@aidan,
aidan, I'm just curious about how you would feel if this girl wanted to date this boy
mainly because of his skin color. I'm not saying that is the case, I'm just playing with a hypothetical in my mind.
Let's say this girl is a rebellious type who is always trying to assert her independence from her mother, or from what her mother wants her to do, or how her mother wants her to dress, or behave, etc. And she knows that her mother is a relatively conservative conformist type who would prefer that she dates boys from groups which are similar to her family--same religion, same socio-economic level, same neighborhood, similar family values, same ethnic/cultural background, and same skin color--because those shared similarities give this mother a feeling of familiarity and consequently increase her level of comfort about the kind of boy her daughter is dating. This mother doesn't dislike or mistrust people of other religions, socio-economic levels, cultural groups, or skin colors, she just doesn't know them well because she herself socializes mainly with people similar to herself on those dimensions because that's the social circle she moves in. So, she'd prefer that her daughter stuck to what she is comfortable with when deciding to date a boy.
This girl goes to a school where she can, in fact, find many potential dating partners who she might be attracted to, and like, and who could easily fit into the familiar parameters her mother prefers for her. But this somewhat rebellious girl decides to opt for the less conventional choice, partly just for the sake of being less conventional, but also to make a strike for independence. She knows this black guy who's very nice and she thinks it would be great, and cool, and unconventional, and liberated, and grown-up to date him--since most of the white girls in her school never dated any black guys--so, in effect, she'd sort of be using him, because of his skin color, to convey some sort of message about herself--and, besides, it would get her mother's goat, so that would be an extra bonus. She's not consciously aware of all of this, she just knows that the idea of dating this particular boy seems very exciting and different, and the more her mother seems to withhold her approval, the more determined she is to date him.
And, this girl might have made the same sort of decision, for the same sort of reasons, if that nice boy, instead of being black, was the only Muslim in a predominantly Christian school, and her mother was an evangelical Christian who preferred that her daughter date other Christians.
Would the fact that the girl's motive for wanting to date the boy was related to the fact of his skin color, and the sorts of reactions that might engender in others, and not just to his personal attributes, or his general physical attractiveness to her, change how you would see her, or her mother?
