Have I betrayed my race by being in an interracial relationship?

As a black man in an interracial relationship, am I letting down the black community when I could instead be in a relationship that showcased a strong, black couple?

Being in an interracial relationship isn’t something I give much thought to, and I’d imagine that’s the case for most interracial couples. Sure, there are times where race plays a role in our relationship with our perspectives due to cultural nuances and experience. However, on the whole, my wife is my wife. She just happens to not be black.

While to us our interracial status is an incidental feature of our relationship, it’s understandably more apparent to others. For some, that’s little more than an obvious observation of us as a couple. For others, that can represent something much less superficial in a departure from our respective race in who we’ve decided to be in a relationship with.

For some, an interracial relationship is something fetishised and actively pursued. There’s the argument that for some this can essentially be one having a ‘type’, no different to being attracted to someone with a certain hair colour or body type, and that type happening to not be from your own race. But it can also cross a…