My Boyfriend Is White And He Loves Me

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My boyfriend is white and he loves me.

His eyes are a beautiful shade of gray,
Like the difference between right and wrong,
His skin doesn’t look like mine but that is how we like it.
He loves me and I love him just as we are.

He loves me because I touch him with inherited hands.
The inherited hands of an Ashanti warrior,
fighting for freedom in the hills of Jamaica.
He loves me with the reckless abandon
that my great great great great grandfather dreamed of
When he looked at the body of that house slave,
The one he could not be caught taking.
When I kiss him I do so with every intention of reminding him,
Reminding him that my people have a rhythm,
One I can play on his heart like our drums.

I never hold back. I am truly emancipated.
And you know what? He loves me because I am black.
And not brown, caramel, red, or honey
Or any other compromising description of my blackness.
He loves that I can agree with Walter Rodney.
Europe did underdevelop Africa.
But I can still make love to him,
with the clear understanding of who he is and where we are.
He is white. I am black. We are in love.

I used to sing.
“I am not my hair, I am not my skin, I am the voice that lives within”
Just like India.
But I am, and she is wrong.
I am my hair- every single course little strand of it.
I am my skin, I am my hips and thick thighs.
There is a woman somewhere in Ghana with breasts just like mine.
And I am beautiful for it.
He said so.
So even if his family prays it’s a phase,
And mine is just hoping I do indeed ‘marry up’.

My boyfriend is white and he loves me.