Ashley Graham’s family didn’t initially accept black husband

Interracial dating can be complicated, Ashley Graham and husband Justin Ervin painfully learned after she introduced him to her family.

“I brought Justin home to Nebraska. Now, I should probably mention that Justin is black, and that I didn’t grow up around many black people,” the model reveals in her new book, “A New Model: What Confidence, Beauty and Power Really Look Like,” which is excerpted in Glamour. “The sum total of what I learned about African American culture in school was Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Underground Railroad. This was more than my mom knew; she didn’t even see a black person in real life until she was 18 years old.”

Her family’s lack of interaction with African-Americans in the Midwest sets up for a very uncomfortable situation à la Katharine Houghton and Sidney Poitier in 1967’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”

“I never told Justin any of this, and I never told my grandparents that the man I was bringing home was black. I naively hoped everyone would be color-blind,” she said. “When my grandparents met Justin, my grandmother was cordial but cold. She greeted him and immediately walked away. When it came time for them to leave, my grandparents didn’t even acknowledge him. Instead my grandmother looked me in the eye, with Justin standing behind me, and said, ‘Tell that guy I said goodbye.’”

As the pair continued to date, things worsened before they improved. Ervin made it clear her grandmother’s perception of black people came from television, which often perpetuates racist stereotypes. But Ervin took matters into his own hands by taking the first step to build a bridge with Graham’s family.

“Justin called my grandmother on her 60th wedding anniversary,” Graham recalled. “He’s not a texter or an emailer; he’s a pick-up-the-phone-and-call-you person, and anniversaries are a big deal to him. Afterward Grandma called my mom and said, ‘You’ll never guess who called me.’ And from then on out, she loved him. Loved him.”