Romance trumps the racial divide

In “Something New,” when the blond and buff hottie steps on-screen and, with a masterful gesture, sweeps the caramel-skinned heroine into his arms and then into bed, a roar goes up in Howard University’s Cramton Auditorium. A few cup hands to mouths, their boos ricocheting through the room. Others stand up, pumping fists in solidarity, hooting and hollering, “All righty then!”

And when the hunk whips out the nail polish and paints the honey-dipped beauty’s toes scarlet? The largely female audience squeals, apparently embracing the film’s thesis, as uttered by one character: “At the end of the day, it’s not about skin color. It’s about the love connection.”

Well, yeah. Except when was the last time you saw a white Adonis literally worshiping at the feet of an African American beauty? Or saw a chick flick in which the Kate Hudson/Meg Ryan/Cameron Diaz character sips her no-foam lattes at Magic Johnson’s Starbucks and comes equipped with some hair issues and a full-throttle ethnic moniker like “Kenya”?

Indeed, the glossy romantic comedy “Something New” presents a new paradigm in the “Hollywood Shuffle.” It is perhaps no coincidence that it arrives in a package written, produced, directed by and starring black women.

The quick version: Kenya (Sanaa Lathan) is a product of the black bourgeoisie (doctor father, academic mother, debutante cotillion, Ivy League degrees). She’s beautiful, rich, black -- and alone. She’s looking for a man, specifically, a black man. Fixed up on a blind date with Brian (Simon Baker), a white landscape architect, she bolts.

Still, family and friends are dismayed: “Are you skiing the slopes? Are you sleeping with the enemy?” asks her lawyer brother. Then an eligible black man begins pursuing her. But she can’t stop thinking about the white guy. It’s an equal opportunity love triangle.

The film has been in theaters for two weeks.

The question that’s burning up movie message boards: Is “Something New” a step forward -- or backward? Even in 2006, in this post-Loving vs. Virginia world, the notion of black/white love still comes fraught with some heavy historical baggage.

Says Kellina Craig-Henderson, a psychologist and author of “Black Men in Interracial Relationships: What’s Love Got to Do With It?”: “We’re still back where we were 60 years ago, when it comes to race and sex.”

So let’s talk about the baggage: Yes, folks of all colors have been mixing and matching since the beginning of time. After all, 70% to 90% of African Americans are estimated to be of mixed race, according to a widely quoted statistic. But much of the history of race-mixing is filled with danger and ugly images, such as lynchings of men accused of untoward interest in a white woman, and sexual exploitation of black women working as domestics in white homes by their slave masters and, later, employers.

That was the reality, but on the big screen, black women from Sapphire to Beulah were Aunt Jemimaed, neutered, erased. Or they were crazy sluts like Carmen Jones. Or, in the case of “Pinky,” “Showboat” and “Imitation of Life,” if they were deemed beautiful, “tragic mulattos” cast as the love interest of a white man, then white actresses were more often cast in these roles.

So no wonder the on-screen love connection between an African American woman and a white man is usually viewed through a political prism. (Never mind last year’s “Guess Who,” a loose remake of 1967’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” which had little to do with interracial love and everything to do with the ebony/ivory slapstick of Ashton Kutcher and Bernie Mac.)

African American men get to play the romantic leads these days. But not, as Will Smith bemoaned in an interview to promote his movie “Hitch,” with a black woman, because then the movie will be deemed “black” and not worthy of big-bucks marketing. He can’t kiss a white woman, he says, because that’s deemed too scandalous for mainstream consumption. So lighter-skinned Latinas like Eva Mendes and Jennifer Lopez get to split the difference.

Even in “black movies” such as 1992’s “Boomerang” and 1999’s “The Best Man,” the romantic fantasies of black women are given short shrift. Notwithstanding Halle Berry’s “Catwoman” and “Die Another Day” roles, African American women rarely get to be the chased-after babes.

Which is why, at Howard University, they were cheering. “We build our role models on the media,” says Asso Aidoo, a 21-year-old senior who says she’s headed for Wall Street after graduation.

Given the “reality of black women,” Aidoo says, where suitable African American suitors appear to be in short supply, watching a character in a movie finding love outside the racial box was heartening.

After all, the statistics are grim: The filmmakers refer to the statistic that 42.4% of African American women are not married and the higher their socioeconomic level, the less likely they are to wed. Only 5% of black women marry outside their race. (“Something New” writer Kriss Turner originally named her movie “42.4.”)

So this is a primal thing, fueled and fed by generations of feeling erased.

“In so much of the movies and television, we’re these hard ... kind of chicks,” Turner says. “There’s a time for that when we can be strong, but there’s also this soft side that we can be ... a very soft, yummy, tender, sexy, beautiful, desirable side to the black women that we don’t see.”

Writer Debra Dickerson, who married a white man and has two children, described this yearning to be recognized in a Salon essay analyzing her discomfort with last year’s mega-hit comedy “Wedding Crashers”:

“But somehow, by the end of the parade of weddings crashed, I realized I was sad. It took me an entire martini to figure out why: The crashers seduced their way through every culture and every ethnicity but mine. Why didn’t Owen [Wilson] and Vince [Vaughn] want to seduce me too? Why don’t they want to dance with my nana at a wedding?”

“Something New” doesn’t necessarily advocate for black women dating white men, says its producer, Stephanie Allain. “We wanted to put something on film that we haven’t seen before.... Why shouldn’t we have choices as women? Just as we can be sitting at a table [in a business situation] with 12 white men looking at us for our opinion, it was high time to show a woman in that position being sought after by a lot of different men.... It echoes the promise of endless possibilities that haven’t always been available to us.”

The concept of endless romantic possibilities appeals to at least a handful of the Howard students who milled around after “Something New.” For freshmen Reginald Darby, Jennifer Onyeador, Alexandria McBride and Jason Woolfork, who are African American, interracial dating is no big deal.

Most of them are from the ‘burbs, and back home, they say, they either dated interracially -- which their parents don’t like -- or didn’t date at all. Coming to historically black Howard changed that for them. But they’re still open.

Mostly, they’re open to love.

The way Brian grabbed Kenya in the movie and kissed her?

“You’ve got to take charge,” Onyeador says, grabbing Darby by the collar and shaking him a little. “I wish that would happen to me.”

“He wouldn’t give up,” McBride says. “He loved her. And he just came and took her.”