Back in the day, when I was young, I didn’t like my blackness. It had nothing to do with my upbringing — my family loved our heritage and our history and tried to instill their knowledge into me from a young age. But society’s brainwashing starts early. It got a solid grip on my mind, and grew too quickly, like cancer. Discovering your identity as you grow up as the sole representative for your race in an all-white school was confusing. There were things my peers didn’t get, like why my hair coiled straight from my scalp. Or why I was never worried when there was an outbreak of lice. And there were things that I didn’t get. Like why some of my classmates’ parents didn’t want me coming over for playdates. If I was invited to play dates, I was equally confused by their invasive questions like “Is your father in your life?” or “Do you celebrate Kwanzaa?” or “Why don’t you straighten your hair more?”

This continued all throughout middle school and high school, and even though those environments were decidedly more diverse than elementary, I still never embraced my culture and my identity. I was ostracized by some of my black classmates for liking “white” things such as rock music (none of us realized that WE created rock music.) But I also stuck my nose up at my peers because, in my head, my proximity to whiteness was a source of pride. The farther away I was from the “typical” black girl, the more society would accept me. So I liked it when my teachers called me “articulate,” and I relished the times my white friends told me I was “different” from other black people. Once I got to college, I became more aware of my brainwashing, but it was nowhere near dismantled. I still argued that BET was reverse racism in my race and relations class (internal facepalm.) I still told my mother, when she asked me why I never showed interest in black men, that they just weren’t for me. “I’m not attracted to black men,” I told her as her mouth hung open in disbelief. Shaking her head, she muttered to herself, “Where did I go wrong?”

Things came to a head when I started dating my first boyfriend. He was my first legitimate, long-term relationship. And he was white. We bonded over our mutual love for music and Family Guy and video games. Things were good because we never talked about race or any other substantive topics. Even when he told me that meeting his grandparents may not be a good idea (because, of course, they were racist), I went along with it. “They’re from a different time,” I said, trying to convince myself. After about a year of dating, we decided to move in together. And that’s when everything began to change.

Moving in with someone reveals a lot about them and uncovers things that you might have been blind to before. This is true in any situation, but it’s especially true when you slowly begin to realize that you’re in a relationship with a bonafide racist. As I came to this conclusion about him, I also discovered myself as a black woman. I got more involved in my community, became much more aware of the war against my people and realized that I had rejected such a large part of myself for so long. I learned to genuinely love my blackness and my history — I did a complete 180, and he hated that.

He began to insinuate that I was changing, and not for the better. I was changing, but how is change negative when it involves loving yourself and your people? That was the first warning sign. There were plenty others as well. For the life of him, he couldn’t see why blackface was offensive. This was around Halloween when the low-key racists break out the brown face paint to play dress up. “It’s not that big of a deal,” he said when I showed him a picture of a man dressed up as Trayvon Martin. We’d be sitting on the couch watching tv and he’d flip to Fox News and would actually AGREE with the morons spewing racist and classist rhetoric. Then, when Mike Brown was shot and #BlackLivesMatter became a cultural movement, he said to me, “Of course black lives matter. ALL lives matter.” Once those words left his mouth, I said to myself, “Oh hell naw. He’s actually a racist.”

He tried to convince me that my path was the wrong one. “Look at the statistics,” he’d say. “Black people don’t make up that much of the population. Yet they commit a large amount of crime. That’s why white people are so afraid.” And then, when I told him that NYC cops are more likely to violently react to an unarmed black man than an armed white man, he said, “Well that’s probably because black people are more likely to have illegal weapons.”

Obviously, the relationship fell apart (other than his racism, he couldn’t season chicken properly and made fun of my sleeping bonnet) and I broke up with him. He called me a racist of course, for discriminating against him because he’s white, like they all do when they feel like they’re being “targeted” because of their skin color. Despite all of the terrible things that he said, I’m still incredibly grateful to him.

Why?

Because if I hadn’t dated him, I wouldn’t have known how good it feels to be loved by a black man who loves his community and his people as much as I do. I wouldn’t have known how good it feels to be comfortable in my skin. Without his racist tendencies, I might not have come to all the realizations that I did about the insidious hidden nature of racism. And most of all, watching him hate how much I came to love my blackness made me truly realize how wonderful it is to be black.

Society’s plan for me backfired. All my life, I was taught by Amerikkka that black men would never love me or give me the things that I needed. I was taught that black men grow up to be criminals and that they can’t be trusted. All of these lies I accepted as truth. I did what society wanted — I dated a white man because I thought black men weren’t good enough. And instead, I found out the exact opposite was true. Now I see why they want us to be apart so badly. Because our love, when true, is revolutionary. Being in love with a black man now… it’s incredible. At the end of the day, there’s nothing like having his brown skin next to mine, our histories, people and hearts intertwined together at the root.

So, to my racist ex-boyfriend, thank you so, so, so much. Your hateful ways made me grow into the person that I am today. Had I not grown in the ways that I had, I might not be in the place I am today — happily and endlessly in love. With myself, with him, with my people and with our collective future.

Arielle Gray is a Boston-based writer, poet and music journalist. She currently writes for the music website KillerBoomBox, while moonlighting as a freelance writer with work published through various mediums, including For Harriet and SoulBounce. You can catch her working on her collective for creatives of color, BLK MKT, and you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to keep up to date with her work and upcoming work/ performances.

READ NEXT: 5 ways to overcome those against your interracial relationship

Arielle Gray

Writing since March 2016 · 1 story contributed