- When I told my dad, "I'm dating someone from Norway,"
and he made a joke.
He's like, "Damn, you couldn't even have gone for
"an Italian or somewhere south.
"You went for the most northern,
"the whitest." - The whitest of the white.
(upbeat music)
- Amber and I have been dating for going on two years now.
- We have been together for five years,
married for just coming up on three.
- We've been together, I wanna say five months.
- When I met Amber, she identified as straight
and had a history of dating men,
so we were just gonna be buds.
- Let's go skating together.
- Buds who go skating together.
And we went skating,
and I remember this moment where she was off the ice,
lacing up her boot,
and she looked up at me and smiled,
and I was like, I have to make her love me.
- We met in class in college at USC.
We have a little bit of varying opinions
about who kind of was flirting with who first.
- I was randomly talking about movies one day,
and this strange girl from across the room
started screaming about that she had seen this movie
and wanted to get into the conversation.
- I was doing improv, and you were doing standup.
You did a set with your backpack on
and had braces at the time,
and in my mind, I noticed the braces first,
and I thought, he's cute,
but it's unfortunate he has braces,
because that's a deal breaker. - Jesus Christ.
(laughing)
- I remember, I think a few months after we became official,
I asked you if the first time we started talking,
you were thinking about the fact that I was black,
and you said, "No, not really.
"It didn't really pass." - No,
I wasn't thinking of race really until
sort of our family met.
I think that was the first time.
My mom was like, "Where is Sheridan from?"
And I was like, no,
"She's from New Jersey."
It's like, "No, no, no, where is she from from?"
And I was like, let's not do this,
this is not a good topic at all.
- I was very cognizant of your race
when we first started talking,
because I have long been,
I don't know if accused is the right word,
but people have strongly suggested
that I lean a certain way with the people that I date.
- Which way?
- I mean, we don't have to get into it.
And I was just, no, she's a Latina.
(laughing)
- You're on really tenuous ground with that.
- I think that you're always aware,
when you start dating somebody new,
of what you have in common
and what you don't have in common.
- It is interesting,
the thing that popped up when she came to Norway
to visit my friends and family.
All the conversations went from,
how's it going over there, how's the US, how's work,
how's school, I'm doing this, I'm doing that
to all right, let's talk about racism,
let's talk about segregation.
Everything turned
to that immediately. - I was apparently the outlet
they needed.
- Yeah. - They needed a catalyst
to bring up the discussions, and that was my function.
- It was not something I thought about
before I started dating you, I thought,
because I have dated different races,
and I feel like it had never been a topic
of discussion really.
When we started dating, I guess I did feel a little bit
of the heat you feel sometimes.
- Now we live in LA,
and I don't think that people feel like it's something
they've never seen before, obviously,
but I do feel sometimes from men,
I get the vibe like, she's with this white woman
when she could be with me?
- It's further complicated by the gender
and sexuality of it,
because it is,
been really that's the first set of reactions
that we clock.
I think Amber summed it up pretty great last week
when she said that we'll often walk into a space,
and I can see it happening now that she's mentioned it,
that people will look and go, what, oh, okay.
- People don't notice it,
and then sometimes when they do notice it,
they come on a little too strong.
- Like how?
- Like that one time when we were at the train stop
last weekend,
and that guy was on his bicycle.
- He saw me, he saw you, he kept biking.
He looked back while he was biking forward,
kept biking, looked back again, and then went.
(laughing)
- And then biked away.
- I have heard horror stories about interracial couples,
and families not being okay with it, not getting along,
and I am fine with a few jokes here and there
about how white he is.
I'm fine with,
I had twists a couple months ago,
and I went to Norway,
and they were fascinated and all up in my hair.
That is fine to me,
because I know it could be so much worse.
- Some people don't like it,
and some people spend a lot of time staring,
and I mean, seeing Amber first
and seeing that Amber is beautiful
and wanting to say something to her
or look at her, and then seeing me,
and then registering the disappointment,
and you can say that that's wrapped up in--
- Not true.
- It's true.
Wrapped up in both sexual identity, race identity
and gender identity.
- Educating, especially my family's a little tricky,
because it's a weird subject,
because they don't necessarily understand
that it's sensitive.
The first time Sheridan met my grandfather,
he used an old fashioned version of the N-word,
not about her, but about someone else,
and it was in Norwegian,
so I don't even know if she understood it.
- Here's the thing. - But it was like--
- The Norwegian word for negro, which is a term people use.
I feel very uncomfortable when white people
even use the term negro, but whatever.
What is the Norwegian word for negro, Peter?
- I don't wanna say it.
- I can say it.
It's neger, which sounds like a bad word in English.
So, while he wasn't saying the bad N-word,
he was kind of saying the bad N-word.
- For sure.
- I think you are good at code switching
and do inhabit a lot of white spaces very comfortably.
I think that is maybe more difficult
than you're given credit for.
- When did you realize that?
- When the reverse happened.
When I went to the cookout.
- There was a barbecue where the majority
of the people there were black.
I guess you probably saw me in a more relaxed
kind of colloquial.
- It was fine, but I was more out of my element.
- I've learned that, although we could be in a restaurant
or in a customer service situation or something like that,
and where I'm very aggressive and generally get what I want
when I'm paying for a meal,
I've learned that it's not always a situation
that she would like me to draw attention to bad service
or something like that.
Even when bad service does have casual tones
of racism to it,
that it's not always important to her
to necessarily cause a scene,
because it feels sometimes
that you're playing into stereotypes.
- Sometimes when that we've gone out,
and I feel like we got bad service,
I felt like I want to tip well,
because I feel like if I don't,
sometimes they're like, "Oh, black people never tip."
You know what I mean?
And I hate that stereotype, and it makes me furious,
and we'll be sitting down, and she'll be like,
but this was truly terrible.
Nothing came out that we ordered.
It was an awful experience,
and I still feel like I want to leave a nice tip.
- The only time I feel like I truly get upset with Peter,
we're very lucky, we don't fight a lot.
We're very in sync in a lot of ways.
We didn't have our car registered in California
when we should have had it registered,
it was still with New Jersey.
It's registered now, so don't come after me.
- They can't.
- I know, they can't, but just in case.
Still, I'm a black woman, I worry about these things.
We drove around for six months with our car
not being registered in California when it should have.
When I was driving it, I wouldn't even drive it barely,
'cause I was so afraid of getting pulled over,
and at the time, my dad was on the deed,
and I was thinking, oh my god,
they're not gonna see that my name is on here.
They're gonna think black person stole this car,
driving around.
Meanwhile, Peter fucking drove around,
no problems at all, felt great.
He was like, "If I get pulled over, I get pulled over."
And so you start to think,
wow, getting pulled over by the cops
isn't the scariest thing in the world to Peter.
Meanwhile, to me and to so many black people,
that can mean you could die,
and it's a very, obviously, dramatic example,
but it happens.
- You have dated people of color,
but it was in this very protected space,
in terms of college.
You know what I mean,
it's not a gas station, it's not a place outside.
It's very protected in that space,
so you don't really get to see a lot of it,
but there are a couple of times, in public,
where a certain situation would happen,
and you would kind of interpret it very differently
than how I'd interpret it.
- Are you thinking about the movie theater?
- The trailers weren't even on yet.
The movie hadn't even started,
and I was just texting right before,
and this guy was like,
"You gonna turn your phone off, right?"
- He was a middle aged white man.
- Yes.
Everyone's on their phones,
but he specifically singled me out
and talked down to me, and you faded away,
you faded away completely.
- Well, I thought he was talking to me, too,
'cause I was also on my phone,
so I - He wasn't talking to you.
- very obediently put away my phone.
(laughing)
- But you faded away completely.
- But I should of, I should of come to your defense.
- Well, I don't know, I don't need that from you.
- But I feel like that's what you did want from that moment.
- You know what just came to mind for me,
is when we were in Kansas together.
- Right.
- And we went to that bowling alley.
- Right.
- And I feel like we've gotten so used to
how we are in LA.
- Yes.
- And how people react to us in LA,
but I feel like when we were in that environment,
the reaction was different.
It was very much like, what is that?
- Mm-hm.
It felt less safe there.
- I felt like I had experienced that kind of aggression
being thrown before
and was perfectly capable of handling it,
but I was worried about her,
'cause I was like,
I don't know if she's ever experienced this before.
- And at the same time, we were driving around
and passed by that house with the confederate flag
hanging from it.
- Yes, I forgot about that.
- And that was like, is that real?
Can people,
is everybody okay in this?
We drove around the neighborhood for a minute,
and I think--
- Just picking up children.
Get in the car. (laughing)
- I feel like I never fully expressed my thought on this,
'cause we kind of brought it up,
but when certain people have called you out
for only dating white women,
to me that is really, deeply unsettling.
It's saying you can't date these people.
Only white people can date these people.
- Do think a lot about, with my kids,
if they do end up looking more black.
My American is so good that no one thinks
I'm even an immigrant.
So I'm very much treated exactly like a white man
is in the US,
and I have no real experience of what it is like
to be black in the US.
My child will have that experience,
and I have no,
like I can educate myself and feel I have sympathy,
and I can listen, but I have no real life experience in it.
- It's weird to think that they won't be going through life
constantly reminded that they're black.
- Something that I do worry about is that
if my child has fairer skin than me,
there'll be a suspicion when walking around.
- I think you're really amazing,
and I just hope that we soon live in a world where
we don't ever feel any sort of shade coming our way, ever.
- Always look for a person as a person.
I mean, I fell in love with Peter as a human being.
- When I fell in love with Sheridan,
I just got to know Sheridan.
(upbeat music)