An article in the Atlantic, "Chinese Workers in Africa Who Marry Locals Face Puzzled Reception at Home," reports on a post on the Chinese culture blog ChinaSmack, which presents this trend as a solution for Chinese men in a country where they far outnumber available women. (Preferences for male over female babies and the one-child-per-household limit there lead to a dating and marriage market in which men are overrepresented.)
Will seeing these pairings outside of IKEA commercials provoke a "Love doesn't know color, and soon everyone in the world will be beige and racism will be over" reaction in many? Sure. But are they a sign of forthcoming worldwide color-blindness? Not so fast.
Clutch magazine's Britni Daniel provided a representative comment from ChinaSmack, translated, in her post on the topic:
Chinese women marrying blacks is no longer something rare, whereas in comparison men very rarely dare to bring black girls back home to China. I won’t say anything and go ahead and post the photos.
In my neighborhood is a Chinese engineer who returned from Angola, and his wife is a black girl. However, she's one of those very pretty high-end black girls. She's very slender and not one of those fat auntie types. Her skin also isn't the kind of oily/greasy black but rather black-brownish and more brown …
"Not one of those fat auntie types"? Sigh. While the trend might well be the key to changing some numbers when it comes to the dating scene in China, it's clear that adjustments to racial attitudes, stereotypes and standards of beauty that devalue black women — here in the U.S. as well as abroad — won't be such an easy fix.
Read more at Clutch magazine and the Atlantic.
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