When Your (Brown) Body is a (White) Wonderland
August 29, 2013 7:35 PM   Subscribe

"[W]hite women have no problem cheering their husbands and boyfriends as they touch me on the dance floor. I am never seriously a contender for acceptable partner and mate for the white men who ask if their buddy can put his face in my cleavage." Tressie McMillan Cottom explains why white sexualization of "fat black female bodies" is old, bad news; and why telling “homegirls with big butts” to reject the “haters” because “somebody loves [them]” is no compliment.

McMilllan Cottom writes about the economic interests behind depictions of black woman as "sexual oddities."
The legendary “one drop” rule of determining blackness was legally codified not just out of ideological purity of white supremacy but to control the inheritance of property. The sexual predilections of our nation’s great men threatened to transfer the wealth of white male rapists to the children born of their crimes through black female bodies.

...

Today much has changed and much has not. The strict legal restriction of inheritable black deviance has been disrupted but there still exists a racialized, material value of sexual relationships.Black feminists have critiqued the material advantage that accrues to white women as a function of their elevated status as the normative cultural beauty ideal. As far as privileges go it is certainly a complicated one but that does not negate its utility. Being suitably marriageable privileges white women’s relation to white male wealth and power.
Slightly altered version of McMilllan Cottom's piece on Slate, here.
posted by cairdeas (1 comment total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: This was posted earlier today, best to keep this in the existing Miley Cyrus/VMAs thread that is still active. -- mathowie



 
My partner could not believe it until not 30 minutes later, with half the fishbowl gone, the white woman bumps and grinds up to our table and laughing tells me that her boyfriend would love to see us dance. “C’mon girl! I know you can daaaaannnce,” she said. To sweeten the pot they bought our table our own fishbowl.


I'd never heard of this behavior until today. Ugh wow.
posted by sweetkid at 7:40 PM on August 29, 2013


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