Am I a 'race traitor' for dating white people?

As someone who's slept with and dated many white men, and someone currently in a relationship with a white man, the idea of the "race traitor" is something I'm particularly attuned to.

Even though it shouldn't matter, my first crush was on a Filipino boy, my first kiss was with a Vietnamese boy and I've dated and slept with men of varying ethnicities.

For what it's worth, non-white boys have broken up with me as many times as I have broken up with them, and I've been on dates with more non-white women than white women. But that's the point — it shouldn't matter.

I don't remember what I tweeted to prompt this response, but a woman who has never met me in person and who knows nothing about me once sent me a tweet at 2:30 in the morning:

"How can you advocate for the deterioration of white supremacy while literally in bed with the oppressor? The fact that you are still receptive to/seeking white men means that you're still upholding white supremacy and Eurocentric masculinity ideals."

I'd seen prominent Asian American women be viciously attacked online for having white husbands or boyfriends, but I was just a normal person on the other side of the world.

I found it interesting and upsetting and infuriating that an Asian woman was angry at me for even considering white men as potential partners — most of the attacks I'd seen in the past had come from Asian men, who were incensed at my audacity to sleep with or date whoever I want, regardless of their race.

My brain stumbled into a panic. None of my Australian friends were awake, so I scoured my Twitter feed for someone who might be. I ended up chatting to a Singaporean Chinese woman who lives in the UK — an acquaintance I'd interacted with briefly online on a few occasions, but someone I'd never met in person.

She reassured me, validated my belief that this sort of ideology was bullshit, and let me know that it was okay to feel shitty about something as seemingly insignificant as a tweet. (She also told me to go back to sleep.)

But halfway through our conversation, she made a point I hadn't really considered before: "I don't know how many people on Twitter have worked out that my girlfriend is white but I have NEVER gotten flack for dating her, which just goes to show what people's priorities are."

I followed her advice and went back to bed, but the thought still lingered when I woke up at a more appropriate time: am I a race traitor? Do I actually have a glut of internalised racism that I'm not aware of? Does dating or even casually sleeping with white men mean I throw away all these aspects of my Malaysian Chinese identity?

Hypocrisy of extraordinary proportions

Asian men in Western societies certainly have to combat unfair stereotypes of their own — they are commonly seen as socially awkward "nerds", subservient and sexually unattractive. These stereotypes continue to be perpetuated in popular culture — see Raj in The Big Bang Theory, or the imaginatively named Chang in Community.

Yet Asian men who date white women don't get the same treatment or the same level of public vitriol. I don't see articles calling out Asian men in such relationships, and I'd be willing to bet that, unlike some of the outspoken Asian women I follow on Twitter, they don't get strangers hurling death threats at them.

In what can only be described as a hypocrisy of extraordinary proportions, these men are lauded by their peers for their ability to land a white woman.

For example, Madalene Chu writes in an article for SBS that her Vietnamese Catholic partner Andrew would "regularly get high-fived" when he was dating a Caucasian girl. Stories like these are relatively commonplace.

When I mention the "race traitor" phenomenon to my Asian friends, most of the Asian men I know have only heard snippets of it here and there, if at all, but most of the Asian women I've talked to know what I'm talking about straightaway.

As Dr Jane Park, a senior lecturer of gender and culture studies at the University of Sydney, says on the Shoes Off podcast, "I would deny the fact that any Asian woman who dates a white guy is a race traitor. If you do that, you're saying, all people who date outside their race are traitors."

Just as I'm not any less a woman because my partner is a man, I'm not any less Chinese because my partner is white. I don't start wishing for blonde hair and blue eyes, just like I don't forget the superstitions my parents taught me when I was young, or how to read or write or speak Mandarin.

My engagement with my cultural background should not — and cannot — be measured by the people I choose to love or date or fuck.

This is an edited extract from Me, Her, Us by Yen-Rong Wong.