Have you ever been walking down the street alone, or with friends and catch a stranger staring at you? Maybe your fly is unzipped, or you have a bugger hanging from you nose. The thing is, sometimes people don’t do a good job of disguising their stares. They may gaze for several seconds at someone they find interesting, good looking, or weird, and not notice that he or she has discovered someone is staring. Staring can make a person feel extremely self-conscious.

Now think about individuals who are walking down the street, hand-in-hand, enjoying life and they get glared at! Not because they are good looking or have anything wrong with them. It’s because they’re a bi-racial couple. It doesn’t seem to matter what two races; just the fact that they are different, makes it disturbing to some individuals.

When people say interracial relationships don’t bother them, or that they are not racist, maybe they really believe that. Maybe for some people what they say and really feel is the same. But the fact is that there are many people who believe interracial relationships are unnatural, inappropriate and wrong.

Interracially mixed couples aren’t the only kind of relationships, which bother people. You could be walking down the street with a couple of friends from different parts of the world, and for some individuals that would cause an alarm bell to go off. Like it or not, the world is full of people who are only in favor of matching; they are against mixing and matching.

Love, commitment, common interests and values are a few of the ties that should bind couples together. Only those in the relationship itself can truly decide whether or not race has a place in enhancing or diminishing their chance for a successful one.

In thinking about what is important for any relationship to succeed, the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., provide solid food for thought. Forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King advised everyone to judge people by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin.