Taming the Exotic: Sexytimes With The Other, Part II (Mildly NSFW)

The counterpart to the 'let's go on a meaningless sexy adventure' portrayal of a WASP-y protagonist and an Other love interest is the 'Power of Love' story, in which the exotic lover is tamed and assimilated by the protagonist, and essentially made into a socially acceptable partner. Older works are likely to star a European or Euro-American man and an Other woman, but there's an abundance of stories, particularly romance novels, with the gender roles reversed (see the cover at the right... there were pages and pages of them on Google search, and that was just the Native American/white pairings!)

This trope has a similar yuck factor to the one I discussed on Monday, namely that it implies the culture/religion/etc of the Other character is inferior, and something that needs to be 'fixed' before they can be considered an appropriate partner for the protagonist. The added bonus is the implication that the WASP character is doing their love interest a favour by erasing their cultural heritage. (This also pops up in the inter-class variant, where the wealthy character teaches the poor character about expensive clothes, etc.; in older works the love interest converting to the 'right' religion-- typically Christianity-- crops up as well).

This gets presented, typically, as a happy outcome, since most of the conflict in this scenario stems from social disapproval of the relationship, and not from conflict within the couple based on individual personalities or incompatible cultural beliefs and customs.

I'm not in the least against writing stories where the main character(s) find love across racial, socio-economic, cultural or religious lines. There's lots of stories there to explore. Just let your characters be people instead of relying on the two established templates for romancing the Other.