If there was anything my father failed at more than birth control, it was containing his deep-seated ancestral rage. My earliest childhood memory is of my father trying to attack my cowering mother with a knife while I stood in the middle, wearing nothing but diapers, refusing to let him touch her. My mother, a victim of sexual abuse and a descendant of a slave and her enslaver, could barely defend herself, let alone her baby. I was left with a deep knowing that there was no one who was going to protect me. In my two-year-old mind, I internalized this violence, assuming it must be because I wasn’t worthy of their care. And if I wasn’t worthy of care from my own parents, was I worthy at all? I didn’t really think so, and neither did the society surrounding me.
As I grew up, my inner unworthiness increased, as I was inundated with reminders that I wasn’t white, thin, blond, blue-eyed, or any of the things deemed desirable by Eurocentric standards. This was made all the harder because most of my Barbie-looking friends were. I was constantly ignored and felt a consistent sense of isolation even in rooms full of others. On the whole, I felt unwelcome, unwanted, and uncared for. This is a common experience for Black women+ whose sense of unworthiness in our intimate relationships are a reflection of the lack of care we are shown in and from the world, especially behind closed doors. Black American women are nearly three times more likely to die as a result of domestic or intimate partner violence than white women+, making domestic and intimate partner violence one of the leading causes of death for Black women between fifteen and thirty-five. We endure intimate partner violence at a rate twenty-two times that of non-Black WoC, and our rates of incest, nonfamilial sexual assault, and domestic violence are also disproportionately high compared with other women.2 Black men, historically robbed of power by white men, feel compelled to prove their masculinity through control, usually exhibited as violence toward Black women+ and LGBTTQIA+ folx.
Black women+ are uncared for by everyone and become the world’s wastebasket for the collective’s familial and societal disdain. We are oppressed (and murdered) by men at the hands of heteropatriarchy and discriminated by other women+ because of racism and anti-Blackness. Just ask Megan Thee Stallion! When people take to the streets to fight for Black Lives Matter, it is rarely as a result of a Black woman+’s murder, nor do our murders go avenged. Breonna Taylor was murdered in her own home, in her own bed, and still the three white cops who killed her weren’t charged. Black women+ continue to die in childbirth at epidemic rates without anyone held to account. Still, Black women+ are expected to, and often do, serve as champions for our Black communities, men+ included, and help educate and lead the way for all women+. Like Oluwatoyin Salau, a nineteen-year-old Black Lives Matter activist who was kidnapped, raped, and murdered by a Black man. As Brittney Cooper shares, “This cultural and intimate hatred of Black women is a feminist issue.”3 On the whole, Black women+ are all very much left in a violent epicenter just as I was as a toddler—with men+ on one side and all non-Black women+ on the other—wondering who the fuck is going to care for us. The answer we continuously return to is: ourselves.
The world does not love Black women+, but that does not stop us from seeking affection. My wanting to be validated as my whole Black self has played out in all of my relationships, including, and especially, romantic ones. I went into relationships seeking to heal my wounds of rejection and took on the role of serving others because it was the only way I knew to find intimacy. Love was not something I had the privilege of falling into, it was something I had to go out and earn. I searched for worth, validation, and completion in men+, usually white ones, which put me in some seriously scary situations.
LOVE ON THE ROCKS
The first time I met him he asked me what “my mix” was. He was one of those white guys who felt he had a claim on Blackness. Huge. Red. Flag. But I got drunk at da club, as one is prime to do at twenty years old, and awoke one morning to find the man I now call “The Ex” in my bed. Awake. Staring at me. He wanted to know my life story, and I wanted to know how quickly I could get him to leave. I ran into my roomie’s room begging to borrow her car and came back jovially to declare I could now drop him off. I wanted nothing to do with this dude, but after weeks of wearing me down to go on a date, I finally relented. I was no match for his charm, and we were inseparable from that day onward. The Ex turned out to be a cocaine and sex addict and the lead character in my most tumultuous relationship to date, and there have been a few! I ignored many warning signs, especially those from my intuition, and what started as a passionate love affair quickly spiraled into dysfunction and despair. There was the time he grabbed my hand and made me repeatedly punch his face, then threw all my luggage down the stairs of his six-story walk-up. Or when he screamed over me with his six-foot stature as I sank to the shower floor sobbing. And then there was the lying and the cheating (to the tune of posting online multiple times a day seeking Black women to fuck). And though I knew in my heart there was something off about a white guy who “only dates Black women,” I didn’t understand the sexual racism at play. That the hypersexualized stereotypes of Black folx leads non-Blacks to derive my appeal entirely from my race.4
All of it was violent and I was always to blame, often internalizing the problems as my own doing before he named me the culprit. None of his actions were cause enough to leave because they only affirmed what I’d always felt: I didn’t deserve any better. I was just another Black woman he would use and abuse. Since my role as a Black woman is to help everyone before myself, I figured all of this was fixable. That The Ex just needed me to love him the right way and then, voilà, he would be okay. For a while, I think he believed it too. One of the many ways the “strong Black woman” trope kicks Black women and femmes in the ass is the belief that we can handle anything, and thus ought to. We also internalize the societal notion that we are not in need of care, but of course, we are.
Four years after I first met The Ex, I sat with a drug and alcohol specialist during his pre-intervention. The specialist told me he had very little chance of getting better given his family dynamic (they never proceeded with said intervention). She told me I needed to stop finding broken men to fix. To leave The Ex alone. That I couldn’t help him, nor was it my job to. That I should focus on myself. It was the first time I had ever considered such a thing. Not my job to fix others? Focus on… myself? This was a radical request for a girl who had worked so hard for love and acceptance, with little luck, her whole life. The epiphany rocked me to my core, and I spent the next five years single so I could focus on healing my heart and remedying the beliefs and trauma that led me to not only enter but remain in such a rocky and riotous relationship. None of this was to release The Ex from his wrongs, but rather to support me in finding my light.
Despite the “I’m all that” act I’d been putting on for ages, I had to come to terms with the fact that I didn’t like myself very much. And that I often picked men who I knew, at least on some level, were no good for me—evidence of my unconscious belief that I wasn’t worth a damn. A belief that was instilled and affirmed by white supremacy. When you don’t feel like you’re worth much, you don’t act like you’re worth much, so I also had to be with the ways in which my insecurities had caused my romantic partners harm. I had cheated on every partner I had ever had, emotionally if not physically. I didn’t believe I was lovable, so I did what I could to soften the inevitable blow. Not an excuse, because there isn’t one, just #facts. Despite being an overtly open person, I learned that my openness was not the same as vulnerability. In a world made to stamp Black women+ out, being vulnerable not only felt like death, it could very well lead to it. My love was also replete with rage, fueled by a lifetime of racism, misogynoir, and feeling less than. Though my rage was, and is, justified, the emotional and mental violence I inflicted on lovers was not. I had to get real honest with the ways I’d caused myself and others harm and apologize to those I had hurt. I began to understand it was impossible to truly love others if I didn’t love myself. So I b
egan to right my wrongs and rewrite the oppressive scripts that had been stuffed down my throat. I decided on a new destiny. One where Black women+ win, both in life and in love. But shit ain’t easy.
IN THE BEDROOM & BEYOND
The impacts of race, as with all of our identities, infiltrate our hearts as well as our homes. Irrespective of who we are or whom we love, white supremacist heteropatriarchy plays a role. A white, cis, heterosexual couple will find themselves mired in heteropatriarchy—showing up, at a minimum, as binary and misogynist gender roles, identities, and expressions—but they are not forced to navigate the additional harms caused by racism, homophobia, and transphobia as queer and trans Black and Indigenous folx do. This freedom from further oppression both within and outside the relationship is an often unnoticed privilege held by white, cis, and heterosexual folx. Greater access to wealth, employment, health care, and other resources are privileges not only for individuals but for families and partnerships. BI&PoC, and particularly queer and trans Black and Indigenous women+, must endure an onslaught of extra stress caused by white supremacy in addition to the standard trials and tribulations inherent in dating and sustaining romantic relationships. This has shown up for me in many ways, including:
being fetishized and assumed to be promiscuous or sexually deviant because of misogynoir, like when my sixteen-year-old white boyfriend’s friends asked him how kinky I was in bed
only dating cis white men for most of my life because my internalized oppression led me to believe whiteness and cis men were most desirable
my Blackness being viewed by all men+ and women+ (including other Black folx) as aggressive, intimidating, and “masculine” and therefore not feminine enough—an experience often aggravated for Black trans women
the conversations my white and Filipinx* husband and I are forced to have regarding raising multiracial Black kids and the oppression we know they will face from all races as a result
The extra harms BI&PoC must navigate when it comes to intimate relationships come in all shapes and sizes, including the mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional toll of enduring oppression every day; the impact of ancestral trauma from enslavement, colonization, genocide, and other violent forms of oppression; and the financial pressures caused by earning less income than our white counterparts while often being forced to provide for other family members. For Black communities, the criminalization of our men, particularly as created through the prison-industrial complex and school-to-prison pipeline, has had a distinctly deleterious impact on our intimate relationships.5
For queer and trans Black and Indigenous women+, these additional stressors are all the more aggravated. Black trans women have to navigate dating more cautiously, knowing that they constitute three out of every five LGBTTQIA+ homicide victims. Similarly, queer BI&PoC experience some of the highest rates of rape, physical violence, and stalking by intimate partners.6 A consequence of the intersecting oppression caused by white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy.
In interracial partnerships, the impact of white supremacy is rarely addressed but always present. For example, less than 46 percent of white Americans will date outside their race,7 but there are tons of white women who love sucking Black dick without any interest in Black liberation.8 Who have magical thinking about being “non-racist” because they’re fucking Blackness, while refusing to acknowledge the ways their white privilege causes their partner (and all BI&PoC) harm on the daily. In my own partnership, anti-Blackness has shown up when it was assumed I needed less care or support in hard situations because “I can handle it.” It has also shown up in terms of succumbing to traditional gender identity roles, especially around the home, despite mutually strong intentions otherwise.
White supremacy is present in all of our love lives whether we are aware of it or not. But a lack of awareness causes even greater damage.
MY INNER QUEER-Y
From as far back as I can recall, I held a fear of being queer. When I was seven, I used to dance around my room naked, and when I saw the dark, muscular, “masculine” body in my mirror’s reflection, I got shook. I was also totally terrified of being a lesbian. Stereotypes of the status quo were lodged deep within my young, impressionable mind. I even thought my mother, who never expressed any interest in men after leaving my father and always rocked a cropped coif, must be gay herself. Homophobia and transphobia were certainly part of the social fabric in the early ’90s, and all the more in Jamaica where my mother was born and raised. By eight years old I was praying to the heavens that I wasn’t gay. In part because I sensed that it wouldn’t be acceptable to my family, and in part because I knew how much harder my life would become. Being a Black woman in a mostly white world was challenging enough—I didn’t need to add queer to the mix.
I can’t tell you exactly when these fears started, but I suspect they came shortly after my mother walked in on me and my female BFF in the midst of our seven-year-old playtime glory, which at that moment included orally pleasuring each other. I can’t remember the specifics, but I know we were seriously scolded. It was impressed upon me, in action if not words, that sex was wrong. And sex with another woman was absolutely vile. This experience left an indelible mark. An act of pleasure, intimacy, and connection left me feeling guilty, shameful, and perverted. As a teenager, I struggled to claim my sexual identity and instead perceived sex as something to be taken from me rather than an act of mutual pleasure. I didn’t trust or claim my own body and allowed men to take advantage of my despondency. As a teen I used to ridicule my mom’s friends who came out in their forties or fifties, perpetuating the status quo stories that it was some kind of phase or cry for attention. I believed those who identified as bisexual were on the “bi-way to gay,” as the homophobic saying goes. When I first met my husband, I thought he may be queer simply because of the strong emotional bonds he has with his close male friends (and likely the racist effeminization of Asian men). My homophobia was alive and well for most of my life. Minimizing the oppressive harm I’ve caused myself and others took a lot of work. And I have much more to do. Sadly, I didn’t feel safe enough to explore my true sexual identity until I was in a supportive and loving relationship with my husband. All of which was also very much supported by the Black LGBTTQIA+ activists and the decades they’ve spent fighting for our acceptance. The deeper I dove into my own healing, the more I was able to claim the fullness of my identity. I am now clear, and proud to declare, that I am queer AF. Gender binaries are bullshit, and I love souls, no matter their genitalia. Though I’m happily married, I wonder how much confusion and heartache I could have been spared had my mom reacted differently that day. Had my queerness been accepted, understood, and normalized by society as it ought to have been. Part of the beauty of the current collective awakening is that more folx are freeing themselves from the gender identities and sexuality binaries forced upon us by white supremacy. We are returning to the remembering of a nonbinary* world, just as many Indigenous, African, and other BI&PoC communities lived before colonization.9 As we continue to do so, we help create more opportunities for queer folx, especially queer and trans Black and Indigenous women+, to be happy, safe, and free.
* * *
All of us, every single one of us, feel the impact of white supremacy in our relationships, either as additional pressures or triggers rooted in personal and interpersonal oppression or as the privilege that inherently comes from being free from them. It is on us to identify the oppressions we perpetuate in our bedrooms and beyond, and both do and demand better. Our love can be a form of resistance against the ills of domination, or it can be a tool for domination itself. Let us work to create the love that liberates, ourselves as well as one another.
Spiritual Soulcare Offering/Call to Action
Race-y Relations Exercise
Below are some questions to get you thinking about the ways in which race, gender identity, and sexual orientation impact your intimate relationships, however they may manifest. You can answer these alon
e, or, if you have an intimate partner (or partners) and it feels aligned, you can ask them to review these questions with you. If so, I suggest making sure they have some prior exposure to racial justice work as led by a Black or Indigenous woman+. Consider the following:
Am I attracted to a specific race, color, or ethnicity? Why? Is this preference racist, anti-Black, and/or anti-Indigenous? Is it born from internalized oppression? How has white supremacy influenced what/who I do and do not find attractive?
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