Black-Asian mixed marriages face prejudice

Tony is black. Rena, his fiancee, is Asian. When Tony met Rena's parents for the first time, the dinner conversation was unusually fraught.

"I thought it would be appropriate for me to confront him with my concerns," recalls Rena's father, Devinda. "I made him aware how racist an Indian mind is. Probably for Tony it must have been (intimidating). He obviously wasn't very happy about it and he must have found it offensive."

Interracial marriage, seen as shocking in the 1950s, has gained widespread acceptance in much of Britain. But typically half the couple is white. A recent BBC radio documentary asserted that when a relationship consists of Asian and black partners, they often face hostility and ostracism from their families and their respective communities.

The race riots between Asian and black Britons in Birmingham, England, last year were evidence of the resentment between Britain's two biggest ethnic minorities, according to Tanya Datta, who wrote and produced the programme for the BBC.

Love across this divide is rare, with a handful of exceptions in the public eye, including the actors Adrian Lester, who is black and Lolita Chakrabarti, an Asian, as well as Trevor Phillips, the black chairman of the UK's Commission for Racial Equality, and his Indian wife Asha.

"There are no official statistics about these kinds of relationships," said Datta, a journalist of Indian descent, who hoped the documentary would generate a debate about race relations.

Datta spent six months finding numerous Asian-black couples with diverse experiences, not all of them negative. But few were willing to be interviewed and even fewer under their real names. Datta concluded that such relationships are, in the words of her programme's title, The Last Taboo. She said: "One Asian woman told me the marital advice she had received from her father when younger: 'The first choice for marriage is someone in your own community... and then after that, white is the next best thing... and after white, any other race in the world but black.'"

Tony, 30, a Londoner of Ghanaian origin, and 27-year-old Rena, of Indian descent, kept their relationship secret for months. Rena's father, Devinda, who runs a voluntary organization opposing caste discrimination, had laid down strict guidelines for whom his daughter should marry. He said: "Unfortunately I know a lot of black people who are from very fragmented families where the father is missing. I don't want my daughter to be left alone with two or three children who are of mixed race and father disappears and goes somewhere."

Rena, aware she had "broken all the taboos in one go," warned her boyfriend what to expect. "I said, 'Oh, by the way, this is what my mum and dad think about black people, and it's not good.'" Tony summed it up and said, "Oh, so your dad thinks that black men are bed- hopping baby breeders then," and then he said, "I'll try my best to disappoint your father, as in, I'll prove him wrong."

After that tense dinner at Rena's family home, in which Tony was grilled about Ghanaian culture to the extent that he "felt like the ambassador of Ghana," her parents were won over. They are now friends with Tony's family and looking forward to the wedding.

Another interracial couple, Leon and Sheela, live in a predominantly Asian part of Birmingham where they are subjected to stares and rude comments. Sheela has been loudly questioned by Asian shopkeepers as to why she is with a black man.

Source: China Daily