Cupids Dating Blog

I admit it: I'm old enough to remember long before the Internet really took off. I'm also surprisingly long in the tooth so I can remember what might not have been seen as the most politically correct exposure at an early age to different (i.e. Non-WASP) cultures. For example, one colorful memory is of a class we called music gym. It was music lessons, but held in the gymnasium of my primary school.

We would stand in a circle and sing songs that usually had physical motions to go along to illustrate the lyrics. I told one of my big city friends that one of the few songs I could remember learning back then "Jump Down Turn Around Pick a Bale of Cotton" was supposed to be sung by slave workers on the plantations. She found that an interesting choice to teach young folks that for the most part had no other exposure at the time to African American culture.

Luckily, of course, we did get to go through the Michael Jackson craze early on enough, but I'm not sure if that really helped the situation much. Otherwise, there were a couple of families of color that living in my rural community, but is often the case, when there are so few members of a minority represent the only contact with an entirely larger racial group, they were seen as more of a novelty than as representative of a different culture.

Even when I was 18 and finally traveled all the way to a city just outside of Paris, France, I still wasn't exposed to the most cosmopolitan experience in the end. For example, at the time, there were a number of popular shows from the States with African American actors, but I had the impression that there was only one woman doing all the translations dubbing for all female of color. The character of Vanessa on The Cosby Show sounded exactly like Holly Robinson's dubbed voice on 21 Jump Street.

When the translator dubbed for Holly I imagined she was some beautiful black girl behind the voice. Unfortunately, when she did it for Vanessa, the illusion was shattered, since that Huxtable at the time was a bit of a whiny teen who tended towards sounding negative, or depressed when she didn't get her way. Meanwhile, the real woman doing the voiceover was probably some North African hottie from one of the former French territories.

Anyway, now that I live in the big city, I know that life is much better when you're part of a lot less homogenous mix. Nevertheless, I guess reading over my intro what would work best for me would be interracial dating sites, as obviously, as much as I've grown from my roots, I'm still WASP boy.