There’s something about America, our history, our values or maybe the very contradictions of our society that can still make interracial relationships a lot more difficult than others. Most relationships deal with mostly internal pressures with perhaps a little added tension from family or friends. Interracial relationships deal with all of the usual difficulties plus negative input from society at large, which means that people you don’t even know and have never met will have an opinion about your relationship, often negative, simply because two people from different groups have fallen in love.

Historically, in America, the interracial relationships that have been met with the most widespread and violent responses exist between blacks and whites. Strictly due to America’s history of importing blacks as slaves which created a huge divide between blacks and whites, interracial relationships made headlines, sparked riots and even led to the creation of laws both forbidding them and protecting them, depending on the different states involved. It’s a sad story when a country as a whole casts a shadow over love between any two consenting adults.

When Sydney Poitier “Came to Dinner”, when Sammy Davis Jr. married Mai Britt, when a black man first kissed a white woman on TV, people got upset, sparks flew, fires burned and people died. It seems silly now, in retrospect, that a black man and a white woman should have any more problems maintaining a relationship than anybody else. But, in some places, they still do. And even though that situation has quieted down some, it hasn’t gone away and any odd set of circumstances could conceivably fan those flames once again.

Even worse, due to the history of the past 25 years in America, with more and more people coming here from different parts of the world, the problem has actually expanded. Instead of blacks, Muslims have come under pressure in America and interracial relationships between whites and Muslims are the new sore spot in interracial relationships. Hopefully, we can evolve someday to a place where relationships between any two people can be treated without the distraction of skin color, religious background or any other irrelevant factors.