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Despite increasing U.S. tolerance, the fact is that it is still far from easy for blacks to be seen with whites. On the campus, white girls who date blacks risk rejection by white male classmates. "Off campus no place is really safe," says a young Negro journalist in Detroit. "When I have a white girl in my car, I don't stop at red lights, I make sure my car's in good condition with the gas tank full and a good spare. God forbid I should have to stop somewhere with a white girl."
He speaks from experience. Two angry Southerners followed him and his date out of a Detroit restaurant one night, announced they were going to teach him that colored boys should leave white girls alone. "One guy started to pull a pistol," he recalls, "but I was able to grab it before he could quite get it out of his pocket. I had to fight him in the street to get the gun."
Deep Down Inside. Parental horror is another thing that mixed couples encounter. "Parents are a real hang-up about that part of my life," complains Candy Reuben, 21, a recent University of California graduate whose mother refuses to allow a black man in the house.
'' 'We're just thinking about what's best for you,' they tell me." One Seattle family sent their daughter to a psychiatrist when they found out that she had dated a Negro, and the parents of another girl turned her over to juvenile police as "ungovernable." Even parents who consider themselves liberals are likely to quail. "My mother is a typical American clandestine bigot," says a New York girl whose family brought her up to be color blind—until she brought home her black suitor.
Many Negro parents are equally adamant in opposing mixed matches. "My parents are pretty liberal, but they don't want me to bring home a white girl," says a Long Island Negro. In Washington, D.C., Vickie Hatcher, who has been dating both white boys and blacks throughout high school, reports: "My family has told me that really deep down inside, they would rather that I marry a Negro. They say I have a good personality and a good intelligence and they would rather that I pass these things on in the Negro race. I sort of agree with them."
"Look How Beautiful." Black Power advocates are even more militantly opposed. "Since the Black Power movement, the kids will talk a little if you date a fellow not of your race. You feel it a little bit," Vickie Hatcher says. So far, however, the Black Power exhortation to "look to your own first" is often ignored, even by Negroes who consider themselves confirmed Black Nationalists. Typical is Patrick Kelley, a 24-year-old Negro from Detroit, who calls himself "a living contradiction, thinking black but not being black. If I take a white girl into a black community, they will figuratively, with their eyes, pull over to the side and say, 'Brother, get hip. You're living a lie. Come over to the winning side, your side.' " He is not yet ready to stop dating whites. "Maybe next year," he says.