Karen Hunter PublishingDon’t Bring Home a White Boy and Other Notions that Keep Black Women from Dating Out by Germantown author Karyn Langhorne Folan hits stores tomorrow. The provocative tome examines the notions steeped in slavery and cultural mythology that keep single black women leery of interracial coupling, even in the face of overwhelming evidence and statistics that suggest that eschew it at their peril. Karen Hunter Publishing, a Simon and Schuster imprint behind the book, delivers the following enticing blurb:
In an age when America has embraced a mixed-race president and a strong, independent black woman as first lady...when black women are on the move and more empowered than ever before...there remains one hot-button topic that stirs up cultural resistance and intensity of emotion like no other: interracial relationships -- or, specifically, when black women date or marry white men. What is it about the black female/white male dynamic that sparks such controversy and depth of feeling? What keeps many single black women from exploring relationships outside of their race at a time when the pool of eligible black men is at an all-time low? "Don't bring home a white boy" is the cultural message stamped deep into every black daughter, an enduring twenty-first-century taboo with origins dating back to the Civil War era, the turbulent Civil Rights decades, and beyond. Now at last there is an honest, eye-opening examination of this societal phenomenon that will resonate with women everywhere and give voice to all sides of the debate.
Langhorne Folan, herself married to a white man, has distinguished herself as an author of such fiction as A Personal Matter, Diary of an Ugly Duckling, Unfinished Business, and Street Level. Until June of 2008, when writing an article inspired a one-eighty turn into nonfiction. Langhorne Folan penned an opinion piece called What Mildred Knew for The Washington Post. The article discussed the struggles of Mildred and Richard Loving, the interracial couple whose fight to love each other resulted in Loving versus Virginia, the landmark 1967 Supreme Court decision legalizing interracial marriage in the United States. The ensuing online comments related to the article numbered in the hundreds – some vitriolic, some supportive, some ambivalent, all thought provoking. The seeds that geminated in Langhorne Folan’s mind from this endeavor resulted in Don’t Bring Home a White Boy.
In the book, the author, a Harvard-educated lawyer, makes a case for why Black women should be more open to the possibility of love, regardless of the color of the man offering it. When asked why she decided to go the nonfiction route with this book, Langhorne Folan says that the topic of interracial love had always sparked her interest. Crafting her take on it was “a wonderful change to really look at history and sociology.”
More importantly, Langhorne Folan’s exploration is, at its heart, deeply personal. “I just wondered why there weren’t more couples that looked like Kevin (her husband) and me,” she says simply.
The cogent and persuasive arguments presented in Don’t Bring Home a White Boy are sure to have the wider audience asking itself the exact same thing.
