*FYI’s new docuseries, “Bride & Prejudice,” follows three couples who desperately want to get married, but whose prejudiced family members do not approve of their unions. 24-year-old Briana Garcia, a biracial woman, and 36-year-old Adam Hammons, a white man, joined the cast to try to work through their families’ issues before their wedding in August 2016. They will take viewers on a journey that highlights the judgment and racial slurs they endure for the sake of love.
“I wanted everything to be on the table for my family and it’s just hard to get there with so many people just not approving of our relationship as an interracial relationship,” Garcia said. Her relatives ask her loaded questions like “what does that white man have to do with you as a young black woman?”
Garcia’s older cousin, Ashlyn, is the most critical of her relationship.
“I don’t think she approves of me dating outside of my race, especially with everything that’s going on in society today, and she thinks that I could possibly be a target,” Garcia told The Huffington Post. Ashlyn has even threatened to not attend their wedding. “I’m really just trying to get Ashlyn to be on board with our relationship. It’s kind of like she has her mind made up and she’s not changing it.”
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Hammons, who has a 13-year-old daughter from a previous relationship who is half black, is trying to get his father, Jack, a 74-year-old Texan, to change his old ways.
“I was raised basically to not like black people,” Hammons told HuffPost. A majority of Hammons’ childhood friends were black. Due to his family’s bias, however, he wasn’t allowed to always hang out with them outside of school and sports, so he lost many friends along the way.
“Most white people, when [they] see a black person, it’s an automatic stereotype because of what they see on TV… that was my dad,” Hammons said.
Despite Jack’s willingness to change by talking with the couple about their relationship, Garcia is not convinced that their union, nor his biracial granddaughter, will be enough to motivate her future father-in-law to ditch his old racist habits. The couple hopes their story will inspire other couples dealing with this challenge.
“[We] wanted to basically do this show to show people that are in the same exact situation that it might be hard now but it’s gonna be OK eventually,” Hammons said. “You have to do whatever you can, especially if it’s your family, to prove to them that this is OK to do.”
Watch a clip of Hammons trying to find common ground with Ashlyn below.
Watch “Bride & Prejudice” on FYI Tuesdays at 10 p.m. EST.
source: huffington post
