Black Gal on White Guy Drama

Black Man/White Woman couples, as portrayed in the media, are going to face taboo and historical connotations, whether played for comedy or drama. This trope has greater historical connotations; these can be seen in antebellum and slavery films such as Queen and Roots.

Contrary to popular perception, white man/black woman relationships are the most common interracial depiction in media. When these relationships are portrayed, two issues may work their way into the narrative:

  1. A black woman may be accused of "selling out" by dating white men. It is expected that black women will only be attracted to black men. If her lover is wealthy in addition to being white, she may receive accusations that she's a Gold Digger.
  2. A white man may also encounter derision. Black women aren't seen as attractive or desirable partners so a white man may be seen as "trading down" or strange for not wanting to date a white woman. Also, there can be a Race Fetish element that dates back to the 1600s slave trade.

White men and black women don't have the history of being "denied" each other but still carry the "forbidden fruit" element.

See also Me Love You Long Time for a similar trope involving Asian women and white men—which often meet much better acceptance, at least from white men (the demography that matters in the West) -- and the gender-inverted version Where Da White Women At?. But Not Too Black can play into all these tropes. The Chief's Daughter is also a common trope in Black Gal on White Guy Drama.

Examples of Black Gal on White Guy Drama include:

Film

  • The 2005 remake of Guess Whos Coming to Dinner (titled Guess Who) reversed the roles with a young black woman surprising her family by marrying a white man.
  • A scene deleted from Death Proof explains that Stuntman Mike only kills women he is sexually attracted to (Jungle Julia in the first group?) Later, the feet he plays with belong to Abby, played by Rosario Dawson, who herself is half black, half Puerto Rican.
  • Something New starring Sanaa Lathan and Simon Baker also has this as a main plot point with the woman's family looking down on the relationship.
  • In Monster's Ball[1], this is not only a source of conflict, but the main one at that.
  • The movie Lakeview Terrace deals with an interracial couple of the combination described by this trope, who get terrorized by their black neighbor.
  • In Road Trip, Kyle has his sexual debut with a black BBW at an afrocentric college. At the end of the movie, they are shown to be going steady.
  • Zebrahead.


Literature

  • A variation in Lawrence Block's Me Tanner, You Jane: Tanner figures out that his fellow American agent has been replaced by an ousted African dictator because the man finds a girl of mixed race exotic—she's very attractive (although only fourteen), but an American black man would be used to seeing mixed-race girls, while the locals in this part of Africa aren't integrated.
  • To Kill a Mockingbird: Dolphus Raymond is a white man who has children with a black woman - although he has to pretend to be the town drunk so that the town can deal with it. Note that, as the trope description says, a white man fathering children with a black woman was unremarkable (although this was less the case as slavery shrank further into the past and near-total segregation of the races became the ideal scenario as far as genteel white society was concerned). What the other white residents couldn't forgive him for was actually acknowledging his children and living with his family in the black part of town.
  • In one of the Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry novels, the protagonist (a young black girl) gets a little bit of Ship Tease with a white boy in town, culminating in the boy giving her a picture. The girl's father flips out and destroys the picture when he finds it, telling her it will put the whole family in danger if anyone finds out. Sadly this happened to be true, given that the novels were set in the South during Jim Crow.


Live Action TV

  • In House, an interracial couple faced opposition from the (white) male's father, and they interpreted this as the dad being a racist jerk. He was, sort of, just not in the way they thought. He didn't want him to date this particular black girl. House deduces that they share a rare genetic illness, meaning that they're actually half-siblings, resulting from an affair the father had with the woman's mother. It's implied that the relationship doesn't survive this revelation.
  • The MTV telefilm Love Song starring singer Monica combines this and the Uptown Girl trope.
  • The Fresh Prince of Bel Air: Will's aunt marries a "tall" man in a Very Special Episode.
  • In a Very Special Episode of Moesha titled "Reunion", Moesha meets up with an old white friend (played by Andrew Keegan) and they really hit it off. Her father has a problem with the potential relationship and Moesha is accused of being "too good for the hood." In the end, they decide not to get together.
  • Not exactly a "lust," but in an episode of WKRP in Cincinnati Venus is interviewed by a reporter from a black magazine, who it turns out is white (and played by Tim Ried's former comedy partner Tom Dreeson). They commiserate over being the only person of X color in an otherwise all-Y company, including wanting to ask out some female coworkers but being gunshy because of how the women might react due to their race.
  • Liberty and Ray-Ray on My Name Is Earl. They seem to be expies of Joy and Darnell, which makes sense considering that Liberty is Joy's half-sister, due to their father's philandering with black women
  • Boy Meets World had Shawn and Angela, treated the entire time as being meant for one another.
  • In one episode of the hidden camera show What Would You Do, two actors pose as a white male/black female couple in a bar. A black couple, also actors, come up to them and criticize their relationship, accusing the black woman of being insecure for dating a white man. The onlookers are not amused.
  • On an episode of The Golden Girls, Dorothy's son announced his surprise engagement to a black woman, who also happened to be much older. A lot of comedy was mined from Discriminate and Switch - it at first appeared Dorothy might take issue with the interracial aspect, but she was uspet at the age difference. Dorothy assumed the fiancee's family would have a similar problem with the age difference, but nope, they were more upset their daughter's fiance was white.
  • Reenacted on I Married A Mobster, where despite no previous attraction to White men, Dion falls for Italian-American Angelo Nicosia, who's a mob hitman and married with the latter case obviously being the bigger issue before and after his divorce as they marry and initially live the good life with a daughter, Gia until he's caught, leaving them in debt, but they stay together and she still waits for him to come out of jail as a reformed man.


Music


Theater

  • Inverted by Patrick Stewart, who played Othello as a white man, with the rest of the cast being black.
  • The whole storyline of the musical "Memphis" revolves around a white man falling in love with a black singer. Being set in a period racial segregation, this is played for drama.
  • Show Boat. White man is married to a mixed race woman who is considered black by the "one drop rule," so white man pricks woman with a pin and swallows a drop of her blood, making him black too by that standard.
  • Half of the song "Black Boys/White Boys" from Hair (theatre) is about black girls lusting after white boys. The other half is white girls lusting after black boys.
  • The Dion Boucicault play The Octoroon explores the challenges an interracial couple encounter in the pre-civil war American south.


Web Original


Western Animation

  • Lampshaded in The Cleveland Show when Rollo (during a black supremacist phase) asks his sister why she's going out with a white guy, she answers with "Do I look like a white girl? Or an Asian girl, or a..."
  • Averted in Danny Phantom Danny's brief relationship with Valerie Gray raises no eyebrows because Danny's white and Valerie's black, rather the source of conflict is that Danny's Danny Phantom and Valerie is also a ghost hunter who thinks he's the enemy.


Real Life

  1. ↑ Which by the way marks the first time an African American won the Best Actress Oscar, in 2002(!)
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