Despite W.E.B. DuBois's 1903 proclamation that America's "problem of the twentieth-century is the problem of the color line," romance and marriage between blacks and whites on some level has existed since Africans arrived in the New World. Interracial relationships have been dealt with in literature, the media, on the big screen and on television; comparatively, these unions have been virtually unrecognized in popular music. Songs that deal with this subject present the same messages as in other media: these partnerships don't last; they're based on myths and stereotypes; and such unions force the participants into social isolation. Unlike literary authors, screenplay writers, and writers for television and media dependent upon economics and communal audience appeal, lyricists assume greater poetic license in presenting primarily heterosexual interracial relations. These songs are generally an exercise of heterosexual males speaking for or about women to other males and echo Spike Lee's comment that "the last taboo [--blacks and whites together in any context deemed 'intimate'--] is still taboo."

Historically, many 1800's plantation/minstrel songs deal with interracial intimacies. Lyrics about white masters and black female slaves, often their "yellow gals," were commonplace. Tunes like "A Little More Cider Too" and "Adolphus Morning Glory" present white males' open declarations of their affections for black females. In the first, a man announces: "I love the white girl and the black, I love all the rest." In the second, a man announces his relationship with a "color'd gal" who has cast a spell over him. H.T. Bryant's "Balm in Gilead" details how "Massa lov'd his good old Jamaica . . .Way down in Alabam." That the relationship takes place the heart of Dixie with its history of tensed race relations, forced miscegenation, and violence recalls the social order put into place during and after slavery, making women slaves the sexual pawns of white men. Other antebellum tunes present forlorn black male slaves longing for the affections of either "Miss Melinda May," "Miss Cornelia," or "Miss Sally." Only Miss Sally dares to kick up her heels with a black man. As minstrel songs parody sexual relations between white masters and mulatto slaves, other tunes of the 1800's attack the liaison between President Thomas Jefferson and his mulatto slave Sally Hemings, the mother of five children believed to be Jefferson's, or his nephew's. One song speaks as Jefferson about his attraction to "Monticellian Sally, a lass so luscious ne'er was seen." Federalist presses regularly presented "bawdy ballads" attacking Jefferson's moral transgressions.

Interracial songs can be further differentiated as songs that demonstrate social opposition through violence; machismo songs primarily of black and white males flaunting their "manhood"; songs about specific race history moments in this country; and songs about tolerance for interracial couples. No song celebrates such unions without regard for social approval. Many songs meant to challenge racial bigotry actually perpetuate myths and stereotypes, reflecting and escalating fears that "race-mixing" is a "grave threat to . . . people's values of identity, homogeneity, and survival."

One of the earliest African American folk songs to document violence against those who cross racial lines romantically is "Miss Dinah," a tragic story of a white woman and a black male. Physical violence and violent threats are used by white men to control white women and black men. In The Stories's "Brother Louie" (1973), a white boy falls in love with a black female. When Louie takes this woman home to meet his parents, chaos erupts. There is no mention of the black parents' responses to this union. The song is a warning to white "brothers" with black women: "Louie, Louie, you're gonna cry." Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers's "Lee and Molly" (1988) also shows another white boy in love with a black girl. Family opposition again comes from Lee's parents, especially from his father who beats him for his choice. We don't know how Molly's folks react to this union, but while blacks and whites as groups object to interracial unions, black families have generally been more accepting of such unions when they occur, perhaps because whites involved with black partners allegedly move down the social ladder by "contaminating" their superior whiteness, while blacks supposedly improve their social status with white mates. As Marley's song questions what society and white parents teach their children about racial difference and individual choices, it validates this union of star-crossed lovers, maintaining that love can exist when boundaries are crossed, but not without personal sacrifice. Such family opposition from whites occurs in Janis Ian's "Society's Child" (1967), wherein a white female ends her relationship with a black male because of environmental pressures. This white female is unwilling to challenge her family and her larger community. She is left spiritually unfulfilled, longing for the day she will challenge society and follow her heart.

A white woman's children are legally taken from her because of her alleged involvement with a black man in Lou Reed's "The Kids" (1973). Rumor and possibility become truth for this white man who alludes to his wife's interracial bisexuality, an affront to him as a masculine military man. Although bisexuality is an issue with this wronged husband, that she is accused of bedding black men is the main reason a father uses his children to punish their mother.

Southern white manhood is defined and challenged in the context of interracial intimacies in Neil Young's "Southern Man" (1970) as a white man threatens violence to maintain his order. When walls of segregation tumble and a white woman is seen entertaining a black man, the violence of "crosses . . . burning fast" and of "screaming and bullwhips crackling" is this white man's way of reinstating southern white men's code of honor. No violence occurs within the song, but the white woman is warned of the dangers for herself and the black man if she continues her social transgressions.

In "Recently," by The Dave Matthews Band (1993), a white male is in a relationship with a black woman despite disapproving stares when they are together. The assaulting effect of stares is another form of social violence. The white male says that he and his partner ignore the stares, but we don't know how or if they affect his female companion. Is the white male being paranoid? Does his own personal (dis)comfort level with a black woman in public make him interpret stares as he does? Perhaps the staring confirms that neither he nor his companion can abandon the historical baggage that connects race, sex, and gender.

In Blessid Union of Souls's ballad, "I Believe" (1995), a black male speculates that his white girlfriend's father won't respect him as a "man" when the father discovers that his daughter is dating a "brother from the street." Despite hiding their involvement from her father, they are hopeful that their love will prevail, that her father will see her beau as a decent human being, "not just a black man." That "Lisa lives in fear" implies that Lisa's father, if and when he discovers this relationship, will resort to violence with her or them both. Nevertheless, she risks severing family ties and violent retaliations.

"The Right to Love" (1950s) was written for Lena Horne and her white husband Lennie Hayton when they made their marriage public after three years of keeping it secret. Here, the couple whose love is "wrong" and "shameful" becomes "indifferent to the cold, unfriendly stares,/ indifferent to the whispered talk." The song makes clear that for them surviving a hostile environment strengthens their commitment to each other. Emphasis on being stared at is presented in Stevie Wonder's "Jungle Fever" (1991), wherein a black male tells of the social opposition he and his white/ Italian female companion meet-"staring, gloating, laughing, looking/ like we've done something wrong." Trying to convince himself that he doesn't notice the stares and unsolicited comments highlights that the black man is affected by them.

Stares and family opposition pale when compared to the physical violence and destruction detailed in 10,000 Maniacs's "Jubilee" (1989), wherein a "Christian" church janitor, symbolically repairing broken church items, also cleanses the world of sin and shamefulness. "Simple minded" Tyler Glen believes his duty to God is to stop the filth of young boys abusing alcohol and young girls allowing themselves to be "man-handled" by drunken boys. These transgressions are the background to what Tyler sees as the greater sin: "a black girl and a white boy kissing shamelessly/ Black hands on white shoulders/ White hands on black shoulders, dancing." Becoming God who promised the second destruction of the world through fire, Tyler sets the dance hall aflame. The song connects Christianity, race relations, sexuality, and violence.

Much interracial music is devoted to black male-white male boasting of their sexual prowess. Public Enemy's "Fear of a Black Planet" (1990), claims to know a white man's greatest fear: that his daughter, sister, wife, mother, or lover will find sexual satisfaction with an allegedly super-endowed black male, and that that such "mongrelizing" and race-mixing will do away with "pure" white folks altogether. This song alleges that it's not black male sexuality alone that threatens white men; it's the illogical and racist one-drop rule that maintains socially and historically that anything mixed with black creates black. The black male is empowered by the white men's fears of contamination with black "genes and chromosomes."

In Chuck Berry's "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man," a black male boasts of his control over white women and by extension white men, claiming that "a [white] woman will walk thirty miles across a desert, she'll fight and lose both her arms like Venus de Milo over a "brown-eyed handsome man." When a mulatto girl is unable to choose between a white lawyer or a white doctor, the daughter is advised by her white mother to find a man like the daughter's own "brown-eyed handsome" father.

Addressed to white females in search of "dark meat," Ice Cube's "Cave Bitch" (1993) recalls Eldridge Cleaver's political treatise, Soul on Ice (1968), wherein Cleaver professes an attraction to white women solely as revenge against white men for historical injustices done black women specifically, black people generally. Cleaver's poem "To a White Girl" clarifies his attraction to white women: they are traps and temptresses, snares for black men draining them of their black manhood. Ice Cube's "Cave Bitch" echoes "white witch." Ice Cube's lessons from Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrahkan inform his attitudes about race, gender, and sexuality.

Ice T/ Body Count's "KKK Bitch" (1992) focuses less on the attraction of white females to black males as the authority this attraction gives black males over white men, particularly over white girls' fathers. Acknowledging the perceived universal fear of any white man --that his daughter will sleep with a black man-the black male taunts the white man who loses control over his white daughter. As in "Fear of a Black Planet," Ice T asserts that the white man's greatest fear is the black man's greatest power: giving the white father "a grandson named little Ice T."

Ice T's "Momma's Gotta Die Tonight" (1992) is a companion to Ice T's "KKK Bitch." While the song is an attack, physical and otherwise, on a black mother by her black son who resents his mother's racist teachings about hating whites, it is also reveals a black man's self-hatred and powerlessness in resisting white females. The white female figure is at first maternal--loving him, touching him, giving him birth. The black male feels this attraction betrays his black mother and that the only means of making a sacrifice for his racial/ sexual transgressions is to destroy his "mama"; his black mother and his white female lover become psychologically the same. Instead of accepting responsibility for his actions with and attraction to his black mother/ white female lover, the narrator chooses to kill her, not realizing that the death of the mother/ lover does not diminish his racial self-hatred or take away his lust for her and others like her.

Ice Cube's "Horny Little Devil" (1991) is a threat to white men who want intimacy with black women. Ice Cube's narrator proposes to know how black women feel about such involvement with allegedly sexually inferior white men. Whereas he was unable to "defend" his Nubian princess against lecherous advances and sexual assaults of white men in slavery and Jim Crow, the speaker vows now to "kill" the "little devil" pursuing any black female. This black male becomes a black woman's protector, her interpreter, her voice. No acknowledgment is made of the possibility that a black woman may want a white man, a reality that would undermine this black male's own masculine self-image.

White males' participation in this bragging game is demonstrated in The Rolling Stones' tunes "Brown Sugar," which one reviewer called "a forceful picture of colonial racism with another [Mick] Jagger fantasy," and "Some Girls." In "Brown Sugar" (1971), a white male romanticizes the antebellum past of sexual liaisons between white slave masters and black female slaves. In the song, a white male celebrates the "performances" of female slaves who participate in midnight love/ dance sessions with their masters. It's not clear whether the white master and the voyeuristic white school boy are sleeping with the same "young girl slave" or whether the young boy has his own young slave for such exploits. Importantly, sounds of pleasure and pain are blurred as the younger white male may be sexually aroused by the pain inflicted upon a female slave unwilling or reluctant to do a master's bidding. That the slaveholding mistress is aware of her husband's carryings on only enhances the observing boy's attribution of masculine and racial power and manhood to the "scarred old slaver."

The Rolling Stones's controversial "Some Girls" (1978) claims that black girls just want sex -- all night long. Although this white male admits being unable to match the sexual demands of black women, his admission in no way undermines his masculine self-image as he continues to boast of "girls" of all races, ethnicities, and cultures who give him things -- money, jewelry, babies, clothes, their bodies. Yet of all the "girls" he mentions-white, Asian, French, and Chinese -- none of the other girls are presented as sexual freaks as are black girls.

A white male trophies a black girlfriend in Porno for Pyros' "Black Girlfriend" (1993). Attracted to the alleged aggressiveness and violence of black women during the 1990 L.A. Riots, this male has found the "perfect companion" in a black woman because, according to his racist perceptions, black women "don't play around [and] keep any man in line." The repetitious "my black girlfriend" and "my little black girl" objectifies this black woman as this white man's pet project, one that proves to the outside world just how "liberal" he is and what a man he is, able to keep up with an insatiable black woman.

Violent Femmes' "Black Girls" (1984) presents a closeted bisexual white male who feels more socially comfortable in an interracial heterosexual relationship than a gay relationship, even a same-race gay relationship. His conscious racist stereotyping of black females as sexually "faster" than white girls orchestrates his ultimate cover-up as he realizes the social dangers of his attraction to both white and black men. Although he can admit his bisexuality across color lines, he hides his homosexuality/ bisexuality by passing as a "straight" man, perceiving his homosexuality/ bisexuality as more socially disruptive than crossing "traditional" color lines. The black female is used by a white male as both a sex toy and a cover-up.

Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing" (1990) is a white woman's efforts to seduce a black man to liberate her and other white girls from passionless "white male corporate oppression." Although the song seems an instance of a female taking initiative to satisfy herself, her satisfaction derives from racist myths associated with black men and their sexual prowess. As for the black man's voice, we only hear his hesitancy. With references to slaves, masters, and panthers, Sonic Youth shows that history and politics cannot be easily separated from individuals' personal choices and perceptions of others along race and gender lines.

Alberta Hunter's "Makes No Difference After Dark" (1930's) boasts of a black woman's bedroom talents to reluctant white men. A black female assures potential white lovers that race disappears when bedroom lights go out. That this female may be physically unattractive by both black and white standards of feminine beauty is irrelevant since white men will feel an "amazing, satisfying difference after dark" between the passion of white women and black women. While Hunter's tune celebrates black female sexuality, promising her timid and even racist white lovers that "once they've tried black, they won't go back" to white, the message is an internalized racist and sexist stereotype of black female hypersexuality.

Interracial music also documents and revises American history. Bob Dylan's "The Death of Emmett Till" (1971) questions a racist "justice system" that allows for the devaluing of human life. As Dylan details the horrors of the 1955 event -- Till's being beaten, tortured, rolled into a gulf, and thrown into the Mississippi River -- he does not speak of the sexual dimension of a white woman allegedly disrespected by a black male. Although no one knows what transpired between the white store owner's white wife and the visiting northern black adolescent boy, the horror of Till's murder is what matters, given the fact that, as Dylan posits, "this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan." Ice Cube's "Cave Bitch" (1993) revises the Emmett Till story, claiming that the white woman acted out her sexual fantasy for a black man and romanticized the notion of being fought over by two men, one white and one black.

Violence resulting from presumed intimacy between black males and white females is highlighted in rapper Paris's "The Hate that Hate Made" (1990), a song about the 1989 slaying of black teenager Yusef Hawkins, beaten by 10-15 white males who believed he was in a white middle-class suburb to date a white neighborhood female. Paris addresses the absurdity of this incident by attacking the myths that created the tragedy: "Seeing a white girl wasn't in the plan, but the plan had plans of its own for the brotherman. A bad case of the right place at the right time makes you just ask why. I guess you suppose you know what a brother do to a female that was just meant for you. Jealous 'cause your girlfriend's [sleepin' with] a black man, so you bust caps on an innocent bystander. But I guess we all look the same." Some accounts of the incident reveal that the female's spurned boyfriend knew that she was dating someone "dark-skinned" and that he rounded up a posse to punish the intruder. Yusef Hawkins was in the neighborhood to purchase a used car.

Historical violence -- particularly lynching -- resulting from the dangers of implicit and explicit intimacies between black males and white females is catalogued in Da Lenchmob's "Capital Punishment in America"(1992). After citing various legal methods used to execute criminals, the song concludes that the last public execution in America was August 14, 1936 when "20,000 [white] people showed up to watch the hanging death of . . . a black man accused of raping a white woman." The black male rapper expresses the perpetual fear of any black male in the south: "I'm sweatin' like a [black man] at a white woman's funeral."

D-Knowledge's "The Revolution Will Be on the Big Screen" (1995) highlights America's historical linking of violence, sex, gender and race. D-Knowledge shows the double standard in race relations controlled by a past and present laden with social and psychological boundaries for white women and black men, noting the irony of white men's historical sexual access to black women: "Denzell Washington can be killed by Kevin Costner for simply looking at Julia Roberts . . . while Kevin Costner will have a picture of Whitney Houston burning in his wallet." The song attacks the authority of white men who define reality as they perceive it, who are threatened by their perceived reality, and who have the authority and power to get rid of any threatening element.

Many interracial songs perpetuate myths, consciously or unconsciously. Stevie Wonder's Jungle Fever is full of contradictions. Both movie and song assert that a relationship between a black and a white is a "sickness" -- a fever -- based on sexual curiosity. While the song itself suggests that interracial love can exist spiritually, Lee's movie cancels that possibility by making the central interracial relationship an adulterous affair. The movie's second interracial couple -- a black female and a white male -- is undeveloped.

Ice Cube's "True to the Game" (1991) offers a limited view of blackness in its assertion that a black man is only "authentically" black if he is in a relationship with a black woman. This song perpetuates the myth that a white woman is a trophy of black male success, making interracial relationships between black men and white women a social/ class contract. Ice Cube articulates a prevailing myth that "successful" black men use white women to show the world they have arrived economically and are on equal grounds with white men in their manhood.

In Public Enemy's "Pollywanacraka" (1990), a black woman wronged by a black man -- he has no money and has left her pregnant -- insists that she will involve herself only with a white man with "a lotta money." Swearing off black men altogether and waiting for a white prince, she was alone with a child and lonely. Neither condoning nor condemning interracial intimacies, the song attacks black men and black women who allow racist stereotypes to dictate how they live.

Me'shell ndegeOcello's "Soul on Ice" (1994), echoing Cleaver's Soul on Ice, bashes black men with white women. Ocello calls this black male behavior as a "social infection -- mis[sed] direction." To love a white woman and "let sistahs go by," according to Ocello, is evidence of white society's successful brainwashing of black males. On behalf of black sisterhood, the song attacks the white female beauty ideal, offering that black men can be healed of this cultural sickness.

Ocello's "Step Into the Projects" (1994), about a white man with a black woman, is a companion to her previous "Soul on Ice." Another attack on patriarchal behavior, "Step Into the Projects" explores a white man's intellectual needs for a black woman. Presented from a white man's culturally arrogant perspective, the song details his efforts to deal with personal turmoil as a white man through romancing a black woman. Though unspecified, his personal problems disappear only when he "step[s] into the projects" and finds love in the "blackness of her skin." This white man can only see this relationship as a validation of his power to save a helpless black female trapped "in the middle of poverty [and] insecurity." The black woman is neither afraid nor trapped in her "project" environment; there is no sense that she responds to this white man's Savior complex. Both songs by Ocello perpetuate stereotypes to create political solidarity.

There is no organized "canon" of interracial music and no extensive treatment of these intimacies in music. Songs about interracial unions exist quietly between the grooves of more popular, less politically charged cuts. As a song need not be experienced communally and its duration is briefer than movies, fiction, or plays, music occupies a peculiar position in public discussions of race mixing. If there is a "place" for those who dare to cross the color lines and "live happily ever after," it is not between the opening and closing notes of popular songs. In the world of popular music, Ebony and Ivory will never be gay, have the house on the hill with children, the picket fence, and neighborly neighbors. As some of the music intends to challenge social boundaries, some of it perpetuates negative stereotypes. While Billy Hill's lyrics to "Glory of Love" -- not really a song about interracial unions -- is the theme song of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, released in 1967, the year America's anti-miscegenation laws disappeared, they warn Ebony and Ivory that if they choose romance, they can expect resistance on nearly every front; "that's the story of, that's the glory of love" for black-white intimacies publicly revealed. If Ebony and Ivory survive social opposition -- stares, self-doubts, social isolation and alienation, family abandonment, physical violence and threats -- they cannot live as individuals who have made choices but as others' symbols of personal privacies made publicly political.

©2001 all rights reserved.
Reproduction in whole or in part prohibited without
the express written consent of Interracial Voice.