This may be the last remaining taboo in our supposedly colorblind society.
A New York City woman — beautiful, educated, successful and single — accepted a challenge presented by an online dating service that aimed to fix her up with available men.
“I’m not desperate to get married,’’ said Jacque Reid, who co-hosts the “New York Live” lifestyle show on WNBC-TV News Channel 4, serves as a correspondent for the nationally syndicated “Tom Joyner Morning Show” on the radio, and is the editor in chief of SingleandLivingFab.com.
“I’ve met some good men. I’ve met some bad men and dated very bad men,” laughed Reid, a fitness enthusiast and never-married Atlanta, Ga., native who lives in Manhattan with her pet Shih Tzus — a boy named Sugar-Shane and a girl named Zoe.
“I’m happy being single,” said Reid, who declined to give her age.
She said, “I’m excited about” the Web-based matchup service. “It will be fun — and I’ll get some dates.”
But two days after we spoke last week, a WNBC spokeswoman informed me that Reid no longer planned to accept the dating service’s challenge because she was “busy.”
A friend told me that she’d changed her mind about it.
Why?
The answer may be found in the dating service’s name: InterracialDatingCentral.com.
Reid, who is African-American, had opened herself up to the possibility of going out with men who are not.
Except for one white guy, she has dated only within her race.
Reid had talked about the challenge on the radio and publicly accepted the service’s offer.
She agreed to be featured in a news release announcing that she would go on a series of blind dates with four New York-area bachelors of all races, including African-Americans.
Then the pushback began.
In this day and age, some people are vehemently against the idea of a woman of color going out with men of other backgrounds.
And the opposition comes from within the black community.
How can this be?
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is white, has been married to a black woman, Chirlane McCray, for more than two decades, and race matters to no one.
But the black character Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington), a Washington, DC, crisis manager on the ABC show “Scandal,” is routinely savaged online for having a fictional affair with the show’s married, white president of the United States.
“People don’t understand. They think it’s no big deal, but it is,” said Christelyn Karazin, co-author with Janice Roshalle Littlejohn of the book “Swirling: How to Date, Mate, and Relate Mixing Race, Culture and Creed.”
Karazin also writes the blog Beyond Black & White, runs an online forum of the same name and is brand ambassador to the interracial dating site.
She was set to help Reid find new men.
“Why do you have to be brave to date whomever the hell you want to? This is 2014, not 1814!” she told me.
More than 12 years ago, Karazin, 41, who is African-American, married a white insurance executive, Michael, 42.
The pair lives happily in California with their three kids and Christelyn Karazin’s daughter from a previous relationship.
Yet criticism — some of it hurled online, some of it in Karazin’s face — for “marrying out” can be cruel.
Most of it comes from black men, she told me.
“Black men date or marry interracially at more than double the level women do,” she said.
“They are given a pass. They can date anyone they want to — black women, white women.”
The purpose of the dating challenge, she said, was to expand a woman’s choices.
Black women are up to 50 percent more likely than their male counterparts to graduate from high school, reports the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and The Schott Foundation for Public Education.
About twice the number of black women attend college as black men, according to the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation.
And the Pew Research Center determined that black men were more than six times as likely as white men to be serving time in prisons and jails in 2010.
Meanwhile, said Karazin, the rate of out-of-wedlock births to black women is 72 to 80 percent — up to 100 percent in some communities.
Some of the ills facing black men, particularly high incarceration rates for relatively minor crimes, are unfair to them.
But Karazin does not believe that black women should be limited by race when choosing partners.
She’s right.
Skin color should not matter when it comes to love.
I smell a brat in this latest lawsuit
A judge has ordered the divorced parents of Caitlyn Ricci, 21, of New Jersey to fork over $16,000 to pay for tuition for each year she attends Philadelphia’s Temple University — although she moved into her paternal grandparents’ house two years ago and doesn’t talk to her folks.
Gramps and Grandma have financed her lawsuit.
This is like the case of Rachel Canning, also of New Jersey, who moved away from home and took her parents to court this year to shake them down for tuition money and other expenses before dropping her lawsuit.
Greedy brats like these could sour one on having kids.
They double derriere ya
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has hit bottom.
Some joker at one of New York City’s greatest cultural institutions tweeted a photo of a big-bottomed statue that’s more than 6,500 years old and 8.4 inches tall.
Its booty is a dead ringer for that of reality TV star Kim Kardashian, who displayed her heinie in all its naked and oiled glory on the cover of Paper magazine’s winter issue.
“Here at the Met, we have artworks that can #BreakTheInternet too!’’ the Met tweeted, a reference to Paper’s coverline “Break the Internet Kim Kardashian,’’which spawned a Twitter hashtag.
Most of us have butts, but not everyone can ride theirs to fame, glory and jealousy from a great museum’s staff.
Enough already!
‘Cannibal cop’ has appetite for change
The “Cannibal Cop” wants to be a lawyer. Gilberto Valle, who was fired from the NYPD, was convicted last year of conspiracy to kidnap women whom he fantasized with fellow ghouls online about cooking and eating.
He could have been locked up for life. But a Manhattan federal judge overturned the top rap against him, agreeing with me that while Valle, 30, committed thought crimes, he posed no real danger to anyone.
After watching his own female lawyer fight for him, Valle, who cooked for jail employees while locked up, said he wants to join the legal profession. He should try being a chef instead.
It’s mighty bigamy
A Wisconsin woman found her husband who vanished in 2005 on Facebook — living a mere 155 miles away and married to another woman. Cops have arrested him for bigamy and fraud.
At least the discarded wife missed years of washing the rotter’s socks.