Professor of Classics Shelley Haley was featured in a Chicago Tribune article about interracial marriages (3/27/02). In "The new mix: more black women and white men are settling what some consider the final frontier of interracial marriage," Haley talks about her own marriage of 27 years to a white man.
Haley, who teaches a course titled "Black Women's Experiences in the United States," says the "whole myth of the black rapist" is rooted in the history of slavery. She says "that myth offered 'an excuse for lynching black men in the South,' a topic she took up recently in her class. 'I pointed out the irony that white men could get away with raping black women with impunity, but the near rumor that a black man had raped a white woman could get him killed.'"
"But reality, not just mythology, plays into the divisions says Haley. 'Black female slaves were sexually exploited by white men who were in the position of their masters. So that history of rape often hardens black women to even the possibility of dating, or contemplating in a romantic way, white men.'
"In her own way, Haley has dealt with what she refers to as that 'conflicted history.' Her husband of 27 years, Adrian Pollock, 51, is white. He is however, not an American white male.
"He's from England. And I think that's why we've lasted this long,'" she says half-jokingly. "He wasn't socialized into the American -- which is bottom line, a racist -- society.'"
