Outside The Beltway Article: Tiger Woods Predilection For White Women Speaks Volumes About His Private Beliefs About Race.
Tiger Woods Affairs Highlight Racial Attitudes
Amid all the headlines generated by Tiger Woods’ troubles — the puzzling car accident, the suggestions of marital turmoil and multiple mistresses — little attention has been given to the race of the women linked with the world’s greatest golfer. Except in the black community.
When three white women were said to be romantically involved with Woods in addition to his blonde, Swedish wife, blogs, airwaves and barbershops started humming, and Woods’ already tenuous standing among many blacks took a beating.
On the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner radio show, Woods was the butt of jokes all week. “Thankfully, Tiger, you didn’t marry a black woman. Because if a sister caught you running around with a bunch of white hoochie-mamas,” one parody suggests in song, she would have castrated him. “The Grinch’s Theme Song” didn’t stop there: “The question everyone in America wants to ask you is, how many white women does one brother waaant?”
As one blogger, Robert Paul Reyes, wrote: “If Tiger Woods had cheated on his gorgeous white wife with black women, the golfing great’s accident would have been barely a blip in the blogosphere.”
The darts reflect blacks’ resistance to interracial romance. They also are a reflection of discomfort with a man who has smashed barriers in one of America’s whitest sports and assumed the mantle of the world’s most famous athlete, once worn by Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan.
But Woods has declined to identify himself as black, and famously chose the term “Cablinasian” (Caucasian, black, Indian and Asian) to describe the racial mixture he inherited from his African-American father and Thai mother.
So much for the post-racial America that the election of a biracial president who looks black was supposed to yield. But it’s not surprising, really.
Stacy McCain defends AP from charges of racism, observing, “Imagine the media uproar if white people had made a race issue about Tiger Woods’ affairs. Therefore, if Associated Press had ignored the (evidently) widespread criticism from blacks, they might have been accused of bias, as if black criticism of Woods was not newsworthy.”
True. Although I’d wager they’d have treated the story much differently.
NYDailyNews headlined the same story “Tiger Woods alienates black community with white lovers.” But the point isn’t that Tom Joyner (no relation, so far as I know) or the other blacks in the story are racist. It’s merely an interesting cultural phenomenon.
Black women have long felt slighted by the tendency of famous black men to pair with white women, and many have a list of current transgressors at the ready. “We’ve discussed this for years among black women,” said Denene Millner, author of several books on black relationships. “Why is it when they get to this level … they tend to go directly for the nearest blonde?”
[…]
“There is a call for loyalty that is stronger in some ways than in other racial communities,” said the author of the study, George Yancey, a sociology professor at the University of North Texas and author of the book “Just Don’t Marry One.”
[…]
Carmen Van Kerckhove, founder of the race-meets-pop-culture blog Racialicious, said there have been frequent discussions on her site about the fine line between preference and fetish. “Is there any difference between a white guy with a thing for blondes, and a non-white guy with a thing for blondes?” asked Van Kerckhove, who has a Chinese mother, a Belgian father and a husband born in America to parents from Benin. She claims that Asians don’t fully embrace Woods, either. “There are two layers of suspicion toward him,” Van Kerkhove said. “One toward the apparent pattern in the race of his partners, and the second in the way he sees himself. … People have been giving him the side-eye for a while.”
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a mate who shares your culture, as long as it’s for the right reasons, the comedienne Sheryl Underwood said after unleashing a withering Woods monologue on Tom Joyner’s radio show. “Would we question when a Jewish person wants to marry other Jewish people?” she said in an interview. “It’s not racist. It’s not bigotry. It’s cultural pride.” “The issue comes in when you choose something white because you think it’s better,” Underwood said. “And then you never date a black woman or a woman of color or you never sample the greatness of the international buffet of human beings. If you never do that, we got a problem.”
The key difference here is that while both white and black opposition to inter-racial marriage can stem from “cultural pride,” an undercurrent of inferiority/superiority underlies much of the angst. And the frustration among blacks — especially black women — over black men marrying white women is the perception that they see themselves as “trading up” in so doing. Dating and marrying white women is seen by many as a status symbol.
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About James Joyner
James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He’s a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama
. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter. Follow James on FriendFeed | Twitter | Digg
2 responses to “Outside The Beltway Article: Tiger Woods Predilection For White Women Speaks Volumes About His Private Beliefs About Race.”
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- - Monday , August 9 , 2010
Gayblackcanada 
Oh please!! Maybe if WHITE MALES weren’t always throwing white women as ‘god’s gift’ there wouldn’t be a damn issue and last time I checked those women CHOSE to be with Tiger!! Despite insecure white males attitude he’s not some rapist sneaking around bushes he was willingly having sex with GROWN women. At least he’s not some damn PERVERT like Roman Polanski but god FORBID the always right lily white media vilify it’s own no you bitches are too damn busy looking for petty CRAP like this to whine about. Because it makes YOU feel bad to see white women with him so you a-holes want to act like he’s the world’s biggest rapist instead of lothario because as well all know a white woman would just NEVER have consensual sex with a Negro perish the thought!! And clutch the pearls SPARE ME that goes a billion times for black people he doesn’t owe them a damn thing and if black women hate seeing him with white women TOUGH S**T!! Black people esepecially women didn’t mind supporting Clinton’s sleazy ass and HE certainly didn’t hook up with any ‘sisters’. Black people need to get over themselves!