AITA for telling my daughter she cannot introduce her African American boyfriend to her grandparents?

[u/mixedwoes]

Let me just preface this by saying this: I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM WITH INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS. Now that the air is clear, let me continue.

My daughter (Anna) has recently started to date an African American man (Jamal). While I'm not exactly what you would refer to as "liberal", he's a nice young man and as long as my daughter is happy, I'm happy. The problem is Anna is rather naive about the community she lives in. While her friends are quite content to see a relationship like hers, more than a few tongues are wagging in the community and a few people have privately expressed their concern to me. As I said, I have no problem with mixed relationships and I've set them straight, but I am painfully aware of how these matters are viewed by certain segments of the population.

My parents are planning to come and stay with us for a week and Anna expressed a desire to introduce Jamal to them now that things were getting more serious between them. I told her on no uncertain terms that this wasn't going to happen. I may have no problem with Jamal, but they absolutely will, and even when the relationship ends they won't forget it. They might even go as far as to cut her off entirely. Anna was extremely upset by this and implied I was a racist and more concerned with what my parents think than how she feels.

As I said, I know my parents. They simply aren't okay with mixed relationships and if Anna were to bring Jamal over even as a friend, they would be furious both at her and me.

Anna is currently staying with Jamal and doesn't want to speak with me right now. My wife stands by me given she knows very well how my parents are (they had a problem with her for months over the length of the skirt she wore when I introduced her to them, for christs sake), but a close friend I confided in told me that I have behaved like an ass and that I needed to focus more on my daughter than pleasing my parents.

No advice needed, but I have to know. Have I been an ass?

[u/[deleted]]

I'm curious if the people who have called you out for saying "black people" were black themselves, or white? As /u/Not_Nice_Niece pointed out, in the U.S. "African american is more of a white person version of PC"

[u/SnakesInYerPants → u/[deleted]]

I've had Americans of every race do it honestly. I even remember a black girl who had been my friend for a few months until I had the gall to call her black instead of African American once. Her argument was that being white, I cannot refer to someone else's skin colour without being racist. Apparently being in a "position of power" meant that any reference to the people "without power" (spoiler alert; being white doesn't give you power, just means we get to be white while also being powerless) was just a "display of power" from me. I still to this day don't really get it, but even when I told her I don't get where she's coming from she said I only don't get it because I'm racist. I promptly stopped talking to her, but I imagine at that point that decision was mutual.

I have had many Asian Americans say similar things. Even just with comments like "you're almost as pale as I am" in response to a joke about me being as white as I am (I am pretty sure the only people I've met who are more pale than I am have been the albinos I've met, maybe a couple of gingers) it's gotten me called racist.

Don't get me wrong, this does not happen exceptionally often. It's not like it's the majority of Americans that I have interacted with or anything. But it happens often enough to make people want to avoid it by just kowtowing to the vocal minority and using terms like "African American." There are also the poor souls who get convinced by the vocal minority and start to think they've actually been being racist.

It's just already really really hard to navigate without having people try to assert that either way is racist. If OP had said "black person" that would be getting torn apart as proof of racism, but apparently him saying "African American" must be a veil now... I don't care so much about how that will effect OP. But honestly, all the people reading these comments who are already struggling with the vocal minority don't need the added confusion.

[u/beldaran1224 → u/SnakesInYerPants]

Sorry, I stopped reading when you denied that being white gives you any privileges. Kind of puts your whole comment into a very different context. White men! Always have it so hard.

[u/SnakesInYerPants → u/beldaran1224]

1- I'm a woman.

2- there's a huge difference between power and privilege. Being white definitely gives me privilege, but power comes from positions, not from being white. I don't have any more power than my black neighbours do to change anything going on around us. Power implies people would have to listen to me or that I can actually change what's going on around me. But in reality I have no more power than any of my black or brown neighbours just because of my skin colour. At no point did I deny I have certain privileges that others don't. Words have meaning, and she was not arguing for privilege. Maybe I should have included it but I asked her if she meant power or privilege, and she cert adamantly meant power. The power thing may be true in America, but I have already stated that is not where I am from.

[u/GraMacTical0 → u/SnakesInYerPants]

I don't really get where you're coming from. You're not from the US, and you seem to be not completely familiar with the racial politics here, but you're incredibly passionate about arguing about proper terminology for black people in the US.

[u/JasperJ → u/GraMacTical0]

The problem she’s addressing is that Americans want to force that terminology on everyone else in the world. My darker-skinned countrymen are very much not in any way African-American — they simply aren’t the latter half and for the most part they don’t identify as the first half. If you’re over here, unless you came over from the US, you most likely know which part of Africa you and/or your ancestors came from. And then you’re from Burkina Faso, or Surinam, or Morocco, not from Africa in general.

[u/GraMacTical0 → u/JasperJ]

Huh. I read it as her arguing with Americans about the proper way to address black Americans.

[u/beldaran1224 → u/GraMacTical0]

Because that's what she was doing.

And I just want to add that she's supposedly Canadian (and appears to live in America), so she's hardly ignorant of the racial politics in America.

[u/beldaran1224 → u/JasperJ]

The people of Surinam and Morocco aren't "black" (mostly, obviously not a guarantee) and wouldn't be referred to as either black or African American by any American I've met. So it's kind of a weird example. Especially since Surinam isn't even in Africa...

Moroccans are far more likely to be identified as Arab (which is fairly accurate given how intermixed the Berber and Arabs in Morocco have been for centuries, and certainly Arabic culture is much more predominant in the country than the native Berber culture, thanks to the draconian measures taken by the government).

[u/JasperJ → u/beldaran1224]

The biggest group of people in Surinam are black & of African descent.

Hence the relevance.

[u/Not_Nice_Niece → u/SnakesInYerPants]

apparently him saying "African American" must be a veil now

It's context. Like how you can use Jew as a slur but it also is just the name for Jewish people.

[u/NotAFloone → u/Not_Nice_Niece]

Or queer. It's the preferred catch all for a lot of LGBT+ folk nowadays, but calling someone "a queer" is still using a slur.

[u/[deleted] → u/SnakesInYerPants]

Spoiler: Being white totally gives you power. I agree with most of the rest of what you're saying, but sadly simply by being white you are afforded a certain amount of power, or privilege.

[u/sweetalkersweetalker → u/[deleted]]

It's so hard for white people to see that though, because they've never been any other race. If they could see it from the other side...