Love’s Not Color Blind by Kevin Patterson

THIS…..BOOK……RIGHT…HERE!!! (inserts slow clap) I’ve been waiting to read this since hearing about it last year. I thought, Finally Yesss, someone talking about the problems of race within polyamory and other alternative communities which I do belong in.

First can we just talk about the Forward by Ruby Bouie Johnson though??!!! Sis, really came through. Yup I’m about to be real black on this review. I already admire her from just hearing her speak on previous occasions within the poly community so when I read her forward it set the tone for the whole book. It fed my soul and made this atheist want to go back to my old church and do a praise dance and run a few laps around the sanctuary. That’s just how good I felt throughout this WHOLE book. Some of her quotes that got me were:

“A book about the polyamorous experience written by a black man just happened in 2017. This is a historical moment.”

“Black people have been spectators to the white experience long enough. Kevin fills a much needed gap in the literature within the poly community.”

I made a status update just 22 pages in about how this book was making me get my whole entire life, and it was. I had to nod my head to SO much in this book. So much that most people in the alternative communities don’t know about inclusion. I’ve personally experienced in the BDSM community both online and in real life. I’ve been one of the only few black women there who just so happened to have a friend (another black women who I refer to as my “sub sister”) there to support and have fun, but of course I’ve been met with the fetishization of me and my body as a black woman. Kevin speaks about this at length in his chapter on fetishization.

I’ve dogeared several pages that I wanted to talk about that really resonated with me like always being the “ambassador” of polyamory to my non-poly or mono relatives. It’s really irritating that I’m always that one, the face of polyamory so to speak. I know a few of my friends or relatives may say yeah Jai’s into that “white people shit” which he discusses in the book as well. I nearly died laughing when he said that because I’ve heard that about almost everything I like to do, but, oh well, I won’t take up too much time on that topic.

A few things that Kevin does that I absolutely love about this book is he says in the first few chapters of the book about how much privilege he has a cisgendered heterosexual male. He recognized the privilege he had right there, and that’s very important. Sadly, most non-POC can’t recognize how their racial privilege affects people. For the most part it’s a negative effect. I seriously wish I could post every single quote and thing that hit home. I just nodded my head through so much of it, like yup he gets it. He absolutely gets it. Some of the other topics he discusses are intentional communities, othering, white feminism in polyamory, and fostering inclusion in poly to name a few.

These topics definitely need to be addressed all the time, not just in polyamory and alternative communities. I don’t know how many countless discussion, journal entries and group posts that I’ve read in online forums about racism, stereotyping and fetishization. It’s a sad, sad state of affairs, but it is pretty common and of course those people who do it don’t even realize they’re doing it, and, when confronted, they make up every excuse not “to own their shit” as stated in the book. Hey, everyone can’t and won’t grow, I learned that a long time ago.

I’m going to end this review with another quote that resonated with me. “If you aren’t being actively inclusive, you are being passively exclusionary.”