What To Expect With My Main Couple...

Yanina and Peter are an interracial couple. 

She is white and first/second-generation Eastern-European American. 

He is Black and multiple-generation African-American and Caribbean-American.

Yanina is from working-to-middle-class people. Her family began late in the 20th century to arrive in the US from political upheaval in Eastern Europe. Elders worked in factories and mills in the new country to eventually starting their own businesses and branching out on a whole in different fields. They still remember their Eastern-European roots by frequenting other Eastern-European cultural businesses, eateries, as well as creating opportunities within their communities.

Peter is from upper-class people. His family is Old Money. Between ancestors buying loved ones early to live in small enclaves, outsmarting the system, investing amongst themselves and in the broader American scale, helping other Black people to build larger communities as well as intermarrying monied West Indians and wealthy Africans, his family's different branches are at varying levels of wealth.

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I have established that Yanina grows up in a lower-middle income neighborhood. She is also around different ethnic groups. Her friendship circle has been diverse.

One thing I wanted to establish is when Yanina and Peter are dating, that he IS NOT the first Black person she has interacted with! Though I'm a sucker for interracial romance, I can't stand that trope, and it is usually with a white person dating outside, that this is the first encounter of the 'other' when they end up in a romantic relationship!

Now, I understand certain cultures discourage inter-dating, and even dating on a whole. Those are exceptions. What I will not tolerate in the stories I enjoy is when the white (or any other race/ethnicity) character is inter-dating someone and they have NEVER interacted with those people beforehand! Especially when the character lives in a multicultural community!

I can understand if you've never dated an Eastern-European, but, depending on where you live, I'm sure you've gone to school with/bought from/or even been assisted in a medical office by someone who is Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, or Russian. 

You don't know how annoyed I get when, in most comedy shows, the white character dates someone outside their race, and they say "I have never interacted with someone like you before!" No no no no no no NO. 

Though Yanina dating Peter is dating a Black person for the first time, it is NOT her first time being around Black people. She's had Black schoolmates, she has Black friends (NOT 1. Or 2. Or 3. She has MANY). She's had Black teachers, and, as an adult, has Black coworkers. She also is an aspiring spoken word poet and looks up to many poets, not all of them white, and her mentors are Black and from other ethnicities as well.

As I said before, there are always exceptions and valid excuses, but it gets annoying when there are obviously other folks in these characters' worlds and they only interact with them when they're dating or in a romantic relationship with them? 

So, my question to those other stories: if that couple breaks up, does the character NEVER EVER INTERACT with that group again? 

Makes no sense! Especially when one lives in communities that are often than not, diverse.

Thank you for allowing me to rant, dear readers and we will see each other again!

An Artist in the World

Though it's a start, it's not enough, but it IS a start and it took them long enough, to see more interracial couples on commercials and advertising.

It's also fair to say that, though there could be more, I'm seeing more diversity and multiculturalism on TV and in media. And because such topics are near and dear to me, I present diverse and multicultural characters within my own stories. Within my art.

To those who think this is a trend... This is no agenda. Neither political or religious or a pet for the corporate world which I loathe.

It is life and what I see in my world. And the more I live, it's the more I want to see in my chosen media.

Notes from the sketchbook

The post topic is originally from my notes in sketchbook, but first, a bit of news...

The FIRST DRAFT IS FINISHED! IT'S DONE! FINITOOO!!

Now that I got that off my chest, the long haul to edit the second draft begins...
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Stacey and Slash may appear as an ordinary couple, I mean, they're both dogs, right?
However, remember what I am trying to state: they are interracial (one is Black and the other is Italian).

Nowadays, many interracial, inter-religious, as well as intercultural couples, are considered very common and everyday to many folks.

However, such pairings were highly unusual in the 1930s, and even quite dangerous for the pair involved!
There was once what were called 'Miscegenation Laws'.

State officials, as well as other authority figures, had taken it upon themselves to keep, not only their own race, 'pure', but made it unlawful for other types of interracial couplings: this meant NO Asian/Black, NO Black/Native American, NO Native American/Asian.

NO ONE, under penalty of law, could marry OUTSIDE their race.
Even if couples were legally married elsewhere, in certain states, such marriages were considered illegal.
Furthermore, children born in such unions were considered (I HATE this term when applied to people) 'illegitimate'!

During both of the characters' development, not only has each had to fight against society's ideas about who can develop a relationship with whom, but oftentimes, the person has had to fight cultural standards, expectations, and identities.

With Slash, he struggles with his ethnic group's ideas of masculinity as well as how he must behave.
This is both within the gang subculture he has spent much of his adult life, but also the broader, wider culture he originates from.

With Stacey, she struggles with her working life, and with a society that has historically hampered, impeded, and hemmed in Blacks.
Throughout the story, she is underestimated, ridiculed, and misrepresented, by a society's need to separate the black individual from the post-modern world.