My Boyfriend Is White And Rich. I'm Neither

There we were, eight months after our first date, driving to my boyfriend’s family’s holiday house for a week-long visit.

- Reniqua Allen

We were like the interracial couple in the film Get Out: I was a young black woman, riding in my boyfriend’s Toyota Prius to one of the whitest places in the country, not knowing what to expect. I was nervous about meeting his family for the first time, but as a woman of colour with middle class roots, I also worried how I would fit in with people who were not just white, but upper-class with Ivy League degrees.

I imagined being alone in the dark woods with limited WiFi service, surrounded by stacks of old and well-off white people. My career as a journalist covering politics and policy had given me a glimpse into this upper-crust world, but that wasn’t the same as dating into it. As we drove on, I wondered whether I would somehow end up in the ‘sunken place’ or, more likely, a place that felt just as lonely, isolated and distant.

When I first met Peter through a dating app, I didn’t know anything about his background. What attracted me was how similar we seemed: he had a post-grad degree, a commitment to social justice, parents who never married and chronic lateness issues. We had a good first date at a random bar in the city, until he took me up on my less-than-sincere offer to split the bill. I wondered whether or not to go out with him again (I’m a modern woman, but I still believe that if a man asks you out on a first date, he should pay). In the end, I decided it made zero sense to penalise someone for being broke, which I convinced myself Peter was. He was a school teacher who lived in a studio apartment. He talked about Marxism and socialism, and believed in a revolution for the working class.