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Whiteness is still held up as a grand carnival prize you can walk out with, as long as you have enough model minority tokens to exchange. This type of thinking is mirrored in Hollywood, as the most common portrayals of interracial love are black/white. Lakeview Terrace, Rome & Jewel, Save The Last Dance, Everything Everything, Black Or White, Guess Who, The Mountain Between Us, and countless more all had either black man / white woman or white man / black woman relationships.

I'm not saying these movies are in the wrong. On the contrary, I think we should have a lot more interracial dating, because you get the bonus of pissing off neo-Nazis. But I'm pro-all-interracial. Show us more diversity, like Asian/black, Latino/Asian, Middle-Eastern/black, etc. If you don't, you create an underlying assumption that whiteness always has to be present in everything, that it's the crucial dough in a recipe that can have any other race slapped in as flavor.

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At its worst, this props up white men and women as the ultimate objects of affection for minorities to win. Take 2017's critical darling The Big Sick, a movie about a Pakistani-American man who falls head over heels for a white American woman. It's been widely praised, but it's also been criticized for stereotyping all its nonwhite women and not giving them any depth. Because who cares about a bunch of undateable South Asian women?

I've learned the hard way about how white skin is generally at the top of the beauty standard hierarchy, and that hierarchy is reinforced in the entertainment we consume. White women are frequently presented as the ultimate goal for men of color to achieve, and I used to think the same way. I held up white women as the most desirable because that's what everyone, including my family, told me. It's like head lice -- you don't know you have it until someone combs through your bad habits in shock and horror. And if a black guy like me can develop shitty attitudes toward interracial relations, then it absolutely happens to your friendly neighbor who swears he loves black people because he likes both LeBron and Kanye.