A White Woman Marries An African Man - And Finds That Diversity Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Vicki was not old, but not young either.  She was moderately attractive and intelligent, reasonably successful, but unlucky in love.  Time was passing and no good man had come her way.

Vicki was also a committed progressive and for years had fought for the rights of the black man who, she and her colleagues believed, was soon to be back atop the human pyramid where he belonged.  A sentient being of the African forest, attuned to nature, of primal intelligence, tribal loyalties, strength, and natural virtue, nothing but racism kept him from his anointed place. 

She had fought long and hard for racial justice, had called out systemic white racism, joined the forces of Black Lives Matter, voted for every racial reform that the DC city council proposed, and tried her best to integrate within black society. 

This last goal proved difficult. Washington was no different than Botha's South African apartheid (east of Rock Creek park black, west of the park white; north-south busses white, east-west busses black) and as much as she tried to befriend black people, the door slammed shut before she could get her foot in.  The very identity politics that she and her progressive colleagues had promoted gave black people license to swarm together and keep white people out.

And to be honest Vicki was afraid of the ghetto - a nasty, horrid place of ho's, pimps, drugs, and violence despite the inherent, innate superiority of the black man - and although she had no doubt that the miasma would soon lift, the inner city would become the social and cultural center of America, and life would be better for all, she hesitated to set foot across the Anacostia river. 

She hated herself for such timidity and hypocrisy.  How could a woman who stood for racial justice and the dignity and honor of the black man not be willing to go where he lived?  Yet her better judgement told her to stay clear, to remain a loyal activist from afar, no less passionate, but far safer. 

None of this dimmed her desire to be with black people, to live the diversity and inclusivity that she had always promoted, and to join them in their struggle, their culture, and their way of life.  Perhaps most of all she wondered what it would be like to be loved by a black man.

Although she rejected the stereotype of black men as sexual dervishes, more well endowed, confident, and eager than whites, she knew that there had to be a scintilla of truth to it as there was in all stereotypes. 

She had never been satisfied by white men who had been whipped like slaves by feminism and MeToo charlatanry into timid, hesitant lovers.  Again, it was the fault of her and her radically progressive sisters, but the law of unintended consequences has no limits. 

When she asked her neighbor, a World Bank economist whose countries were all in Africa, where she might go on her African journey (she did not confide in him the real reason but talked only of cultural diversity and historical interest), he said, 'Don't bother'. 

Vicki would never have taken him for a prejudiced man.  The World Bank after all had a development mission to raise the poor out of poverty, to improve its socio-economic and judicial systems, and to hasten Africa's emergence as a legitimate member of the commonwealth of nations.  Wasn't that mission enough to dispel any thoughts of prejudice?

One by one the economist reeled off Africa's failures.  From top to bottom, east to west, the continent was failed space, ruled by big men in arbitrary, autocratic rule; socially backward, tribal, primitive, and medieval; venal, corrupt, and morally empty. 

Vicki couldn't believe her ears.  What racism will do to an otherwise intelligent mind.  The economist was blind to the truth and had become hardened with prejudice and racial hatred. 

The tour companies were less critical but more diffident than she expected. Lindblad, Avalon, Abercrombie & Kent, Trafalgar, and others had nothing on tap for the kind of sub-Saharan cultural tour she had in mind, but could possibly configure a personalized tour for her.  In the meantime, why didn't she consider something much more interesting, like a Nile cruise or a Serengeti safari?

She found a tour company which was delighted at her request.  They were proud of their eclecticism, their adventurous spirit, and their encouragement of off-the grid travel.  To be sure they could not offer the luxury of the big companies, but their experience would be far more rewarding.  They promised her 'an insider's tour of Africa' where she would be free to roam and at the same time would be well-taken care of. 

Her eagerness was such that she failed to dig any deeper than the agent's promotional pitch. Had she given even a cursory look she would have found that Ottaway Tours had filed for bankruptcy twice, recovered, repositioned themselves, rearranged their priorities, and rejiggered management. However no one but the most naive Americans hoping for adventure on the cheap, would have looked at Ottaway Tours. 

Vicki was one of these credulous, idealistic Americans, and Ottaway Tours said that they would fashion the tour to meet her particular, personal objectives.  When she said she wanted to meet 'ordinary' Africans for friendship and even intimacy, the tour agent immediately understood her meaning.  From start to finish she would be guided to the most popular African watering holes where the best and the brightest Africans meet.  

The bar at the Amitie Hotel in Abidjan was one of those places.  Wealthy Ivoirians from Yamoussoukro, the new capital far inland, came to the more cosmopolitan coast for a reprieve, and gathered at the Amitie and the Palm Bar to meet and greet, drink with old friends and meet new ones.  It was a sophisticated place with an Olympic-size pool, illuminated at night, festive, and filled with beautiful people. 

 

'Why not start there?', the tour organizers agreed; and so it was that Vicki was housed in a modest hotel somewhere between the foreign enclaves of Le Plateau and Treichville, the popular center of town.  It was far enough from white privilege and close enough to native reality to give Vicki the impression that she was finally in Africa. 

After a quick wash and freshening after the long flight, she was met by an Ottaway agent who brought her to the Palm Bar, deposited her, gracefully left and promised to pick her up when she called. 

It was there that she met Ibrahim who showed her every courtesy, every bit of African generosity, charm, and attention.  This could only augur well, she thought, meeting such a wonderful, attractive African man on her first night in the country; and went back to the hotel feeling happier than she had been in a long time. 

Now, Ibrahim was not just an incidental African, but a businessman, one who like his Nigerian counterparts was a master of the scam.  However he did not deal in financial instruments, but in women.  Vicki was not the first American woman to come to Africa looking for bi-cultural adventure, men, and political justification.  

His conquests, however had only been partial.  He was given gifts, bought five-star dinners, and paid generous emoluments by eager women, but his goal - to marry well and go to America - had not yet been realized. 

Vicki was so blinkered by her desire to meet real black men that she was as careless about her male company as she was about her choice of tour agencies.  She was delighted with Ibrahim, found him cultured, sophisticated, attentive, and overwhelmingly sexy.  

They were all like this, these American women, Ibrahim learned early on. He was delighted that his American brothers had done the prep work.  With women like Vicki who were convinced that Africa was the cultural motherlode and that African men were soon to sit in the citadel of honor, seduction was a piece of cake. 

Vicki was a wealthy woman who had recently inherited stock in both Amazon and Nvidia, and was easily able to extend her stay in country.  Cote d'Ivoire Immigration had no problem extending her visa, delighted as they were to see American tourism increase after so many years of civil unrest.  

And so it was that she and Ibrahim became an item, and coaxed by him to upgrade into his real Africa, she moved to a suite at the Amitie overlooking the ocean with all the amenities of a first class stay.  

Ibrahim stayed with her there, and after a month of growing intimacy, the ultimate prize - marriage - was broached.  She would travel with him up country to meet his mother and his family, they would be married in a village ceremony and then one officiated the American consul, and would then sail to America. 

Vicki couldn't believe her good fortune.  God had indeed smiled upon her.  She had not only found her man but found an African one! 

After arriving in America and moving from her small apartment in Dupont Circle to a more spacious home in McClean, Ibrahim continued the scam he had learned so well, and with his Nigerian lawyer worked out a very favorable financial partnership with his new wife.  

When his residency was well established, his marriage official and documented, and his financial future set, he announced his departure.  He took thousands of dollars from their joint account and secured it in an Aruban offshore bank account, redeemed the millions of dollars of Amazon and Nvidia stock he had had cannily transferred to himself, and disappeared. 

He had done nothing wrong - he did not steal anything nor had he taken anything that didn't belong to him so he was not a wanted man, just a rich one thanks to - yes, his native intelligence, cultural superiority, social sophistication, and primal African sentience. 

Vicki's World Bank neighbor wanted to say, 'See, what did I tell you?' when he learned from his colleagues what had happened to her, but held his tongue.  She had learned a hard lesson, and would never forget it. 

However, he underestimated her progressive idealism and true belief in the rise of the black man.  The misfortune was entirely her fault, she admitted.  She was too smitten, too much a naive, desirous woman, too much in thrall to men and sexually deprived, too ambitious in her desire to champion blackness to protect herself. 

Some thought that this was an example of Christian charity, forgiveness, and absolution.  She had made peace with herself, had forgiven her predator, and returned to the higher values of life.  

The reality was far different.  Once afflicted by cultural myopia and infected with an untouchable idealism, her return to the canon of social reform was a given.  Ibrahim was her doing, not the black man's, not Africa’s.

Back in Abidjan, Ibrahim's family was delighted with their monthly checks from America and were as proud as punch over the success of their brother.  He was a true hero and his fame spread far upriver, encouraging young men to make the trip to the capital and to try their luck with white women. 

A development success story, not exactly the kind envisaged by the World Bank or USAID, but a success story nonetheless. 

Looking For A Husband - Danube River Tours, Castles, And Eye Shadow, The Feminine Mystique Of Travel

Vicki Brice squawked all the way up to Vassar for the reunion.  'This time will be a charm', she said referring to the Danube tour where she hoped to find her a husband - or rather a companion - for at her age romance was a thing of the distant past.  So dim in fact that she had to dig deep in her reticule of memories to sort out Michael from Phillip, Robert from David - or was it the other way around.  Never mind, doesn't matter. Let bygones be bygones, and let life begin again. 

Her husband of many years was not yet cold in the ground before Vicki began to plan her future.  'God only knows how many years one has left', she mused to her classmates, limning the praises of Lindblad Travel, a savior in disguise, the happy refuge for still-young widows like her.  She was not going to sit on her behind and watch the clock tick her hours away, not on your life, so it wasn't long after Arnold was in the grave that she began her romantic journeys.

The reunion would be a lot of old cows mooing about some bull who took them in the pasture, but old times are good times, and along with the fragments of trips to Yale, the Old Campus, the parties at Davenport and Silliman, reunions were silly, happy, girly things.  

Vassar girls however were supposed to be a cut above Smith, Holyoke, and the rest of the Seven Sisters - a place for the brightest, the future of women and not the usual marriage mills. Yes, the college did arrange busses to take girls down to Yale for the weekend, but that was part of the perks of a school like Vassar - differential calculus and the pick of the litter.  

If a Vassar girl had not found the man she was to marry by the time she graduated, something had gone awry.  God knows, there was no lack of opportunity. 

Now, Vicki was not exactly Miss Universe, in fact far from it.  She had gotten all the wrong genes from her Guatemalan father and Canary Island mother - a pairing which looked good on college applications just beginning to look for 'diversity' but which genetically speaking was a bad hand. 

She tried her best to make up for her genetic misfortune and spent a fortune on cosmetics, hair styling, and Lord & Taylor, but not even a makeover genius could have done anything for those narrow-set eyes, fright wig hair, disappointing nose, and thin as paper lips.  As much as she tried to convince herself otherwise, she was not much to look at.

Yet Yale was a big place, and the bell curve applies to everything; so although the number of chisel-jawed, blonde, blue-eyed Adonises skewed the curve and flattened it considerably, there were bound to be good men, just men, the right kind of men for her. 

She did find one, her recently departed husband, Arnold; and if there is little record of the couple, individually or together, it is because there are people on this earth who barely leave a smudge, men and women who come and go with barely a notice, folded into the run of the mill so perfectly that when they die, it is as though they had never lived. 

So Vicki's squawking was her war cry,  She might have been married to an emotional bookkeeper all these years - Arnold was never able to muster much more enthusiasm than turning a page - but her new life was going to begin, albeit far too late.  

All in all Arnold was a good husband, one of the very few who never strayed - but to be honest, this sexual sedentariness, far from honorable, made him even more unattractive. She had always had eyes for Lance Reventlow, Yale's prize, a Casanova, Valmont, and Lothario even as a freshman; but watched him fall into the spider web of Alexandra Cabot of the Boston Cabots, a tart, une pute, but a girl with money galore and Hollywood looks.  How could anyone compete with that?

There was first the Caribbean cruise, a very pedestrian affair. First Class did not do much to separate the wheat from the chaff, filled as it was with jolly old men from Dubuque more suited for excusing themselves for port and cigars while the ladies retired than anything romantic.  

Not a one of these 'men' was of any interest, the on-and-off stops at hot, steamy places was enervating, and the meals, touted as being prepared by a five-star chef, were as limp and insipid as her fellow diners. 

The second tour - the Aegean - offered more promise. It attracted a higher caliber of client thanks to a team of docents from Columbia University, a whopping all-inclusive price, and luxury accommodations; but the men kept their noses in their Baedekers and took copious notes during all lectures.  Who cared who did what to whom in the Peloponnesian wars, for God's sake? 

So this third tour, the Danube tour, seemed right.  Thanks to AI, Vicki was able search beyond the brochures.  There was no shame in asking ChatGPT anything, so she typed in 'I want a river cruise where I can meet, attractive, eligible older men' and Avalon was at the top of the list. 

To take a step back - why did these matronly women possibly think that trolling for husbands on a cruise ship was going to catch them a prize? Vicki had been saddled with her unhappy ordinariness for decades, and in that time not one man other than her bookkeeper husband ever looked her way. In fact Arnold rarely looked up at her at all. He was happy in the relationship because she, unlike most women, never forced the issue.  

Beverly Adams, for example, a woman of some stature in her former profession, married to a man whom she missed when he died, still needed male company.  Who said that women could be complete without men? Beverly wondered.  Probably some lesbian feminist who never needed men.   

So she went on cruises just like Vicki with little more in her bag to recommend her.  She was still attractive in an older woman kind of way, still as pert and vivacious as she was years ago, and while not beautiful, certainly attractive.  However she came up empty handed each and every time.  Divorced men obsessed about their wives, either disconsolate for having been left on the curb or angry that they had been; and widowers were still living in the shadows of the dear departed. 

Beverly was adaptable. Waverly was dead and buried, they had led a good life, but old age is unforgiving and the clock ticks faster than it did when one is young.  Yet for all her sanguinity and enthusiasm, she found nothing but dissatisfaction on board.  

Cruises are deliberately configured to encourage companionship, to make romantic interchange easier, to grease the wheels.  The cruise line membership algorithm was designed for compatibility.  It took the chance out of meeting.  Otherwise why bother? One might just as well cruise the National Gallery of Art or the Corcoran for well-intentioned, cultured men. 

Let's face it.  Most of these women, although hardwired to need men, socially programmed to seek them out and to live with them, were diffident about the idea at best. Decades of marriage only confirmed what their inner voices told them - men really aren't worth it, better to live without them, especially as one gets older and sex fades  as a desirable commodity. 

Vicki squawked all the way up 95, the Dewey Throughway, and Route 9W to Poughkeepsie.  This time would be different, she told her classmates.  She would come back refreshed, invigorated, renewed, and with a beautiful man in tow. 

Needless to say the Danube Cruise was just as much of a bust as the others, and Vicki was forced to regroup.  Maybe she was barking up the wrong tree. 

After the reunion she dropped out of sight, not a peep in the alumnae notes of The Vassar Quarterly, not a sighting anywhere in Washington; so it was anyone's guess what happened to her.

‘I hope she found someone',  one Vassar friend said to another; but Vicki would have been barking and yapping if she had.  No, a singular fate must have awaited her. 

There was nothing really surprising about Vicki's odyssey, regardless how she might have ended up. Women of a certain age are simply too hardwired to the man thing, the social thing, to do anything else.  All well and good for both sexes when both are plump and juicy, not so later on. 

Slave To The Kitchen, Slave To The Job - Why The Outrageousness Of Donald Trump Is So Appealing

Harlan Banks worked two jobs and a little on the side.  There was always something to deliver or dig or fetch, and he made ends meet.  His life in a small town in the Mississippi delta was unremarkable for its regularity and its sameness.  Everyone was in the same boat, paddling in the slow current of the bayou, watching time pass with little to show for it. 

Yes, he loved his children, put up with his wife and his in-laws, enjoyed a week on the Gulf every few years or so, but soldiered on like others in his regiment - born poor, raised poor, and lived poor.  Not colored poor, but poor enough, not trailer trash but living in a trailer. 

He was a complaisant, uncomplaining worker at Walmart and The Live Oak, a popular restaurant where he worked seven till closing. Living on the margins meant he could never complain, act up, or make demands.  He was as much a slave and no better off than Isaiah who had worked the Ottaway Plantation where his great-grandfather had been overseer.  Dawn till dusk in the cotton fields, cornpone and fatback, working his fingers to the bone for nothing. 

His family remained on the plantation during Reconstruction as tenant farmers.  It didn't take long for Harper Middleton, the former grandee of Ottaway, run off his property by the Freedmen's Bureau, to regain his land, and he was quick to hire whomever was still in the county, white or black, to work as tenant farmers. 

Life as a tenant farmer was little different from slavery.  Harlan's forbears managed a living on the fertile bottomland recovered by Middleton, but were as beholden to him as former slaves were to him as Massa. 

Life went on for succeeding generations of Banks until the present day when Harlan Banks reflected on his history. For how many generations longer would Banks be owned, tethered and tied, beholden and corralled? 

The election of Donald Trump changed everything.  Not that he expected to be a guest at Mar-a-Lago or at the White House, nor even that expected prosperity to come his way.  That might come once attention turned towards people like him - patriotic, hardworking, Americans of faith who asked nothing from government but opportunity - but the real reason for the fresh air was the personality of the President, a man who had nothing to do with the pedantry, sanctimony, and righteousness of the Left. 

He was a Super Hero, a comic book action figure come to life.  He was an Ubermensch with no patience for small minds and infantile idealism.  He was a Colossus.  It wasn't so much that Harlan would ever be like Donald Trump - his yachts, mansions, and arm candy - but that thanks to him he might regain his dignity.  

After years of being told he was a white supremacist, a racist cracker, a fundamentalist fool, an airheaded swamp rat, he was suddenly his own man.  After years of the configuration of society around the assumption of the black man's native superiority, the white man was once again in focus. 

He was again told that his Scotch-Irish roots were noble, that the European civilization from which his ancestors had come was valorous and built the foundation for liberal democracy; that there was no such thing as systemic racism; that there was no distinction between the working man and the leader of government. 

Most importantly, Trump was outrageous. He bulldozed his way down Independence Avenue and got rid of the do-nothing hangers-on in one bureaucracy after another.  He was building a grand ballroom, an Arch of Victory, and a Field of Heroes.  He was wielding a mighty Christian sword crushing the infidel and razing his cities.  He was reprising Joshua in the battle of Jericho, ridding the Holy Land of the heathen enemies of Israel. 

Professional wrestling matches would be held at the White House, and tinsel, sequins, and sparkle would return.  The days of ugliness, faux propriety, and absurdity would be gone and forgotten.  Harlan's America was back!

This of course was exactly what drove the Left to distraction.  It wasn't so much the President's conservative policies - lower taxes, freer enterprise, less regulation, a more muscular foreign policy, an embrace of capitalism and Wall Street investment - but his embrace of what they saw as a lowbrow, cheap culture.  

After years of progressive promotion of gay men, lesbians, transgenders and the black man, the beautiful people were back - the blonde, blue-eyed women and handsome, chisel-jawed men.  It was the return of a much maligned culture that they thought they had thoroughly disparaged and dismissed that rankled. 

The President didn't just change the cultural ethos on little cats' paws, but like gangbusters - with an in-your-face, fuck you braggadocio - and it was this that Harlan cheered.  The explosive anything goes ethos of the old America. 

Why, the Left asked, would anyone like Harlan Banks vote for Donald Trump, a crony capitalist whose policies would only benefit the rich and the privileged?  Their policies and programs would be designed for the marginalized, the disadvantaged, and the poor.  

Yet as Harlan knew these programs were fictions, enabling charades for minorities, giveaways in the name of equity but nothing more than posturing.  During the Biden years Harlan hadn't seen one dime of the purported equity money so widely promised.  Trump made no fictive promises, but only pledged to recalibrate and reconfigure the American economy to do its job, to spread prosperity.  

Harlan would wait but in the meantime was energized, spirited, and awakened by the President.  Every time he called out a reporter for their dumb questions; every time one of his Cabinet members refused to toady up to Congressional committee members and snapped back at their preposterous sanctimony, he cheered. 

This is what the Left missed.  America is not a progressive, serious, compassionate place.  It is lowbrow, simple, and honest about its lack of pretention.  It is a country of Las Vegas and Hollywood, con men, pimps, and charlatans, catfish noodlers and alligator hunters.  It is a country of men like Harlan who have limits - and they have had enough of the Biden progressive freak show. 

Northern liberals are proud of the fact that they have never set foot below the Mason-Dixon line, for to do so would be giving support to the racist, proto-segregationist, perennially Jim Crow cracker South.  They have never met a Harlan Banks and never wanted to do so.  Anyone born and raised as he was would not be worth their time. 

Progressive arrogance plus Trump outrageousness is the perfect political storm for continued conservative victory.  Americans like Harlan want their country back.  Let it become more 'diverse' but on Jeffersonian terms, terms of integration, patriotism, and subscription to a core moral ethos.  Not the progressives'  arrogant, politically expedient, absurd, and divisive 'inclusivity'. 

'Fuck 'em', said Harlan, catching the President's drift.