Taye Diggs recently used an appearance on Van Lathan’s The Red Pill Podcast to give his bizarre takes on who he will or won’t date. First, a little bit of history: Diggs was married to Rent co-star Idina Menzel, who is white, for 11 years, but he claims he used to receive a lot of criticism for being with a white woman instead of a black woman. He is currently dating biracial actress and model Amanza Smith.
So, fast forward to today on the podcast when Diggs went one step further and claimed that the stigma has made it so that he doesn’t think he could ever date a white woman again. Let’s run through that again: Diggs is blaming black women for the fact that he now feels he can no longer date white women. If you’re rolling your eyes, you are having a very popular reaction.
Lathan and Diggs start talking about this issue at around the 23-minute mark above. Diggs said he felt black women were salty about his relationship with Menzel, even though he admits he doesn’t read social media.
“To this day, I still get, ‘I thought you only like white girls?’” Diggs said. “It’s been a life lesson. It doesn’t matter how many times I explain myself, there’s always going to be someone talking."
Asked if he had any resentment against black women, he said, “It took me a minute to not be offended. Deep down inside [there's resentment]. I don't wanna say I suppress it, but I just watch it. When it happens to you personally, even though you understand the logic, there's trauma there.”
“I don't know if I can ever mess with a white girl now,” he continued. “I don't like that. That goes against who I am as a person. I feel like I've had [to] deal with that so long it has changed what I think I like, what I'm attracted to.”
Lathan then noted black women are one of the most “devalued” groups in America, which is behind the concept that black men need to uplift and celebrate black women, and dating white women doesn’t help that. “In order for us as a people to move forward is to learn how to love yourself and to not make excuses,” Diggs said in response. “The more time you spend pointing fingers the less time you’re going to grow as a person and the less you’re going to be able to move forward.”
Diggs also recounted a story he has been telling since 2011 about how he feels he was destined to marry Idina Menzel. “When I was 13, I was reading a magazine and there was a picture of a black woman and I said, ‘Oh, she’s pretty, I want to marry her.’ And my mom said, ‘Oh honey, you’re going to marry a white woman.’ It hurt my feelings but she was right,” Diggs told Us Weekly in '11.
The underlying issues at stake here are clearly sticky as hell. Despite that complexity though, one thing is clear: black women throughout Twitter did not take kindly to Diggs’ assertions. It truly is a backwards sentiment: if Diggs, as he put it on the podcast, doesn’t care what people think about who he dates now, then why does he maintain that he still harbors resentment toward] black women? As it turns out, a lot of them really don’t care who he dates.
As Yesha Calahan wrote for The Root, “If he’s insecure about his own dating preferences, that’s his problem. Who he pokes his penis into shouldn’t matter to anyone but the person being poked,” but it seems disingenuous to play the victim “‘Woe is me, black women don’t like me because I like white women’ act.”
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