Living With Two Realities: Love and Exploitation in the Same Breath (The reality of loving a man with a lineage that exploited/exploits Black women)

There’s a tension I carry inside my life and lineage, one that I’ve had to face over and over as a Black woman. It is the reality of living with two parallel truths about white men at the same time.

On one side, I have known real love with white men. The first man I loved outside of my father was white. That happened naturally, not because of fetish, not because of desperation, but because of the environment I grew up in—the suburban Dallas, Texas area in the 80s and 90s, where most of my classmates were white. Later in life, I also loved Black men. Love for me has never been about color—it’s been about connection. Today, I still have a genuine bond with a man I love, who happens to be white. That love is real.

On the other side, I have also been exploited by white men. The men who sexually assaulted me during my military service were both white. The man who tried to coerce me into sex during a trafficking attempt in Mexico was a white man from my hometown. And when I look at the statistics, I see the larger picture: Black women are only about 7% of the U.S. population, but nearly 40% of trafficked women are Black—and white men make up the largest share of the demand. This is not a coincidence. It is a continuation of the same exploitation that took place during slavery, when Black women’s bodies were treated as property.

Both of these realities are mine. I cannot erase one to make sense of the other. I cannot deny the violence because I have known love, and I cannot deny the love because I have known violence. They sit side by side inside me.

I even see this paradox in my family’s lineage. There’s a photograph of my great-great-grandmother, a dark-skinned Black woman, sitting beside her husband who appeared white or nearly so, surrounded by their children. From what I assume and the bits of information I’ve heard about him, he truly loved her. Even in the shadows of a more recent exploitive history in that time, love still found its way. That tells me this tension isn’t just mine—it’s been carried through generations.

So how do I live with this?

The only way I’ve found is to separate the system from the person. The system of white men—the history of slavery, trafficking, and sexual violence—is exploitation. That is real. But the individuals I have chosen to love, who loved me back, are also real. Their love doesn’t erase the system, but the system doesn’t erase their love either.

This is what it means to live with parallel worlds: to hold love and injury in the same breath, to know betrayal and intimacy at once. It is not contradiction—it is complexity. It is my truth.

And my power comes in naming both without confusion: the violence belongs to the system, but the love belongs to me.