The first time I ever heard a white male sexualize a brown female, was at the age of seventeen in 2007, when the folks of my generation decided to welcome a “Paper Planes” aesthetic into their lives. A white (very good looking) male friend and I were sitting on some steps, each sporting some form of neon colour, discussing the release of M.I.A’s, “Kala” and how, “great, that whole record is” when he turned to me and said, “also, she’s SO hot.” And admittingly, on a certain level, this was empowering. In this moment, having identified as a brown female who had been raised in a white-oriented western culture - I was more than relieved to discover girls of my color could be sexually objectified too – in fact I was thrilled into a moment of bewilderment. Surely the boy had made a mistake! Surely there was something wrong with the boy in question, for high school had only been a year ago, and in high school, the brown kids dated each other and only each other, and the white kids did the same.
In one of my classes in high school, a white boy in the class had spent a good portion of it taunting me. Playfully enough that I could smirk at his comments but frequent enough that I noticed. It was senior year and I had recently discovered that when boys were mean to you, well, it meant they liked you. And yet rather than indulge in such a revelation, I found myself sitting behind a student desk, perched in the same row, but ahead of this boy. He put his feet on the back ledge of my wooden chair, and pressed down, forcing me to unexpectedly tilt back. I gave out a small cry, turned around, and locked eyes with the kid. He was staring back at me with a set of bright blue eyes, a particularly pointed nose, and big, dumb, grin - a small sweat drop slid down his wide forehead. And for a split second, I wondered – “does he like me?” I locked eyes with him, and instead of indulging in the flattery of this moment as I should have (especially considering how the acceptation of this realization would have certainly served as a much needed confidence booster for my deteriorating adolescent sense of self), I felt myself stiffen, burdened with shame and confusion – like I had committed a moral crime in even considering the boy would be attracted to me. So I said something – probably something really mean, and whipped my head back around, locking eyes on the chalkboard ahead, never to turn around again.
As a female, my body is policed. As a brown female, my body is policed by my conservative, extended family. Recently, in an argument between my father and I, I expressed frustration at his requests. I had been asked to change my outfits twice, in order to accommodate the outdated views of my grandmother we were going to visit, and I had obliged at first, in frustration, and then burst into a fit of rage at the second request. I said “I am trying, and doing this for you, even though I am dying in these jeans” and my father’s face crinkled and he said, “What dying? Nobody is dying. They’re just jeans.” Instantly he had put me in my whiny teenage place, and I felt small for a 23 year old. Because of course nobody was dying, and of course they were just jeans – but I was being policed and in that particularly humid day, it felt suffocating. This kind of conservative policing has led to an unintended self-shaming of my body. As a woman, I have been taught to feel burdened and apologetic about the baring of my skin, and I have been subconsciously policing myself as a result. The other day I wore a tank top and a friend who I’ve known for over a year now, stared at me in awe and said, “Your breasts are huge. I have never seen them before, what the fuck?”
So what happens when you externalize self-shaming? Well, there can be a very odd, and uncomfortable, sexual experience, when positioning dark skin with light skin. Of course, this instinctive feeling is coated with naturalized ideological impressions, but that’s not to say, there isn’t a sense of truth in it. Of course, we aspire to live in a world where all skin colours, all genders, and all differences, can comfortably interact in loving, if not sexually accepting and embracing, ways. Oh, and it does! It does. It is the 90s after all.
But, we also live in a society where the known is comfortable, and the unknown is threatening. Thus making it harder to not simply sexualize, but desire the unknown, moreover to desire the unknown in a healthy, non-exoticized manner. In the wake of films like, “Dark Girls,” the general continued lack of racial representation in Western media, and its cultural persistence of creating a racial divide in its headlines surrounding celebrity women of colour (Beyoncé’s a bad feminist for her skimpy outfits, and Lena Dunham’s a badass for her televised nudism, M.I.A is a loud nuisance, but Miley Cyrus is “just so IDGAF”) – we are continually being taught to hold women of colour to impossible standards.
Over a chunk of the years that followed high school, I carried a specific opinion, about the westernized brown men of my particular generation. It was a cynical representation, that saddened my father when I discuss it with him, and it is bound to be controversial and upset some whom defiantly oppose it. Thanks to 7 years in academia, I have surrounded myself with enough of a positive community that I now believe my theory to be wrong. But there is something to be said for the fact that much of my adolescent lived experience reflected otherwise. And what was this opinion? I thought the brown men of my generation, were exclusively into white women. And though I now know I was wrong to assume this exclusivity, I still don’t think I was wrong about the reasons it occurred, that is to say, the manifestation of an inherent racism against one’s own kind.
A year after high school and into college, I was at a house party once. And out of the crowds of white faces, there appeared a brown male. There we were, leaning against the kitchen counter, joking about how we were the “token brown friend” among the crowd, which had brought us to this event, in this very expensive neighborhood, in the first place. And somehow the subject of dating brown people came up, and in that moment he re-confirmed my theory, and said he could never date a brown girl. I said, “Why?” and he said, “brown girls are so hairy,” then he paused and said, “white girls are so soft.” Then he turned around and kissed his white girlfriend.
Having developed a particular Western-Asian, identity, we become distinguished from those who constitute the same generation (age-wise), but who’s lived experiences greatly differ from our own. So there’s the brown girls and boys we all went to high school with - the ones you could never really be yourself around, because somehow, in that teenage spectrum, brownness becomes quantified, and you just couldn’t get along with them, having not been “as brown as them.” And this exclusion, I think, contributed to the development of a kind of resentment against those “other kids.” The ones your parents wanted you to mingle with, but whose music taste you just couldn’t understand. And this in turn, was a tiny reflection of the way westernized, younger generations of brown kids, perceived, older non-westernized, generations of brown grown-ups. We all made fun of them.
And because of that distinction (which was just that, a distinction - not something that necessitated rivalry), there built a riff between not just you and other kids like you, but you and the colour of your skin. So you proclaim extra extra liberal ideology in the wake of modernity but look on in disgust at what you were taught to hate – caricatures that were other-ized and excotic-ized by your western peers. We are the smarter generation for we corrected our perspectives from the destructive qualities we found in the conservative mindsets of our parents. We’re post-post-colonial and we’ll marry whoever we want.
And yet, I know so many brown kids, who hate other brown kids. And more on topic, so many brown kids who refuse to date, or eliminate the capacity to sexualize other brown bodies, because they’re still learning to do that for their own. I was one of those kids. I was a victim of both spectrums; I desexualized others because I in turn was desexualized. I said things like, “They’re nice enough, but” and had my heart sink when I heard others say the same. Those brown kids - they just remind you too much of a person you never could understand.
But what, if nothing else, stands as the root of all racism?
