Lauren Handelsman, a white sophomore at Brown University, didn’t expect many problems when she began dating a black student in the fall of 1994.
“We’re at Brown,” she remembers telling Thabiti Brown, her boyfriend, who is also a sophomore, as their friendship grew serious. “People are really open-minded here. People are nice here.”
“Well,” she says now, “I guess not.”
She had expected a few racist asides when they walked off-campus in Providence holding hands, or maybe some awkward small talk at mostly white parties.
Instead, the most flak has come from black women who think that black men who date non-black women are abandoning their race, Ms. Handelsman says. Many of them glare when she and Mr. Brown walk around the campus, she says. Friends tell her that some black women criticize her behind her back.
Last October, in an incident that still has students talking, seven black women got personal in their crusade against black-white romance.
The women, who had gathered in the dormitory room of Felicia Carmen Lyde, a sophomore, scrawled “Wall of Shame” on a wall with an erasable blue marker. They then wrote the names of famous black men who either date or have married white women, according to Ms. Lyde.
Then, on the door of Ms. Lyde’s room, the women made a second list, with about a dozen names of black men on the campus who, they said, date white women -- including Thabiti Brown and, simply, “the basketball team.”
Ms. Lyde lives on the busy first floor of Harambee House, a dormitory for students who are interested in African-American culture. News of the “Wall of Shame” circulated quickly, setting off fierce arguments within the black community at Brown. Men on the list were hurt, as were children of mixed-race marriages. Most Brown students, however, did not learn about it until Michael Maimon, a white columnist at The Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, wrote about it in January.
The black women who created the list say it was the result of frustration that has been building for a long time. Black men at Brown have simply rejected them, they say.
“People come up to me and say, ‘Why did you do it? Didn’t you know it would hurt people’s feelings?’” says Ms. Lyde.
“Didn’t they know that my feelings have been hurt all along?”
When Ms. Handelsman heard about the list from a friend, she stayed up all night crying. “I was very upset, offended, hurt -- just angry in general,” she says.
On one level, the controversy involving interracial dating at Brown is simply the most intimate version of a broader campus debate involving race and ethnicity. At many colleges, the need for racial solidarity runs up against the ideal of race-blindness in such issues as housing and special orientation programs for minority students.
But the dating issue is also a question of demographics. At Brown, black women outnumber black men 211 to 154. The discrepancy is even wider nationally. About 900,000 black women were enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs at colleges and universities in 1994, compared with 550,000 black men, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
It makes things worse, says Leslie Abrams, a black junior at Brown, when “the black men who are here don’t want to have anything to do with you.” She says she was not involved in the “Wall of Shame” but sympathizes with those who created it.
Some black women at Brown believe that half of the black men there date white women at least occasionally.
But Ralph Johnson, a sophomore who made Ms. Lyde’s list, says he can count the number of black men in relationships with white women on two hands.
Mr. Johnson, who says he usually dated black women in high school, says he fell for Rachel Davidson, who is white, shortly after a friend introduced them in a campus cafeteria. They have dated for more than a year now.
“Two people can love each other, and there should be nothing wrong with that,” he says. “I cannot be blamed for the lack of black men who get together with black women.”
Rarely do controversies over interracial dating become public. Last spring, a Yale University graduate set off a furor on that campus with an article in The New York Times in which she described the dim prospects that black women at Yale faced in trying to get a date. The story said some black women were tolerating unfaithful boyfriends or were bowing to sexual pressure.
On weekend nights at Brown, Ms. Lyde says, “black women just sit around and talk with each other. That’s it.”
Ms. Handelsman says that she understands why black women are angry, but that the “Wall of Shame” was such a personal attack that it should have been treated as a violation of the student-conduct code. She took her complaints to Leonard Perry, an associate dean of student life who also serves as an adviser to Harambee House.
He visited Ms. Lyde’s room but says he saw only a few names on her door, and nothing that said “Wall of Shame.” Because Ms. Handelsman did not file a written complaint, the university did not conduct a formal investigation.
Mr. Perry noted tension between black men and women in the dormitory, however, and suggested a workshop on interracial dating.
About 50 students -- almost all of them black, and two-thirds of them women -- talked, cried, and shouted during a tempestuous four-hour meeting. When some black men denied that they loathed their own race, black women began to call out more names of black men who date white women.
Some students were angry that the administration had not responded more forcefully to the list.
“For Brown to ignore the ‘Wall of Shame’ is really pretty wild,” says Tabitha Suarez, a Daily Herald columnist. “Brown is the kind of university that goes haywire over any breach of sensitivity.”
Black women say black men naively succumb to standards of beauty drawn from mainstream magazines and movies, which present blond, blue-eyed women as the ideal.
Ms. Abrams, the Brown junior, who grew up in Gulfport, Miss., says that as a teen-ager, she went to bed wishing that her kinky hair would straighten by the time she awoke. Now she’s learned to love her hair, and she’d like black men to do the same. “If you’re in love, and it’s a simple matter of attraction, then go for it,” she says. “But if you’re attracted to a white woman because you’ve been taught that white is the prime standard of beauty, then that’s problematic.”
The women at Brown have a point, says Larry Hajime Shinagawa, an assistant professor in the department of American multicultural studies at Sonoma State University who has studied interracial marriage. Twice as many black men as black women are married to whites, he notes, adding that stereotypes have something to do with the pattern.
Some black men may accept racist stereotypes of black women as bossy homemakers or strident complainers, he argues. “Unfortunately, there are still some very, very negative views about black women in this society.”
Ms. Abrams says some black men are looking for a chance to “step up” to the white world. “I’ve heard guys here say they’re going to go get their good job, their big salary, their big house, their big cars -- and their white wife.”
She isn’t interested in dating outside her race, she says, because she worries about the way racism might subtly infect the relationship.
Mr. Johnson, the Brown sophomore, says black women are overstating the extent of interracial dating. While black women flock around what he calls “flashy guys” and athletes, he says, quiet and studious black men are ignored.
Black women “should start looking up” at all the available men around them, he says. “These are brothers who will be running companies someday.”
He says the idea that he has turned his back on his race by dating a white woman is absurd. He is the treasurer of Brown’s largest black-student group, the Organization of United African Peoples, and spent much of this winter scheduling campus speakers for Black History Month. Once a week, he heads to a Providence community center where he serves as a mentor for black high-school students.
The “Wall of Shame” is a distraction, he says. “There are so many other things that need this kind of energy and attention.”
Ms. Davidson, his girlfriend, says she wasn’t surprised by the naming of names on the door. She had sensed resentment from some black women from the first week of her relationship. “It was just a blatant display of something that we knew existed subtly,” she says.
The incident has strained relations between allies in Brown’s minority community. Several members of the Brown Organization of Multiracial and Biracial Students have one parent who is black and another who is white. “It’s indirectly expressing disapproval for their existence,” says Emily Lam, a leader of the group. She is of Chinese and Peruvian ancestry.
Jocelyn Burrell, a freshman who has a black father and a white mother, says she was devastated when she heard of the list. As a child, she says, she was stung when she overheard black men make “horribly derogatory” comments about black women.
She attended the heated meeting about interracial dating at Harambee House in part because she wanted to commiserate with the black women, she says. Yet she also wanted to tell them how badly she had been hurt by their action.
But the black woman leading the conversation would not let her speak, she says, because she is dating a white high-school student. “It’s like there was a hierarchy of pain.”
There is for Ms. Lyde. “I’m trying to talk to the black man, and they’re crying about being insulted. That’s the problem -- everyone wants to get in on the conversation.”
Several black men have erased their names from the list on Ms. Lyde’s door. But even after eight months, two names remain. Ms. Lyde has no plans to remove them.
“Is it not the truth?” she asks.
