I grew up in Chicago believing the book on interracial marriage my father, a white anthropologist, worked on throughout my childhood sprang from his love for my Black Jamaican mother. But when I finally opened the boxes of papers I had inherited, I discovered he had begun interviewing Black-white couples as a 21-year-old graduate student in the 1930s, long before he met her. In notes from his bachelor-era interviews in the 1950s, he described a wild party for mixed-race couples only. Reading these papers left me uneasy about desire that’s racialized—when race itself becomes the attraction.

I can picture clearly the first time I was unsettled by this type of attraction. The moment plays back like a haunting scene from a movie.

It is the month before my eighth-grade graduation from my integrated school in Kenwood, as the chilly Chicago spring slowly warms into summer. I am barely thirteen years old. During recess or when school lets out, I notice two white girls in my grade leaning casually against the school wall as Black boys bend toward each one, playfully chatting.

The girls pose with an unaccustomed demeanor as they look up at the boys, seeming to hold their attention effortlessly. They are dressed in miniskirts that had become shorter than the year before, knee-high socks, and fitted blouses. I can tell they fancy themselves more mature than our classmates for talking with the boys in this manner. In hindsight, I suspect that the boys were students at the high school, who crossed the park separating our schools for a chance to share this momentary exchange.

That was my first awareness of the dynamic of white girls and Black boys expressing a distinctive attraction toward each other. The sight of those boys and girls interacting was unlike anything I had seen or experienced before. It felt unfamiliar, a sharp contrast to the behavior I was used to from my classmates.

In my little autograph book, with a blue cover and multicolored pages, where my classmates wrote playful farewells as we departed for high school, a common inscription from the girls was “2 cool 2 go 4 boys,” a phrase that hinted at a collective innocence—or perhaps a shared resistance to interest in romance. In that moment, I sensed that those white girls and Black boys had crossed a line. And I knew race played a part in what I was seeing.

At that point, the closest I’d gotten to flirting was a phone call from one of the Black boys in my class. He told me he liked me and asked me “to go with” him. Maybe if I had agreed, I might have been one of the girls with her back against the wall, with him smiling down at me that day. But even a second phone call was out of the question. My mother wouldn’t allow it.

Maybe those white girls were the only ones who were willing, not the only ones who were desired. The Black southern writer Kiese Laymon explains in his memoir, Heavy, that the reason the first girl he had sex with was white—even though he was attracted to a Black girl—was because the white girl was the first to ask him. In any case, the dynamic surely would have been radically different if I, a Black girl, were in the scene.

Questions swirled in my mind. Did their flirting extend beyond the schoolyard? I wondered. Was there more to it than the playfulness I was witnessing? My mother had worked hard to shield me from any sexual experience of my own, but I could still detect the charged energy emanating from the scene. I felt a knot form in my stomach. My face burned with intense and confusing emotions I couldn’t fully articulate at the time. I resented the girls for the power they held over the boys. I felt disgusted with the boys for being captivated by it. I felt betrayed by all of them.

I never felt similarly offended by my parents’ relationship, however. Daddy frequently praised my mother’s beauty while I was growing up. He admired my mother’s many dazzling traits, her intelligence and grace, along with her appearance, and he made a habit of saying so.

Looking back on his attraction to her, I can see that it stemmed at least in part from her African features. As if to leave no doubt, Daddy was fond of repeating the saying “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” I understood perfectly when I was little that he meant that he found Mommy’s dark skin—and the charms that went along with it—appealing. I also knew he meant the saying as a rebuke of the white-beauty standard, the dominant societal preference for light skin.

Far from hearing anything unseemly in my father’s words, I was grateful for his adoration of my mother’s Blackness. At the time, I had no idea that he had pursued Black women long before he met my mother. Still, knowing that now doesn’t tarnish my view of their relationship. (Even if that means I am judging my classmates in my recurring memory more harshly than I am my parents.)

Statistics bear out the strong influence race has on intimate relationships. The most obvious impact is that people in the United States tend to marry within their own race.

The U.S. Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage in 1967, but no law regulates personal preferences when choosing a partner. While interracial marriages have steadily increased in recent decades—along with popular approval—they remain relatively uncommon.

As my father noted in his 1940 master’s thesis, mixed-race marriages are far less frequent than we would expect if couples were randomly matched without regard to race. According to a 2008 study, if pairings were random, 44 percent of all U.S. marriages would be interracial. In reality, that number is just about 20 percent—a clear sign that race continues to shape marital choices.

For me, interracial intimacy can’t be disentangled from the larger forces of race, gender, and power that continue to govern our world.

Soon after I opened my father’s boxes for the first time, I was introduced to the unsettling world of digital dating research by my sociology PhD student, Sarah Adeyinka-Skold. Her work explores how young women from different racial backgrounds navigate the search for long-term romantic partners. Based on dating app data and interviews with 111 Asian, Black, Latina, and white college-educated women, Sarah found that Black women face the greatest number of barriers in the modern dating landscape.

Most online dating platforms allow users to set racial preferences, including filtering potential matches by race, and the patterns that emerge are striking. While most users, to varying degrees, show a preference to date within their own racial group, what’s more telling is who they won’t even consider.

Black users are ten times more likely to message white users than the reverse. In fact, 80 percent of white users send messages exclusively to other white users, and only 3 percent reach out to Black users. One man, reflecting on these dynamics, described the trend as sexual racism masked as preference. He recalled sending a photo on a dating app and receiving a blunt reply: “I don’t like black guys, sorry.”

Conversely, whiteness—or even partial European ancestry—provides a noticeable advantage in the dating market. While white people are the least likely to date outside their racial group, non-white people are most likely to choose white people as the group they would date interracially.

One finding from the dating app data that Sarah shared with me was especially infuriating: Black women are the only group of women frequently excluded as potential dating partners by men of their own race. To put it bluntly, some Black men reject Black women categorically—simply because they are Black.

The history of sexual violation of Black women and lynching of Black men casts a long shadow over the politics of interracial intimacy. It makes Black women’s relationships with white men seem as if the women are capitulating to a white supremacist and patriarchal hierarchy, while Black men’s relationships with white women are countering it. But I can also see the opposite. Those exceptional white men who love, admire, and commit to Black women are nothing like exploitative enslavers—and the Black women who love them in return aren’t victims of exploitation. By contrast, those Black men who see having romantic relationships with white women as a badge of liberation, a prize that no Black woman can offer, do nothing to oppose the racial hierarchy. In these admittedly skewed scenarios, the white men are contesting white supremacist disparagement of Black women, whereas the Black men are playing into it.

I can’t deny my bias—both as a Black woman and as the daughter of a Black woman who married a white man, my father. Yet, what matters most to me is my fierce loyalty to Black women and my opposition to the stereotypes, policies, dating apps, jokes, social media, TV shows, and movies that demean us. Few things ignite my anger more than the notion that Black women are inherently less attractive, less capable, less nurturing, or less valuable. Everything I have written and worked toward as an adult has been dedicated to celebrating and uplifting Black women’s sexuality, childbearing, and motherhood.

I wish I could believe that sexual attraction, desire, and love exist untouched by race. Romantic attraction is supposed to be a magical force, something beyond our control that transcends the influence of society. “Why can’t you just be happy for people who love each other?” my husband often insists when I bring up the sociological dimensions of interracial intimacy. “Why does everything have to be political?”

I would never discuss these thoughts at the interracial weddings of friends and family—I respect those moments and their marital decisions as deeply personal. I try not to make this about individual choices. But I can’t ignore what I’ve spent years studying: the undeniable ways unequal structures shape our preferences, even the most intimate ones.