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  chapter seventeen RACE RELATIONSHIPS

  Lauren

  Even though Cameron and I don’t wake up every morning and remind each other that we’re an interracial couple, anyone who watched the show might actually think it’s all we talk about (and they’ll definitely think it’s the only thing on my dad’s mind!). The truth is that our marriage, like any relationship, is incredibly complex and multilayered. Race is one of the layers. It’s never our main focus, but we both understand that it is something that must be addressed at times, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.

  I think back to the summer of 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. It felt like every day there was more horrifying news, from George Floyd to Breonna Taylor to riots in the streets around the country. It was hard for me to process it all, despite the fact that when you grow up Black in America, race is something you talk about from the beginning. Black parents pretty much train their children from as young as five and six on how to interact with the police. We’re told what to say and what not to say, because if you say the wrong thing the situation can get dangerous or even deadly. I was disgusted by the constant stream of racial injustices but I wasn’t surprised. However, that didn’t make them any easier to digest mentally and emotionally.

  By that point, Love Is Blind had been streaming for almost six months, so Cameron and I were in the public eye as a mixed-race couple. I remember logging on to Instagram one morning and finding a barrage of DMs.

  “Lauren, you’re a Black woman,” one of them said. “You have a platform. You need to be speaking out against this.”

  It was difficult because I was still trying to process what was happening in my own mind as a Black woman, let alone as a leader for all Black women around the world. I went for a walk around the neighborhood to try to collect myself and organize my thoughts. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t escape the great weight on my chest, the anger and frustration welling up inside of me.

  I came back home and collapsed in a heap in the middle of our bedroom floor and just started to sob uncontrollably. Prior to marriage, that’s the type of moment I would have by myself. I wouldn’t even let my parents see me in that state. But I couldn’t keep it from Cameron. He came into the room and immediately tried to comfort me.

  “I don’t want you to hold me,” I said. “I need you to give me this space to cry.” It was hard to say that to him, because I knew he was only trying to help. But the solitude was necessary. After a few minutes I settled down and we talked some more.

  “I love how supportive you are,” I told Cameron. “But you will never understand what this feels like. And I can’t explain it to you. You’ll never know what it’s like to be a Black person in this country and experience all of the pain that is happening in our minds and hearts right now. Where I’m at mentally and where you’re at mentally, there is just so much space between us. You will never feel how I feel. What you can do, though, is listen.”

  That was probably the hardest conversation of our entire relationship. Because Cameron always wants to fix things. And in that moment, he realized that this wasn’t something he could fix. But he was willing to listen. And that was the support I needed.

  Cameron

  My understanding of race and ethnicity has been evolving since I was a child, and it’s a process that continues today. There will always be more for me to learn, and I will never know what it is like to be Black. I can only ever experience what it is like to be me, not anyone else, and especially not someone who has experienced systemic prejudice. I am grateful for the opportunity to continue learning how to be the most supportive husband I can be to Lauren as well as the best ally I can be.

  Growing up in rural Maine, I didn’t see many people who looked different than me. Nonetheless, I was aware that there are people of all different races, ethnicities, nationalities, sexual orientations, religions, and cultures. My mom also helped start an international program at my town’s high school, Lee Academy, that brought in students from all over the world. This exposure to people of different backgrounds in my adolescent years onward was invaluable to me, as it opened my eyes to the broader world.

  Growing up, I had heard people promoting stereotypes like “all Black people like hip-hop and play basketball,” but I reasoned that stereotypes could not be universally true. I reflected on my own Maine culture and how I often felt like an outsider—I wasn’t crazy about hunting and fishing, I didn’t care for country music, and I didn’t want to work in the lumber industry. If I could be so different from the stereotype of a Mainer, then it made sense that people from other backgrounds did not have to conform to the expectations ascribed to them. The more I thought about it, the more intuitive it seemed that at the end of the day, we are all just people, created from the same genetic material and with the same basic needs and desires. We all want to be treated fairly and to be comfortable in our daily lives, have the freedom to pursue our dreams, to be respected by others, and to have fun.

  Because this all seemed obvious to me, I didn’t understand why everyone else hadn’t reached the same conclusion. As I got older and observed how people treat others who are different from them, I started to realize that prejudice takes on many forms. I also learned that subtle racism is no less painful or wrong. For example, my best friend in college was an Indian American guy. People sometimes compared him to Kevin G, the Indian character from Mean Girls, because he liked to rap and the character in the movie also rapped. Sometimes they would compare him to Kumar from Harold & Kumar simply on the grounds that they both have an Indian background. Even though my friend always laughed it off when people called him Kevin G or Kumar, I could tell from his body language and comments he made to me later that it hurt his feelings to be reduced to a character. In those moments, I recognized that it was wrong and hurtful for people to call him those names, and often called people out for it. But looking back, I’m ashamed that I didn’t do more. I was starting to see racism in action more and more, but it was still just the beginning of my awareness.

  It wasn’t until grad school, when I left Maine for the majority Black city of Atlanta, that I started to get educated on the systemic and life-threatening ways Black people are still discriminated against. The statistics are there to back that up, including the fact that Black people are three to four times more likely to be killed by police than white people, according to a 2020 study by researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

  I remember having a conversation in 2014 with a Black woman I was dating about the recent shootings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. This was during my philosophy grad program and I had gotten into the habit of playing devil’s advocate, even if I agreed with the person I was talking to. And so I took the position that, because I didn’t know all the context of what transpired leading up to the shooting, I could not say for sure whether it was justified or not. I didn’t realize at the time that it was my white privilege that enabled me to take such a callous position, even if I was taking it for the sake of discussion. My white privilege had allowed me to believe that law enforcement could almost always be trusted. I did not think about how it must have felt for my girlfriend to hear her partner’s seeming lack of empathy. I did not fully consider the pain, fear, and exhaustion that comes from watching another member of your community killed by the people sworn to protect you. I am embarrassed by my former ignorance and insensitivity, but I bring this story up because I think it highlights a common failure of people with privilege—a rank ignorance of the mistreatment of people subject to systemic prejudice, resulting in a lack of compassion.

  Lauren

  The willingness to listen is extremely important in an interracial relationship, but so is the willingness to teach. Oftentimes, one person in the relationship will get frustrated because they feel like the other person doesn’t understand them. Or they think the fact that their partner has to be taught something makes them ignorant. But it may simply be that they just aren’t info
rmed.

  This reminds me of a story from one of my modeling gigs after Love Is Blind was filmed but before the show had come out. I wasn’t advertising the fact that I was married, but another model on the shoot was an old friend, so I confided in her that I’d recently tied the knot.

  “Oh really?” she said. “Let me see a picture.” So I pulled out a pic of Cam.

  She shared that she also was in an interracial relationship. She’s white and went on to explain that she’d been dating a Black man. “But I don’t think it’s going to work out because he’s constantly getting upset at me for not knowing things about Black culture.”

  “Okay, that is not good,” I told her.

  A few weeks later, I ran into the friend at another shoot. “How’s your boyfriend?” I asked.

  “What boyfriend?” she answered, rolling her eyes. The lesson is a hard one for many mixed-race couples because, let’s face it, there are undeniable differences between Black and white cultures.

  Take the standout scene from Love Is Blind, where I’m shown wearing a bonnet to bed, like a lot of Black women do. Cameron had dated Black women previously, so he was no stranger to the bonnet life. But for many mixed-race couples, that would have been a highly teachable moment, and not all of them would be able to navigate it.

  On this point, the show also made a lot out of the fact that I’d never dated a white man before Cameron. It wasn’t for lack of interest. Throughout my life, I’ve had crushes on men who are white, whether a celebrity on television or someone from real life. There would be times I would be giving a Caucasian man the eyes, to no avail. It got to the point where I started to think, Do I look mean or intimidating? Do I have resting bitch face or something? I’m like the nicest person ever!

  Cameron

  Even on set, I had so many conversations with guys about their hesitancy to date outside their race. They talked about the fact that they were interested in other races, but their parents or peers had convinced them that mixed-race dating was not a normal or acceptable thing to do. It was sad to hear some guys talk about having an initial connection with a woman on the other side of the wall, then casually dismiss the possibility of a relationship on account of her ethnicity. I felt like these guys were sparking up a conversation with me because they knew Lauren and I were progressing forward and they wanted to see how I was able to do so.

  My advice to my fellow cast members back then is the same advice I have now: You need to do what is best for you, not your family and peers. It’s not easy to date someone when people close to you look down upon your relationship, but you need to be brave and live how you want to live. You will inevitably face challenges as an interracial couple, whether uncomfortable conversations about racial inequality, differences in culture, or criticism from the outside world. It may be easier to take the path of least resistance and date someone who neatly fits with who society and your social circle believe is an appropriate match for you. But in limiting yourself in this way, you may be missing out on the person who could make you your happiest self and elevate your life in ways no one else can.

  Lauren

  Cameron and I know it’s still a tough road ahead. When we talk about raising children, for example, we know that they’ll be viewed as Black by most of society, so we’ll need to have hard conversations with them. We know that for some aspects of those conversations, Cam won’t be able to speak from experience. But he is learning to deal with prejudice against our relationship, which we openly have encountered living in Georgia. I remember the first time this happened. We were walking down the street in our neighborhood when an agitated homeless man who was Black gave us the stink eye and started spewing animosity. “Look at you with that white man,” he scoffed. We just kept walking and ignored him but it was still irritating.

  It can get even worse online. Shortly after the LIB premiere, some rando sent me a DM calling me a bed wench, which is a really hurtful term used in the Black community, referring back to slavery, when enslaved Black women would have to sleep with their masters in exchange for privileges or higher status among the other enslaved women. I was able to brush it off because it’s such an ignorant thing to label me and my love story, but also because the overwhelming majority of comments we get on social media are full of love and support.

  Cameron

  I get the occasional negative message too. Every once in a while, some troll will tell me I should be with a white woman or disparage our relationship in general, but those messages are now thankfully rare. The rest of the time, the engagement from followers is totally supportive. Most messages are: “You guys look great together,” “Y’all are such a beautiful couple,” or “We love to see a couple thriving like y’all.” I know we have a long, long way to go in our society toward racial equality, but I see those messages as a positive sign of progress. That said, I have also noticed that whenever Lauren and I post about systemic racism or Black Lives Matter on social media we see a sharp decline in followers that day, sometimes even a couple thousand. This further emphasizes how unwilling some people still are to address prejudice in our country and how much work is left to be done.

  A significant amount of the fan outreach we receive, especially on social media, is people seeking advice about their own interracial relationship. During the 2020 protests following the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, a guy in a mixed-race relationship reached out to me on Instagram. “Obviously, there’s a lot going on in the world right now with respect to the treatment of Black people,” he wrote. “My partner’s very upset. I want to communicate with her but I’m not sure exactly how to do that. How should I talk to her about what’s going on in the world? What should I do?”

  I don’t pretend to be an authority on race relations. But I can share what’s worked for me. There’s a quote I like that goes something like, “Any act done out of compassion can’t be wrong.” When people come to me with these questions, I always start with that. If you can begin from a place of empathy and actively listen to your partner, you will have taken a critical first step toward supporting them. You have to be willing to have the hard conversations and to be vulnerable enough to admit when you have benefited from privilege to yourself and your partner. It is important that you talk to your partner about how you can best support them and it is okay to ask them questions about things you do not understand, but you also have to realize that you cannot depend on your partner to educate you on everything you should know about the prejudice they are experiencing. If your partner is suffering because of a loss they experienced within their community, they will likely not have the mental or emotional bandwidth to answer all your questions, so it is best to seek out online resources to educate yourself. One resource I have found helpful is “A Growing List of Resources for the Movement for Black Lives,” which includes links to literature on allyship, petitions, protest information, charitable organizations, and many more ways to get involved. In sum, if you and your partner build your relationship on shared compassion and respect for each other, you can make the relationship work, regardless of race, religion, or any other differences.

  * * *

  Lauren’s Last Words

  When I think back over my relationship with Cameron in the context of race, these two stories really stand out, because they taught me so much about myself.

  Find strength in vulnerability. On the second or third night of our proposal-moon on the show, we were hanging out in the resort. I was lying on the bed and Cameron was milling about the room. All of a sudden, I started to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” Cameron asked gently.

  “I was thinking about our children and the struggles they might endure being mixed race. Will they be treated poorly? Will they get teased on the playground?” I felt sorry for them and it filled me with so much sadness. Cameron held me for a few minutes.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said finally. “We are going to raise them together. They are going to be loved and they are goi
ng to know both cultures. And that’s going to make them that much more amazing.”

  We looked at each other for a solid few minutes.

  “You know what?” I said. “You’re right. And this is the last time I will ever cry about that.” And I’ve kept my word.

  Show tolerance in certain situations. One time during a visit with Cam’s family, I had just gotten new braids. One of his older relatives asked if he could touch my hair. This is a pretty sensitive area in the Black community, because it feeds into the idea that Black hair is “other,” this crazy intriguing thing that is so “out of this world.” Historically, Black people would travel around the country in these sideshows and be paraded around because of their “strange” features… abnormal hair and different bodies. So needless to say, a lot of Black people are sensitive when it comes to those things.

  My instinct was to say, “Hell, no! You can’t touch my hair!” Instead, I thought to myself, You know what, this is a teaching moment. I let him touch one of the braids and then I asked if he had any questions. I also found a way to gently recommend that he not go around asking random Black women if he can touch their hair.