Ashley Graham is opening up about when she first brought the love of her life home to meet her family, and how not all of them were open to accepting that she was dating a black man.
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She said, “I naively hoped everyone would be colorblind.”
In her new book, “A New Model: What Confidence, Beauty, and Power Really Look Like,” Ashley goes in depth about what the experience was like.
She says, “I brought Justin home to Nebraska. Now, I should probably mention that Justin is black, and that I didn’t grow up around many black people. The sum total of what I learned about African American culture in school was Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Underground Railroad.”
Apparently, her grandparents didn’t take it too well, as Ashley writes, “When my grandparents met Justin, my grandmother was cordial but cold. She greeted him and immediately walked away. When it came time for them to leave, my grandparents didn’t even acknowledge him. Instead my grandmother looked me in the eye, with Justin standing behind me, and said, “Tell that guy I said goodbye.”
She went on to sorrowfully express, “I had never seen my loving, hardworking, and wonderful grandma be so hurtful and so racist.”
Justin, Ashley says, was extremely comforting about the whole situation, saying, “Justin made me understand that someone like my grandma only saw black men depicted on television in situations involving guns, rape, and violence—situations that perpetuate racist stereotypes against black people in general and black men in particular.”
Eventually, Justin won grandma over, Ashley goes on to tell, “Justin called my grandmother on her 60th wedding anniversary. He’s not a texter or an emailer; he’s a pick-up-the-phone-and-call-you person, and anniversaries are a big deal to him. Afterward Grandma called my mom and said, ‘You’ll never guess who called me.’ And from then on out, she loved him … Loved him.”
It’s nice to still hear there are stories out there of love conquering hate.
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[H/T: Daily Mail]
