her sister and mother jokingly warned me that i was getting involved with "sister souljah" before she and i were officially an item. she vocalized her displeasure with my whiteness often at first but eventually kind of got over it (but not really). she said, "i wish you were black," at least once and had genuine issues with my inability to empathize with her experience with racism. but we connected on every other level and at the time really needed each other so we stuck with it, hoping we would grow out of (into?) the racial issues

i just loved her and wanted to be with her so i put a lot of effort into understanding what it meant to be black in her eyes. we devoted hundreds of hours to conversations, stories, and anecdotes about it. it was very important to her that i understood what it meant to be black and specifically how important her blackness was to her

we eventually broke up due to non-race related issues. the racial thing was just another layer of incompatibility between us, mostly coming from her end. she needed to be with someone with similar experiences to hers and the ability to connect on a deeper level than what she and i were connecting on