WESTWOOD HEIGHTS - Latasha Parrish wore a sparkly green dress to the Hamady High School prom, accented by a leafy design painted on her fingernails.
Her date, Troy Galentine, wore a suit and pale green shirt to complement her dress.
Pale blue and white balloons, the school colors, adorned the room at The Holiday Inn in Mundy Township on this special night.
But there are two colors that Hamady students didn’t seem to notice.
Colors that sometimes turn heads, even in 2007, more than 40 years after the height of the civil rights movement.
Parrish is black and Galentine is white.
While a high school student newsletter article about interracial dating caused a stir in Flushing, the topic is old news and “no big thing” at Hamady, several students said.
The Flushing story condemned those who disapprove of interracial dating, but it created controversy because the story reprinted racist quotes of students responding to a survey.
Westwood Heights has undergone a racial transformation over the past 20 years. What used to be a majority white district turned into relatively even racial composition in the 1990s, to where it’s now about 75 percent black.
The result of the racial mixing: Students of different races socialize and date.
And it’s no big thing.
“What attracted me was his personality, not his race,” said Parrish, 17, who met Galentine at church. Galentine, 19, of Flint attends Mott Community College and is studying how to be a sign language interpreter. Parrish plans to study social work at Mott.
Kenneth Bowen, a Hamady High School sophomore who is white and Mexican, said he started dating a black girl last month.
“People at Hamady see it like, ‘Oh, it’s just another couple,’” said Bowen, who says he looks more white than Mexican.
But he said when they step outside of Hamady, that’s when they receive the strange looks, like the time they stepped off the bus holding hands while going to a softball game at Lake Fenton.
“The baseball and softball teams were looking at us like ‘What is going on?’” said Bowen, who didn’t notice disapproval but rather shock. “You could tell they were like, ‘Hey, he’s with a black girl.’”
Parrish said her cousin married a white man, and for a while, he was the only white person at family gatherings.
“He felt kind of awkward at first, but we showed him our loving, and now he doesn’t even think about it anymore,” Parrish said.
Tabitha Aubrey, 17, whose mother is white and black and father is black and Mexican, said she dated a white boy with red hair and blue eyes last year.
Once the couple left the hallways at Hamady, that’s when they noticed a social stigma.
“I went to a track meet at a mostly white school, and I did feel a little tension,” she said. “When we sat down, they moved away from us. You could tell we weren’t really welcomed.”
Parrish said there’s no standoffish attitudes among the races at Hamady, a tight-knit, 1,200 student district in Mt. Morris Township.
“We don’t think about them being white. They’re just like family,” Parrish said.
George Yancey, a sociology professor at the University of North Texas, and an expert on interracial relationships, said while acceptance has grown, there still is an undercurrent of resistance to interracial dating.
“People are very good at hiding their true feelings,” Yancey said.
He said blacks are more accepting than whites but are less likely to take the plunge and date the other race.
“(Blacks) don’t resist it for other people, but they tend to be more unwilling to do it themselves,” Yancey said. “Black women are especially unwilling to date whites.”
He said there’s no good data on why black women are reluctant to date outside the race, but he said perhaps black women are more protective of their culture and less trusting of white men.
Jameka Brown, 17, and a junior at Hamady High School, said she supports interracial dating, but she personally wouldn’t date a white student.
“They’re not my type,” she said, smiling.
Yancey said while black men are much more likely to date outside of their race, the black man/white woman combination is viewed by whites as more threatening than the reverse.
And people accept interracial dating better if it’s any combination other than black/white, Yancey said, such as white/Asian or black/Hispanic or white/Hispanic.
Yancey said age is also a determining factor. Those over 65 are a lot less likely to approve, while those 40 and under tend to approve.
Galentine said it took a little while for his grandmother to warm up to the relationship, but now she’s accepting.
Bowen said his friends were surprised he started dating a black girl. “They thought I’d never date a black girl because they don’t look like me,” he said. “But what I’ve always believed is (that) your skin color doesn’t mean anything. I don’t judge people by their race. I don’t think about their race at all.”
