Dating At Uni As a WOC In a Sea Of White People

“No, like where are you REALLY from?”

For many young adults, myself included, the modern dating world is a nightmare. In recent years, it’s been little more to me than just a rollercoaster of failed situationships, commitment issues, regret, heartbreak and tears. Not to be too negative.

Of course, there are universal issues that make dating and relationships such an exhausting addition to the average university student’s academic life and commitments. For example, the above-mentioned commitment issues are all too common these days. From experience, I can tell you that it’s extremely hard to maintain the effort for a talking stage in which he only replies every few hours, and messages you exclusively after midnight, alongside the hundred upcoming essay deadlines you’re bound to have. More often than not, you prioritise the former which inevitably ends in the also above-mentioned heartbreak and tears (and equally disappointing grades).

But are there other issues that people, or specifically women of colour in particular are uniquely faced with, and hence struggle to navigate? Put simply, yes. That is, in my experience, and in the experiences of virtually every other non-white person I know at my university.

Granted, since the demographic of my university is predominantly white, I’ve sadly been able to find very few POC friends here. But what seems to bond us together, more often than not, is shared (negative) experiences involving the ignorance, if not blatant racism, of some of the white students around us. With my female friends, I regularly find us discussing these in the context of dating or romantic situations. As a result, I felt it necessary to document my thoughts here as a personal exploration of the way in which WOC, at least in my life and my university, attempt to navigate the complexities of dating in a white-dominated area.

MY RACE IS A 'THING'

When you’re clearly a minority in the city where you live and study, most of the time you naturally feel ‘othered’. It’s impossible not to notice that you don’t look like the majority of the people around you, especially the people in your circle, so perhaps you feel like, as a result, you can’t fully relate to your white friends about certain matters, when race is involved. I’ve found that this has caused me to inherently feel as though my race is a ‘thing’ - that it is relevant, it matters, and it’s being noticed, in daily situations when it really shouldn’t. It’s important to mention that I’m so lucky and grateful to have some of the loveliest white friends who I genuinely regard as great allies, but unfortunately it doesn’t always feel the same with them.

Any person of colour will understand the way that feeling as though your race matters when you’re in a group of people, in that it may be an issue, can lead to insecurities about your self-worth and desirability, as well as your confidence. It broke my heart to hear my best friend at university say that most of the time, as a Black girl, she won’t even bother to do the typical university thing of casually getting with or chatting to loads of people on nights out, because she immediately assumes that they just won’t be interested in her due to her race. If they are, she says, chances are it’s only because she’s a fetish to them.

Personally, having grown up similarly as a visible minority in a small white-dominated town, I find I already have internalised negativity concerning my appearance and consequently, my desirability. This only seems to make issues relating to race within dating worse and it’s such an exhausting burden to carry as a young woman.

To me, it seems that fetishising is the main problem in my own, and my WOC friends’ dating lives. The ignorance of some of the white boys we’ve met is shocking but also makes us (as we tend to say on a regular basis at this point) “disappointed, but not surprised” - we’ve learned generally not to expect much better. Some examples, out of many, that immediately come to mind is some white man’s proud statement of

“Never have I ever been with an Asian!”

in an attempt to flirt with me, and our overhearing of the equally proud

“Nah, you know I love my African girls!”

coming from someone else.

This means that my childhood best friend, who is also Bengali, and I are on the completely same page most of the time; in fact, we’ve identified a pattern in the way we respond to advances from a white man.

It always begins with becoming immediately wary of the fact that he’s showing any interest in us in the first place, and therefore feeling like we can’t trust him. As a result, we either choose not to engage or if we do, we’re subconsciously inhibited by this. Often it’s because we can’t be sure that we’re not just a fetish to them, though other times, it’s simply that we have had self-critical thoughts and views ingrained in our minds for years, from the things we’ve heard, experienced or been made to feel about our desirability as women of colour, that make us downright surprised that a white man could be attracted to us.

"LOWKEY SURPRISED HE GOT WITH ME LOL"

To this day, she and I will joke with each other that one of us is “lowkey surprised he got with me lol” when it comes to a straight white British man. Of course, it’s not only white people who can fetishise, but they seem to be the usual culprits for us.

It’s reached the point where my friends and I immediately sigh (and put our guards up) when a man in a club smoking area or in a bar asks the dreaded question: “Where are you from?”.

Firstly there’s the dilemma of never knowing whether they mean geographically in the UK or ethnically; more often than not it’s the latter. Due to all of these racist undertones in dating that haunt us WOC, it’s not uncommon for us to simply be reluctant to answer, since there’s a considerable chance we’ll then need to brace ourselves for a creepy, if not an annoyingly enthusiastic response when we say what our ethnicity is.

All jokes aside, this always makes me sad when I think about it. I’m SO proud of my culture and where I come from but somewhere along the way, in situations like these, I’ve become reluctant to speak about my background. I guess it’s understandable when I think back to some of the ways in which that same question has been phrased. My ‘favourites’ are:

“No, like where are you REALLY from?”

and

“So, what are your origins?”

(I don’t know why but the second one, and the creepy way that it was said to me, feels inherently racially motivated. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.)

It’s clear that so much of the wider problem of racism and the fetishising of WOC is based on stereotypes, which is in itself another issue. A final sad joke that is repeatedly made among my friends is in terms of calculations (we’ve become so adept at this): despite the maybe 20% of the time when a man starts speaking to you with generally innocent motives - i.e. without any thought of your race or ethnicity - the other 80% is always evenly split between either a blatant hate crime or their fetishisation of you.

I’m so glad I have POC friends that I can talk to about these issues, and ironically enjoy just how laughable some of it is. However, it remains fundamentally a disheartening representation of the ignorance that young WOC in the UK still face. It's clear that this needs greater discussion so as not to normalise it any further.