Photo courtesy Tiffany Jana
When I look at my husband, Matthew Freeman, it’s hard for me to come to grips with the fact that at one time we could have been sentenced to prison because we decided to marry.
I firmly believe that love is love. Love has no race and color boundaries. While we’ve come a long way, we still have much further to travel. So many people still don’t understand that race is a social construct. There are no biological races — only ethnicities based on ancestral heritage. That’s not something you know by looking at someone. Nonetheless, race defines people’s experiences in profound ways. The Loving decision means that people are free to love whomever they choose, regardless of societal bias.
Our nearly 7-year-old marriage is beautifully complicated. We met at work, were friends and colleagues before we fell in love and got married. We’re an interracial couple — I wear dreadlocks, and am quite comfortable and happy being a black woman, while Matthew’s short hair is wavy at best, and he’s quite comfortable and happy being a white man. There is never a dull moment in our household. Working together and living together in a world that is still so full of bias is intense.
We are living, breathing examples of racial reconciliation. We have an intense spiritual partnership and we have to think outside the box to overcome our differences and embrace each other’s strengths. Matthew is helping raise three black children. I am navigating a white male-dominated career. We leverage each other to make sense of an otherwise complicated landscape. We work hard, we play hard and we travel often. We laugh when we find ourselves “facilitating” each other as we do with clients. We most definitely use the tools we teach.
We founded our company TMI Consulting Inc. as a leadership and organizational development consulting firm that specializes in diversity and inclusion strategies, and we practice what we preach. We are based in Richmond and much of our work is here, but we’ve also worked across the country and in Europe, Africa and Asia. Our eyes are very open to all of the bias that exists and persists within the systems all around us.
Everyone has bias — even nice people like you. No shame or blame as I see it. You are not the problem, but the solution. We are such believers in creating authentic relationships across differences that we have written a book that comes out in print this month, “Overcoming Bias.” In it we share tools we teach and use in our own lives and marriage — everything from how to use dialogue to how to manage our personal triggers. We could have divorced many times over by now, but understanding the value of diverse perspectives helps us be patient, forgive, communicate and love each other more fully and honestly. Together we share great joy.
