“It is the one time of the year that I feel I can have my pick of the bunch and its true Black men have bigger penises. Back home, because I'm a fat white woman and not exactly beautiful, I tend to settle for men who aren't that special-looking. Here in Jamaica Black men are gorgeous, and I can have any one I want, just about.” – German white woman
From the slave plantations of the past to sex tourism today white women continue to sexually exploit Black men. Black men’s relationship with white women historically and currently has not been really addressed critically and deeply.
Yes today, yearly and throughout the year white women from America, Canada, and Europe go on vacations ‘sex tourism’ to the Caribbean and Africa sexually exploiting impoverished Black men.
Most of these white women have an attraction toward Black men rooted in stereotypes rather than genuine connection; it’s not care or respect, but exoticism and sexual objectification.
These racist ‘exotic’ ideas about Black men being hypersexual and unable to control their sexual appetite towards white women allows them to rationalize and justify that they are not sexually exploiting them.
When Malcolm X was unconscious “Detroit Red” hanging out in the streets of Roxbury white women were sexually exploiting Black men, he stated:
“This Lesbian, a beautiful white woman, had a male Negro stable. Her vocabulary was all profanity. She supplied Negro males, on order, to well-to-do white women. As a Harlem habitue, she’d known Harlem Negroes who liked white women. Her role developed from a pattern of talk she often heard from bored, well-to-do white women where she worked, in an East Side beauty salon. Hearing the women complain about sexually inadequate white mates, she’d tell them what she’d ‘heard’ about Negro men. Observing how excited some of the women seemed to become, she finally arranged some dates with some of the Harlem Negroes she knew at her own apartment. She noticed a color preference, she’d tell me with a laugh that I was too light. She told me nearly every white woman in clientele would specify ‘a Black one’; sometimes they would say ‘a real one,’ meaning Black, no brown Negroes, no red Negroes.”
Indeed, from Malcolm’s quote white women exercised their racial and economic power over Black men. Historian Thomas Foster addresses this racist sexual power too in his book “Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violence of Enslaved Men.”
Foster cites during slavery that forms of sexual violence against enslaved Black men were enacted by both white women and men. His book sheds light on how sexual assault, exploitation, objectification, and coerced reproduction affected enslaved men and their communities.
He highlights how the separation of enslaved Black men from their communities for the purpose of stud reproduction often severed intra-communal relationships that resulted in psychological pain and generational trauma.
In closing, is sex work less morally demeaning if an impoverished Black man is the sex worker and a white woman the client? Why is white female sex tourism okay? Why is white female sexual gratification seen as just tourist revenue and less dehumanizing ‘mentally destructive’ to Black men?
