When Whitney Adebayo, the 27-year-old former Love Island contestant, posted a cryptic message on TikTok this weekend, it set the entire internet buzzing. To go with footage of herself in a bright pink strapless bikini on a beach in Barbados, she added the caption: “‘You look happier.’ Thanks! I finally fell in love with my skin he used to call dirty.”
People immediately speculated that the former wig entrepreneur, who is of Nigerian descent, was referring to her now ex, Lochan Nowacki, whom she met during the tenth series of Love Island in 2023, and from whom she separated in April.
The 27-year-old, who before finding fame on the reality TV dating show was an account manager at a communications company, has denied ever making a racial slur, and has found the accusation particularly upsetting given his own multicultural heritage: his mother is Indian and his father is Scottish, Polish and English.
He has since taken to TikTok himself, to say how “insulted” he was by the allegation of racism. A very public game of “he said, she said” between two attractive young people has quickly become very ugly indeed.
When I was growing up, I was surrounded by interracial couples, who were in what we called mixed or blended relationships. These days, romantic set-ups between people of different races are known as a "swirl".
And being part of a swirl couple – which is typically, but not exclusively, between a Black person and a white person – is no guarantee of guarding against racism. It seems everyday racism, of the kind experienced in the world at large, can also come home with you.
I’ve been in swirl relationships myself, but I’ve never suffered overt racism from a partner. And yet I have been subjected to comments that were questionable.
One ex once told me, grinning, how his friends had told him he “must be good in bed” to be with me. I told him that wasn’t funny, and that it played into a stereotype that Black women are hypersexual, which can be detrimental: how, when we are victims of sexual violence, we are less likely to be taken seriously.
My girlfriends have stories to tell, too. One friend told me about how when she split with her son’s father, he’d tell her that his new girlfriends often felt sexually threatened by the fact he had previously been with a Black woman. They would often ask stupid questions, like: “Did she twerk for you?”
Another friend told me how, when she was having problems at work with a client she believed to be racist, she told her white partner about it and looked to him for support – but all he offered was a generic response: “Not everything is about race.”
“But,” she added wryly, “he was the one who used to love watching porn where white women dominated Black women. So, yeah, everything is about race.” She was so disgusted by his response that she now refuses to date interracially.
It’s not just Black women that have to deal with racial stereotypes around their sexuality. Many Black men have told me they’ve been referred to as “mandingo” by white girlfriends.
Never far behind is a belief that you’re somehow less intelligent, more prone to violence, and generally irresponsible. One guy I know in a swirl couple pays the mortgage and the bills, and yet his name isn’t on anything; his wife says she likes to “sign for him”. I only hope they never divorce because… yikes!
Another Black friend told me every time he argued with his white ex, she would imitate him – “and the impression she’d do sounded rather too ‘primate-like’ for him to be comfortable”. Increasingly fed up, he told her to just say what she really meant, and so she did.
She called him the N-word.
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