DCentric

Matt Radick / Flickr

Last week, we wrote about the rise of interracial marriage and asked how tolerant D.C. is of mixed-race couples. Many of you responded that you sometimes receive stares or negative comments, while others wrote their experiences have been mostly positive.

Admittedly, these stories can’t fully capture every experience, but they do provide some insights into what life is like for interracial couples in D.C. If you’d like to share your story, contribute by posting a comment below.

Luis writes that “the more interracial couples feel comfortable out in the world, the better chances we have of building a world defined by our common humanity rather than our race:”

When I mentioned this article to my wife, she asked if I was going to comment on it. “Wait, we’re interracial, right?” she had to double-check. We often forget. When it comes to our relationship I don’t really see race. We haven’t been in DC that long, but most places we’ve been, we are pretty comfortable in public…

Commenter NotSquare, a white woman in D.C. dating a black man, writes that she’s learned to “tune out” the stares she receives, “but I find anywhere I go people, even people close to me make the ‘color’ jokes in regards to my relationship.”

Riotsnotdiets writes that she still gets plenty of odd looks from passersby:

I lived in Ohio for several years with an ex (who is black and Arab), and we lived here for about 2 years, we never had any negative experiences in DC like we did in ohio. particularly in restaurants, in Ohio, we’d often get stares and sometimes comments from entire tables but here no one seemed to give a crap. It was pretty awesome.

… a couple of years ago I was at a restaurant in NJ where my girl friend and I actually had trouble getting a table – they actually tried to refuse us. Both of us being stubborn we stayed and they eventually served us. I would never expect anything like that to happen in DC.

I refuse to allow my relationship to become a political statement. I am far more concerned with the harassment we receive then [sic] what people think they know about our relationship based solely on skin color.