Good Question.  I am currently in love with a beautiful black woman.  I am as white as they get.  She is my soul mate and I love her very much.  What is important to me in a woman has absolutely nothing to do with skin color.  I even live in a small town and come from an opinionated family. I have however travelled the world and find all woman attractive.  I have dated women of many various colors and races.  They were all uniquely beautiful to me.

Having said all that I think it all boils down to approach.  I hang with some white dudes that are just intimidated with black women.  I think it is funny because I guess I dont find the stereotype they think they will find.  What that might be I dont even know. 

My advice to a black woman who is interested in a white dude?  If you are old fashioned you are prob out of luck.  If you can stomach the approach then you will have to make the first move and let him know you are interested.  I think most guys any color feel more comfortable with a hint or two, it will break the wall of intimidation or preconcieved notions really quick.

Cool topic and very interesting analysis.  I have some of the same questions.  And I've come to the conclusion that it must boil down to more than racial stereotypes perpetuated my American Media.

This is going be a long post so here goes... 

I live in Toronto where interracial dating runs rampant. I don't think I know too many people (White, Black, Yellow, Red or Brown) that are dating within their own race, with the exception of a small handfull. I have lived in London and just like Toronto we are not really burdened with the history of black versus white. Of course the issues reside in both cities and are not to be made light of but we have never experienced them the way it has been experienced in the States.

That being the case interracial relations (generally speaking) are far more common in Canada and England. But, the only people that tend to be left out of this dating pool are black women and sometimes East Asian men. I have noticed that East Asian men tend to date other East Asian women (usually from the same country), where as black women who are far more open to the idea of dating outside of their race remain single (I.E. out of 10 of my black girlfriends only 1 refuses to date outside of her race... namely white dudes...funnily she is bi-racial). Most of my black girlfriends (6/10, that are not currently involved with black men) are single (myself included). We are university educated, healthy lifestyle living, loving, soft hearted, eloquent, strong and beautiful women but completely left out of the dating game. Well not completely, (I mean there are always men that see beyond colour and have the balls to get over their personal anxiety and approach a black girl), but these women are not flooded with the attention that they are due or that they would receive if they were of another race (Asian, Hispanic etc), by men of any colour (including black).

For whatever reason the term "black girl" seems to carry so much weight. WHY? Who ever said that black girls don't like white guy's and vice versa? Of course there are always the few that are uninterested, but that goes for all races, so why are the interracial dating ratios so far a skew?

I know there is the interest. I mean for most guys in London and Toronto a woman is a woman it doesn't matter if she's from Bombay or Capetown. But when it comes to approaching a black girl they just clamp up and I simply don't get it. I have a lot of guy friends of all races, the majority tend to be white, I can tell you exactly which of them fancy me yet none of them approach me. The only time they do, is when they loosen up, and are usually slightly inebriated...and if I shoot them down they can pass it off as being drunk (and I usually do shoot them down... Because they are drunk ha ha)... but when sober, they just clamp up and go back to their doe eyed ways, stammering around the issue. It's so bazaar. I always have to be the one to make the first move. Which I hate because I am very shy in those terms, and like most girls I prefer to be courted and it's never easy when it's your friend and you may have misread the signs (never have yet) but still, they have no problem callously hitting on other girls, why not me when it's obvious that they are attracted.

The only time guys haven't been shy to approach me was in London and Montreal. (maybe it's the European influence thing... men are just far more bold and apt to going after what they want regardless of the consequences to their ego). But still, the ratio is a skew, but on the rise.

Anyway, that's my rant, and I guess it's still an unresolved question. Honestly I think the more it is portrayed in the media the more people (and guys) will become comfortable with the idea of it and realise that women are women and that we all as a society have to move beyond our racial hangups. Humanity has come so far, and still has a ways to go, but that's not gonna happen by closing ourselves off within our ethnic ghettos and not getting out and interacting in all ways shapes and forms and appreciating people on the other side of the fence.

xoxox...

p.s. I just remembered a story of when I was in Uni. So I lived in rez first year and I had this friend that lived on my floor. He was a white guy from a small town 4 hours West of Toronto. Anyway, so I was in his room one day and he was down the hall and I was sitting on his bed waiting for him to return to his room and he had this hot background image of a bikini clad Tyra Banks on his computer. So when he walked into the room I said, “you're a fan of Tyra, eh?” and the blood just drained from his face and he sat at the computer looking all anxious. I was surprised so I asked him what was wrong, and he said that he thought that I would think it was weird for him to have a black girl on his screen. And I was shocked by this revelation. And I told him of course, not, "why would I care if you think a black girl is hot? Christ I think its fantastic and for shit sakes she's a model, the whole world knows she's hot." I just couldn't wrap my head around his reaction. Anyway long story short, myself and some other Toronto friends launched into a discussion about race and interracial dating and history and ethnicity etc and it was very interesting and quite enlightening according to him as he had never known a black girl before (aside from the 1 black girl in his grade that apparently was a bitch from his account lol). The next day he changed his background image to some other girl though (although Tyra made the occasional appearance throughout the year) never asked why. He started dating East Asian girls after that discussion as well (never a black girl... but I think it's because there weren't too many at my particular university (outside of Toronto). Actually for most people from small town at my university I was the first black friend they ever had. I was honoured and eager to make a great first impression lol. Spread some of my left leaning liberal ideologies, so now they think all black girls are like me!...and actually all of my black girlfriends are like me as well as the majority that I meet, In Canada, the US or the UK. ha.

I don't really think there is such a scarcity of white guy/black girl couples, especially not on college campuses. Some recent polls actually showed that there are two times more white guy/black girl couples than the reverse on college campuses at the moment, and the ratio is increasing. The thing is, I'm white& my girlfriend is black and we both go to school in NY; at the same time it's probably worthwhile mentioning that I'm Romanian and my girlfriend is Trinidadian...but even before I came to the states, my first girlfriend was part indian so slightly darker than the average there...simply, I just feel more attracted to darker skinned girls, and I also feel that they're more down to earth somehow unconsciously...mostly because, on average, they had to fight more to get where they did, or had close family members that had to fight and instilled those ideas in them - unlike the white counterpart that might come from a legacy of rich people.

The reason my girlfriend and I think there are increasingly more black girl/white guy couples is that, well, black girls on average work significantly harder than black guys for their classes, and also tend to have different values (not that many girls are athletes or into hip hop culture like the guys, as bad as this might sound), so they have bigger chances of just finding somebody to get along with that's white. I think most of my friends at school are Black girls that actually have no Black male friends. And this unfortunately makes sense: my gf is an engineer, I'm a physicists and though there are quite a few black girls wearing engineering shirts on campus, there is NO Black male undergrad doing Physics at Columbia, 1 undergrad doing math (that calls himself latino) and the list could go on so we can add up to 3 Black students in these fields...out of many hundreds. So there are barely any black guy/white girl couples but there are simply tens of couples like us that we see whenever we go out. Unfortunately we do get lots of angry looks from Black guys on the streets of NY, which I guess are compensated by nice looks from Black girls. At the moment I'm in Trinidad so we get angry looks from everyone, but that's a different matter.

It's true that our situation is reversed from the one some years ago when the black guy was the "stud" and what not, and couples were mostly black guy/white girl. And this is probably what is still keeping many black guys at Columbia back (and single): they rely a whole deal on being "cool" and enforcing old racial stereotypes that actually defavour them educationally. Further, it makes the few  students that do science and the girls that are my friends feel awkward about the colour of their skin as they don't "talk Black", nor do they listen to "Black music" so they were stigmatized in high school by other Black students by being called "White girl/boy" so now they will only date the people that accept them as who they are, despite their race. And this means (for all my friends who are Black girls brought up in the US) dating almost only outside their race, where what you have to say regardless of race is more important than your "being Black" - something that is pretty ironic. This is not the case of my gf though, she grew up in a country where everybody around her was Black, the president has been Black for a few decades, and where people - though Black - are very different than African Americans...so, simply, we're both foreigners who don't really care...not as much as the people staring at us at least. Some of her Trini friends asked her as a joke when Obama got elected "how does it feel to have a Black president?" because they're used to it.

Again, don't get me wrong, there are quite a few really smart Black dudes at Columbia; but there are just 2-3 doing science (all of them extremely good though, certainly better than the white average), and there are significantly fewer excelling like their female counterparts in other areas. This might also be the effect of a different form of discrimination going on for guys, racism comes out of fear and it's usually a sort of a male-fighting-for-terrritory thing, and that imaginary fight isn't against girls, so that might encourage girls to do better.