It,s all the media's fault.

'Could Mr. Right be white?' More black women consider 'dating out'.

This is seriously a headline from CNN. In a society that is so uptight about race and stereotype I can not think of any better example of the media worsening the situation than a headline like this. I mean read it, it has the two major colors, black and white. It mentions women and not men because no one would be shocked if it was an article about black men wanting to date white women. The headline question brings back thoughts, no matter how subliminal of the age old phrase from the sixties "white makes right". Beside the fact that the phrase "dating out", implies that they are breaking a social taboo. Face it, with little apparently non-offensive articles like this just the headline alone can hide enough implications of racism to incite even the most moderate of people. It isn't as if people are dating out side of their species, people have been dating outside of their color for centuries, now if the headline was, ' Can donkeys make hot lovers for humans?' I could see people being shocked a bit more by all this. The only reason for this article is that keeping the rift between Black America and White America is good for selling papers and good for politics. Does anyone ever notice that politicians count the the Black vote, the Latino vote, the Asian vote but never do you hear mention of the white vote. Should this not simply be "The Vote"? I would say yes in an equal society but, as long as we have media that can put out such seemingly non-offensive articles that simply perpetuate racial bias and stereotypes in a very subtle way, we will never live in an equal society. Why have I never seen an article about how white men want to date Asian women? Why is there never a news story covering Brazilian womens desire to date Black American men? Most likely because these aren't surprising issues or somewhat socially taboo so they wouldn't make good news. Most likely however, it is because, as long as we keep thinking about the small, unimportant things, the real problems in our society can continue to be hidden.

As a side note I would just like to say, if you have never read old "Bloom County", comic strips you should, especially the ones about "Penguin lust". Bloom County was a cartoon from the late 80's and early 90's that really helped form my perspective on things and I believe that Penguin lust was just another way of discussing this same issue of race and dating. So, even though he will never read this, I just gotta thank Berkeley Breathed.