Category: featured

“Can you teach me how to twerk?”

“You’re pretty for a black girl.”

“One of my biggest fantasies is to role play slave and master.”

“You look so exotic, are you completely black?”

“Should I play some Destiny’s Child to make you more comfortable?”

I am not the only black woman that has heard these words. These phrases, though shocking to some, have become a familiar “mating call” for college-aged black women; fetishized by white peers under the guise of aesthetic praise. Even the seemingly complementary or innocuous ones are illustrations of the fetishization of black women, which is heavily rooted in the misogyny, racism, stereotyping, and anti-black sentiments that plague America.

Black bodies have a long history of being exoticized, fetishized, and othered. This happens to all black people, but this piece focuses on the fetishization of those that identify as a woman. The earliest example of this kind of discrimination is slave masters’ justification of raping their slaves. Slave owners’ abuse of the black woman’s sexuality branded slave women as livestock, not human beings. The erotic undertones of black people being stripped naked, oiled, and poked at by potential slave buyers were especially present in those cases relating to black women. White society believed that black women were wild, lustful creatures because they contrasted the image of the “pure” white woman. Consequently, this made black women both loathed and lusted after by white people.

This discrimination manifests in the case of Sara “Saartje” Baartman, a woman enslaved and forced into the circus as the “Hottentot Venus.” The word “Hottentot” is an ethnic slur, while the word “Venus” stands for the Roman goddess of love). During her enslavement, beginning in 1810, Baartman faced public ridicule for her figure which, according to European beauty standards, was grotesque and inhuman. Her large behind, enlarged labia, and full breasts were turned into spectacular commodities for a white audience to consume and from which her white captors to profit. This established an irony in her dual eroticization and mockery by white people; a body both sexualized and shamed. Ironically, in the same period that Baartman was shown off as a circus freak for her black female body white British women adopted the fashion of the bustle, which is characterized by emphasizing and exaggerating one’s buttocks. Unfortunately, this trend of white women with thicker bodies, like Kim Kardashian and Iggy Azalea, being admired for these features while black women with those same features being scorned, like Serena Williams and Blacc Chyna, still exists.

The idea of black women as carnal beings continued past the 17th century into the present. More recently, the production of film pornography allowed for the appropriation of black culture and misinterpretation of the black woman’s sexuality to be manufactured. The accessibility and industrialization of the porn industry makes this toxic imagery easier to promote, further praising and shaming black women for their otherness in comparison to European bodies. And let’s not forget the backlash Nicki Minaj faced after releasing the “lewd” cover art for Anaconda while Sarah, Becky, and Megan receive praise for posing in similar fashions on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Black fetishization is a powerful force that plays a role in many of the world’s institutions, including those of higher learning. The college hookup scene is difficult to navigate for many reasons, especially if you attend a small school, but it becomes increasingly more challenging when you’re black in a white space. Hookup culture is heavily based on physical appearance, and when beauty standards in America are Eurocentric this leaves even less room for black women to feel comfortable. Many of my black women friends acknowledged that at first the attention may feel empowering because they are often ignored, but fetishized compliments eventually leave them feeling used or hollow. It is quickly understood that he/she/they will not ask you for anything more than sex.

Everyone has a general right to fetish, it’s uncontrollable but ultimately derives from external forces such as cultural influences and taboos. However, the intellectual differences that distinguish the safe from the unsafe are very clear: so long as this fetish does not violate one’s humanity it is relatively safe. People with legitimate fetishes are often stigmatized, but if your “type” is one specific race, stop and ask yourself why. (Not all people who like black women or people with fetishes racially fetishize; however, the two are not mutually exclusive). Do you like black women because of their hair? Ass? “Independence”? “Sassiness”? These are characteristics of specific people, not a whole race. Believing that every member of a race possesses the exact same attributes is racist, even if it is intended as flattery. Do not imagine us to be people we are not. Do not erase our character.

Black women are repeatedly superficially judged and hypersexualized based on harmful stereotypes, which comes from centuries of violence. Centuries of combined violence, legislature, and literature have culminated in a disdain and ironic mystique for black, women’s bodies. This extension of misogyny and racism is aimed at maintaining control of the black woman’s body; it is not a compliment. Furthermore, even when black fetishization sometimes appears in the form of idolization, it is still not a compliment.

Being a black woman in college hookup culture filled with white bodies far too often means that your sexuality, character, and humanity are unappreciated and undermined. (It is also worth noting that as a rather light skinned, thin, cisgender woman, my experiences are very different from someone who does not share those same characteristics).

We are not your ebony princesses, your jungle baes, or your kinky twerking ladies. We are not objects to be used then discarded. We are not made solely to be stereotyped as erotic, naughty, wild, or aggressive. And most importantly: You are not progressive or good for “looking past our blackness”.

A few weeks ago a friend mentioned to me that one of her friends from home found me attractive and wanted to get to know me. When she asked them why she hadn’t been considered good enough to hook up with they said: “You’re cute but you’re just not black enough.”

Yikes.

I don’t remember a time when people didn’t attempt to strip my ethnicity from who I was. I heard it from friends, classmates, and even their parents. In their minds, it isn’t possible to be so intellectual, so “articulate,” so aspirational, while also being Black. As though the only way to accept me was to carefully measure me by how much I complied with a stereotype. In retrospect, I’ve noticed that as I grew older, the type of racism I experienced became more and more implicit, occurring on a micro level.^* In middle school, I remember telling my mother about how my classmates called me an “Oreo” during recess. They told me that I was “white” on the inside because I didn’t talk like a “regular” Black person. My mother turned to me and told me not to accept the pseudo-complement. She said that being African American and speaking “proper” English were not mutually exclusive, and that the way I spoke was not a result of me being internally “White”- it was a result of my first-rate education and intellectual capability.

As I grew older, the way people enacted racism was more complex than comparing my personality to a popular snack. The message, however, was always the same: “You’re so white.”  Why anyone, with positive or negative intentions, would say that to a person of color is something I never really understood the root of until attending a predominantly white University. In conversations about racism with other Black woman undergraduates about their experiences with racism, the phrase “you’re so white,” and how much we’ve heard it throughout our lives, always comes up. The women I spoke to all had something distinct in common: they were high achieving, intellectual individuals. To me, this isn’t unusual, so I was perplexed by all these people who found it to be so.

I have been surrounded by a support system of high achieving Black men and women all my life. However, given that many of my peers and their parents were only exposed to stereotype, they saw me as an anomaly, but I never saw the contradiction. I still don’t see a contradiction. It took me a long time to understand that people saw a discrepancy between how I spoke and how I looked. Strangely, they felt a need to tell me so. My embodied Blackness didn’t fit their perceptions of what Blackness should be.  When confronted by the existence of someone who does not fit into that understanding, instead of expanding their conception and understanding of Blackness, they labeled me as “white.”  

I grew up believing in myself and my abilities, not because I wanted to be the exception to the stereotype, but because I never registered one in the first place. My peers called me an Oreo because the person they saw in front of them clashed with their preconceived ideas of who they should have been seeing at their magnet schools, their NHS meetings or their research labs. But what they didn’t realize is that those things were never “theirs” in the first place. No one group can claim ownership of intellect, achievements, taste in music, or personality type. There is not one “type” of Black person, and there is no one “type” of any person of any ethnicity. We are all individuals with diverse backgrounds, interests and aspirations- not cookies to be boxed into a misrepresentation of our respective cultures.

*What are Microaggressions?

Microaggression theory was originally developed by a psychiatrist named Chester M. Pierce in 1970, and has been elaborated on by several psychologists and psychiatrists since then. Derald Wing Sue of Columbia University has categorized different types of “microaggressions” into 3 groups: Microassaults, Microinsults and Microinvalidations. According to Sue, microaggressions are “everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent to them.”

DeAngelis, Tori DeAngelis. “Unmasking ‘racial Micro Aggressions'” American Psychological Association. 2009. Web. 10 Oct. 2016. <http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/02/microaggression.aspx>.