The Black Sexism Debate, interracial intimacy, and Black women’s agency

It’s intriguing to see how different modern vitrol for bm/ww, bw/wm, bm/wm, and bw/ww even now when those relationships have agency on both sides. Because Black women were always accessible to yt men they are almost never seen as having the agency or the choice to date inter or intra racially. When a black men dates interracially there are two understandings of his choice. In the case of dating a yt woman, it is seen an affirmation of his masculinity to the detriment of his race. As Michelle Wallace elaborates subjugating the yt woman is seen as a symbol of ultimate masculinity. The betrayal is understood as an obviously advantageous position in which he’s put himself but on which he should not have attempted in order to stay loyal to his race. As Kayne West puts it, “ Stick by his side/you know the dude’s balling and yeah that’s right/but you keep calling and trying and you stay right girl/and when he get on he’ll leave yo ass for a white girl” (Goldigger). Wealth and power and a Doris Day to share it with. That’s the American dream. In the case of a Black man dating a yt man, his choice is seen as an assault on his masculinity, a elective castration, and an act to the detriment of his race and the national project. The Black Nationalist project is not queer. In the patriarchal construct of sex as domination over a lesser being for one’s own pleasure, Black men are subjugating themselves willingly, making them less than, and even worse to yt men. In a vast simplification of the politics of these relationships, the yt men who sleep with Black men are seen as acting out a power dynamic of which the movement is trying to strip them. I do not doubt that this is true in some cases, but the assumption still stands as overarching and all consuming.

For Black women dating interracially, it is seen as ignorant or a relationship without agency. In the case of a Black woman dating a yt man, she is actuating out a historical tragedy. As Wallace notes, “the miscegenation laws [were] designed to keep the black man and the white woman apart while the white man helped himself to black women,” (51). As I said with bm/wm, it is possible that those politics are there. In our yt supremacist heteronormative society, Black women are fetishized or denigrated and intimacy does not exist outside of politic. However ascribing this idea to every bw/wm relationship doesn’t give Black women agency. It doesn’t allow for an individual to make an informed decision about her own life despite the politics. It also does not give her the problematic benefit of perhaps making an advantageous decision for her femininity, though I’m not quite sure what that advantage would be (it could be the idea of being accepted within a yt supremacist standard of femininity or having access to power structures though her husband/lover that she doesn’t have access to herself). The idea that she is oppressed or weaker alone or even that she could be aiming for some advantage (an idea that was present in slave times as Wallace notes and contributed to the divide between Black men and Black women) is erased. The relationship of Black women dating yt women is relatively unexplored but the ideas of the butch Black lesbian oppressing the gentle yt femme come to mind.

Interesting Links:

http://thoughtcatalog.com/alok-vaid-menon/2014/03/confessions-of-a-snow-queen/

http://www.eonline.com/news/499523/tamera-mowry-s-husband-adam-housley-calls-interracial-marriage-attacks-bigoted-and-pathetic