A woman of color who’s seeing red

EVERY woman of color is hot in bed. Ask any white guy, they’ll tell you.

Latinas are hot in bed. Asian women are hot in bed. Black women are hot in bed.

The fact is -- yeah, we all are. But that’s not all that we are. We have centuries of oppression combined in one body that may excite you, Mr. Thousand Oaks, but it also has ambivalent feelings about dating a race of historical colonizers and oppressors.

I remember walking with my friend Irene, of Korean and Mexican descent, and her boyfriend, Frank, discussing “yellow fever,” the phenomenon of non-Asian guys obsessed with dating Asian women.

“So, Frank, what is it with guys and Asian chicks?” she asked. “You’re a guy, tell us.”

“Well,” said Frank, a beefy 6-foot-4 guy wrapped around Irene’s little finger, “promise you won’t get mad at me? I can tell you what I heard, but you’re not going to like it.”

After both of us squealed, “Tell us! Tell us!” repeatedly, he did. And we didn’t like it.

Let’s just say it was something about petite women. We both stared at him open-mouthed, shocked and outraged. I don’t know what offended Irene more: that she was half-Korean, that she was 5 feet 8 or that her boyfriend said it.

She hit him hard in the arm. “Frank, that is so sick and wrong! I can’t believe you!”

“I didn’t say it! I’m only telling you what other guys said! I don’t believe it!” he yelled, frantically ducking.

Karen Eng, a Chinese American writer, said that she has dodged many a fevered white man who was “Asian-inclined.”

“I’ve seen China-doll blindness that affects men to the point where no matter how many burritos you eat ... no matter how many combinations of combat boots, 501s and ratty Goodwill coats you wear, they still see a little Oriental flower,” she said in “The Yellow Fever Pages.”

Then comes the inevitable, “How come you never wear a kimono?”

The closest to that I got was the often late-night plea, “If we have children, could you teach them Spanish?”

Never mind that I’m not fluent in Spanish. I could only teach them Spanish akin to a ninth-grade primer. (Ella nada en el mar. Ellos nadan en el mar. Nadamos en el mar.) Which is great only if we plan on spending a lot of time on the beach.

There was also that time a white-bread sophomore attempted to seduce me in his dorm room by telling me how much he admired “Latin culture,” Anthony Quinn and how hot Latinas were. Then he whispered badly accented Spanish in my ear.

Weirdness aside, prejudice always came up. Even when I dated Ryan, the white, enlightened son of Oregon working-class stock. I remember meeting his colleagues, chemists with master’s degrees, not the type of yahoos you expect to spout things like, “There were so many cars in the driveway I thought Mexicans were moving in!”

I told him if he didn’t get me out of there soon I Would Say Something.

Our differences were relatively easy to ignore until the immigration issue came up. And as I masochistically watched Lou Dobbs, the comments came.

“I just don’t get it. Why can’t they just come over legally like everyone else?” he asked rhetorically.

My prejudice antenna was squawking. My bile was rising. I had the “Please, please don’t let him say something that makes him a racist cretin” bargaining with God moment.

“Define ‘everyone else,’ ” I said levelly.

That’s the moment your woman of color is really asking to find out just what kind of man you are.

So I waited for the boyfriend to say something offensive. And he did.

Women of color dating white men seem to eternally be the teacher in the relationship, one of the biggest turnoffs to their hotness in bed.

“My grandparents came from Mexico when there wasn’t a border like there is today,” I said. “They worked hard, raised a family and people still called them names and told them to go back to Mexico. They had children who joined the Marines and fought for their country and people still said the same thing. Those are the people I see on that screen. When you say some thoughtless or prejudiced remark, you are dishonoring my family and dishonoring me. And if you do that, you can find another place to spend the night.”

He dumped me for an Asian chick.

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Barbara E. Hernandez may be reached at weekend@latimes.

com.