Episode 01: Intro

White boys is a podcast about race, sex, culture, and dating told from the diaries of my heart. Growing up first-generation Nigerian in a southern suburban town I was an anomaly among white faces and narratives on the soccer fields, in school, and on the cable networks that projected stories and advertisements to my family, night after night on the big screen television in the living room. I found facets of myself in everything I watched in the mid-90s, from The Cosby Show, Full House, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, to Clarissa Explains It All. The chronicles surrounding these famed characters' lives resonated with me. They made me laugh, they made me sad, they made me think,  but they never made me see myself as an object of sexual attention. There was never, and I mean NEVER, an African girl with kinky hair and a wide-brimmed nose that would get the guy. I thought I was pretty though. I understood that I was unique and likened my aboriginal Nigerian features to Italian runways and b-roll inserts for the Fashion Television Channel. I always assumed I was born at the wrong time and place. Surely if I was in my 20s, as skinny as I was and living in New York wearing Marc Jacobs Gavin Rossdale would fall in love with me right? 

It didn’t quite translate like that as a teenager in North Carolina. My dating life and introduction to sexuality was limited. It was a complex minefield that I never quite figured out how to navigate. I found myself in nature vs nurture situation where all of my attractions were on boys that were unviable and unreciprocated. I got all the typical crushes a young burgeoning woman would, but in my world of country clubs, indie rock, and families with last names like “Crabtree”, options for me as a gangly black girl with a pixie Afro were few and far between. It was always a given that I was off-limits, in those days you just didn't date a black girl in these types of circles.

While my white girlfriends were experiencing firsts- kisses, sex, boyfriends and lovelorn triangles I was loved from afar, sidelined as a reliable confidant providing partial advice and unwavering loyalty to all sides. My friends gorged themselves with illicit activities at midnight on park benches having all the My So-Called Life moments with troubled boys who had substance abuse or behavioral problems while I watched and encouraged them from an island of naive wisdom and a place to spend the night if they needed to sneak out.

I was a peripheral part of a social scene that valued blonde hair and long legs. I had access to the parties, gossip, and long hours of co-ed phone calls, but like a careful bull in a china shop I knew my place, things either happened behind closed doors or not all. 

I’ve always been a little boy crazy and obviously I’ve always been black. I decided to start this podcast as an ethnographic study of my love life and interracial dating in America. I wanted to hear from the crushes, the boyfriends, the idolized, the assholes and finally my husband, who played some role in the way I sought and viewed love through the years. I wanted to hear from the men who had some part in that. 

So join me on this thought-provoking journey about relationships as I dissect and uncover untold stories of love and sex from an interracial perspective.