She always answered that she had no objection to marrying a white man provided he was a decent person. She describes herself and her husband as happy grandparents whose lives do not differ fundamentally from their contemporaries. Some of the younger women are less sanguine about their relationships with white men. She and several other contributors imply that some of their white lovers were interested in them not as individuals but as blacks, a statement that echoes Carol Camper s observation that the desire to gain entrance into a so-called exotic lifestyle was a motive behind some whites decision to marry interracially. Sometimes circumstance rather than race was the major factor in their choice of partner.
Some contributors admit to other reasons for preferring black over white men.
A young woman abandoned by her American soldier father and raised by her white mother says that for many Afro-German women the search for a father and the search for Black men often converged. Yet in some ways Showing Our Colors strikes me as the better book. For instance, Camper deliberately excluded contributions that endorsed views with which she disagreed, such as the idea of race mixing as the key to ending racial discrimination. Our Colors allow the contributors to express differing opinions. One example has to do with the role of blacks in German films.