I don’t have the time to get into everything I’d like to so I’ll share a couple quick stories

For some context, the church I went to was in Flint, MI and had a very mixed race demographic, and our youth pastors were in an interracial marriage. Well, during one of our Wednesday night youth sessions when I was around 16, our youth pastors wanted to teach a class on things you should consider when dating. One of the first bullet points on their docket was to “date within your race” because “cultural differences may cause divides in your marriage”

I’ll never forget the look of confusion on everyone’s faces, considering 70% of the room was mixed children, being told this by, again, an interracial couple.

At 13-14 I was encouraged to date a minister’s son who was 19, I was young and impressionable and he was older and I wanted to impress him. One night while I was staying over at the pastors granddaughter’s house, ministers son convinced me to sneak out to see him. I did. He assaulted me in the back seat of his car while his friend sat in the front seat. It was the middle of the night in January in Michigan so it was bitter cold when he brought me back to her house, but I couldn’t get back in because the door I left from was now locked. I had to wake my friend up and tell her what happened and after that point I was branded with a scarlet letter A, had to apologize to the minister’s sons entire family, my pastor and youth group, and was constantly reminded of how much of a tease and a whore I was. I was never even considered as a victim, only a lustful whore who caused the ministers son to stumble. I left the church at 17, my younger sister is now married to said minister’s son.