we are allegedly blind to. These two logics can create a lot of anxiety and silencing effect in the “privileged” – in Germany, it is the white people. Ben told me, “I’m more hesitant to reach out to people of color [on online dating platforms], especially when they emphasize the importance of their racial identity in their profile.” “But don’t you think, once you get in touch with them, you will be able to understand their standpoint better?” I asked. Ben explained, “I don’t have that many people in my life who can give me first-hand testimony in this context. So I think it might be kinda weird for me to approach a person of color when I don’t even have that many non-white friends in my life … So I often thought, okay, maybe that’s why I won’t be a good fit for that person, because I don’t have that many opportunities to reflect on this topic.”

Ben’s concern is that, under the guideline of political correctness, he should be able to treat his potential partners indifferently of their race, but he struggles with the lack of knowledge about their differences from him and worries that he will appear to be insensitive and consequently make his partner feel different. After interviewing Ben, Natasha, and another white participant, it became apparent to me that these two rules – political correctness and awareness of one’s privilege – can paralyze those individuals from the “privileged” group and actually hinder the mutual understanding between different social groups.