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Married Swirling

Liars and Gaslighters: How the New Anti-Swirling Meme Falls Flat

It seems like every week there’s a new anti-swirling article on so-called black women’s interest blogs, and I have to wonder why. I mean, we’re so trivial…right? Why all the attention?

One recent piece took issue ostensibly not in criticism of interracial dating, but of the term, “swirling.”Yesha Callahan wrote in her recent Clutch piece, “Please Stop Calling Interracial Relationships ‘Swirling,” said in her rant…

It’s not so much the fact that people are profiting off of the word, but the use of the word in general is a bit much. I understand that “swirling” is supposed to symbolize some soft serve ice cream coming together as one. But I’d rather not relate a relationship to some Dairy Queen soft serve. Swirling reminds me of when people referred to it previously as “Jungle Fever”. Just because you sweeten up the name doesn’t make it any better.

Are you serious? This is all you have to complain about? You don’t like “swirling” to be compared to a delicious food? Call me crazy, but there’s a lot worse words to describe interracial relationships. (Miscegenation, anyone??) Oh, and I bet the author doesn’t ever refer to her loved one as ‘honey,’ because to do so reduces affection to a sticky substance produced by insects. She probably doesn’t call him ‘baby’ either for fear she might get mistaken as a pedophile. She probably won’t call him ‘boo’ for fear someone might mistake him for a walking turd.

The other issue that is perhaps the most insidious is the criticism that books like “Swirling” aren’t needed because “we’ve always had interracial relations.” Wait–they’re right about that. There HAS always been interracial relationships, but what they deliberately fail to admit is that those relationships aren’t always easy. Wonder if The Lovings would agree with how people poo-poo the experiences of people who dare cross color and race to find love. Ask that couple in Savannah, Georgia attacked by three thugs simply because the girl was black and the boy was white if interracial relationships are “no big deal.” And if interracial relationships were just like every other relationship, then this site wouldn’t exist, because I wouldn’t have any readers, traffic, or advertisers. But…this site get hundreds or thousands of views, so what gives? You have to have an incredible lack of empathy or your head firmly planted in your ass-cheeks to deny that swirling couples don’t face social consequences. They do.

“Nothing is more frustrating than that denial peace-love-and-tofu-hippy crap ‘interracial relationships are just like any other relationships.’ You see this way they don’t have to ever learn anything about anyone else culture or address the obvious cultural conflict that is inevitable with all of these relationships. I have found that most often these comments are made by people that has no idea what an interracial relationship is really like,” says JC Davies, author of I Got the Fever. Davies got skewered in black media for her no-hold-barred book (which is quite funny) chiefly because even in 2012, despite having a bi-racial president, and a gestapo-like political correctness culture, folks STILL aren’t comfortable talking openly about race.

Many times the very people who claim to be exhausted of all the interracial dating talk are the ones who give the members of such relationships so much flack. On one hand, they say go ahead with IR, but they don’t want to hear about it. Sounds a lot like the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” military policy we once had doesn’t it? Celebration of such diversified unions is met with scorn and often ridicule. Let’s also not mention the fact that those folks interested in IR often have a paralyzing fear of rejection, which is why sites like DateWhoYouWant.com and InterracialDating.com even exist. InterracialDating.com was born from a real need from single people to find others singles who were open to dating other races. Many people live in areas where its not easy to know whether people of another race are firstly single, and secondly, whether they are open to dating someone of a different race,” says Rob Thompson, founder of AfroRomance.

But according to these people, blogs, matching making services, groups and books dedicated to giving people a safe place to discuss their relationships and commune with others is just to freakish to imagine. How kind of them, huh?

Follow Christelyn on Instagram and Twitter, and subscribe to our YouTube channel. And if you want to be a little more about this online dating thing, InterracialDatingCentral is the official dating site for this blog.

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