Police Brutality: A Sexuality and Colorism Issue
By Dr. Donna Oriowo @cocoabutter_hairgrease
Police brutality and Karen's karening, at its root, is a sexuality issue.
Sexuality, at its core, is about how we present and are received by the people who are around us. It is a thing we are and embody from birth to death. It encompasses our physicality, including height, weight, styling, our way of dress, perceived “health,” skin tone, hair texture, and everything in between. Sexuality is also based on capital and capitalism, but that’s a story for a later day. I am going to focus on skin tone (and some hair texture) for the purposes of this writing.
The question often becomes “but how does your skin tone and hair texture impact your sexuality?”
Starting from the beginning: we grow up with a certain set of beliefs about ourselves and how others view us based on our race. For white people, they are taught (implicitly and explicitly) that they are the superior and original race. Born of beauty and purity. They are taught that they matter more than most and have been ordained by God to have dominion over others. Black folk, we are taught that we are inferior, that we are supposed to protect and uphold white people. We are also taught that we WILL be viewed as a threat worthy of brutality because of an “inherent violence” that our people have.
These things invariably, in fact, affect and infect, what we think about ourselves and how we approach other Black people. Simply because theirs (white people) is the dominant discourse. This is the pedagogy we have been brought up on. These are the ideals within which we are watered. We are watered in the idea that white people are better than Black people with “proof” furnished by white supremacy every step of the way. Things that show us that they have dominance and are allowed to get away with literal, actual murder.
How does this impact your sexuality?
How does this impact what you see in others and how you see yourself? For me the better question is: How does this not?! How is this not part of the discourse of how colorism was even born? We already know that colorism and texturism are the children of racism. They are byproducts of white supremacy and somewhere along the way, we Black folk get on some bullshit where we blame Black folk for it. We don't give credit where credit is due; to white people. White people gave us this shit. They curated racism and then created the perfect space for colorism/texturism/featurism to come to fruition.
So, just as we employed politics of respectability as a political strategy to see if Black folk dressed and behaved with mannerisms that white people said they wanted--as we saw that it didn’t make much difference to them, as history shows they still beat up, fire hosed, and killed Black folk anyway, we have also tried to employ other strategies for safety and upward mobility; racial whitening.
Racial Whitening …
is a “ social, political, and economic practice used in many post-colonial countries in the Americas and Oceania to "improve the race" (mejorar la raza) towards a supposed ideal of whiteness.” While we may talk about this concept in Latinx spaces like Brazil, Argentina, etc. we cannot deny that some of ole ye Black folk right here in the good ole U.S. of A, are doing the same shit. This practice is based in colorism. Racial whitening seems like another strategy folk are using to see if something else will work, now that many of us are able to note that respectability politics has been a huge FAIL. We learn to be more sexually attracted to lighter skinned people. We learn to value them and the perceived life that being with them can offer. They become as aspirational as having a white picket fence around a 2 story house. How many times do you hear of a darker skinned Black person, especially Black women, talking about how they don’t want a child to go through the colorism they went through? How often do we hear darker skinned people not wanting to have a child that people make assumptions about, see as a threat, and ultimately devalue their lives--making them a bigger target to be hurt, raped, or killed?
We are intent on saving our Black asses. Sometimes the way we try to save ourselves--physically, economically, and socially is by moving in a space where we find the lightest color or the whitest folk that we can be with, so that we can produce light skinned children. Children that will not have to deal with the violence of the dark skinned hate crimes of our world. Because make no mistake, the people who are dying brutally at the hands of police are on the darker end of that damn color spectrum. This, my dear reader, is where colorism comes in and intersects with sexuality and police brutality.
Colorism has always lived alongside police brutality. Because when you think about it, the way that we divide ourselves by race in this country makes no damn sense. We use the identifying markers to be able to know whether or not someone is Black, white, Latinx, Asian, or other. We are looking for what the hair looks like, what their eyes look like, what the skin tone is, etc. Darker skinned Black folk are the faces most often harmed by the hands of white supremacist America because they are unmistakably Black. As such, they are (by design) going to be the ones who get the brunt force of the book that white people deign to throw. Now, don’t get me wrong, light skin Black folk also suffer. They just don’t suffer in the same way. Pretending that colorism isn’t a factor is not just unhelpful, it’s harmful. Detrimental. Violent. And ultimately, leads to dark skinned death, a genocide.
Moving forward
But here we are. 2020. Police brutality, not necessarily at an all time high but certainly being filmed with horrible regularity. We have not discussed the main issue at hand here, we have not discussed how white people, Karen's & officers, are picking their targets. You pick the people that you know aren't you. That you know aren't white, that you know for certain are Black. So if you're a part of the “well, what are you” crew or “what are you mix with?” crew, they're probably not talking or thinking about you. You're very likely not the one that is regularly getting picked up by the police, not unless you don't pass that brown paper bag test-because that, ultimately is the test that they're moving by. They want to make sure that you're Black before they misjudge you and mistreat you. Before they decide that they're going to go full Karen or Becky in and stunning HD.
However, we don't talk about that. Sometimes we talk about police brutality, like it hits us (Black people) equally and it doesn't. We talk about state sanctioned violence against us as though it's equal and it's not. We talk about the disparities as though they're equal when they are not. Darker skinned Black folk are disproportionately affected. Darker skinned Black folk are more likely to be targeted by the police and certainly more likely to have a negative assed outcome, one that ends in death and hashtags. How could we ever forget that? How could we ever pretend not to see that? How is it that we can talk about police brutality against the Black community, but the Black community wants to ignore that colorism is very much THE factor. How sway? How can we act like certain (darker) people aren't (more) readily, easily targeted?
Colorism is ours to heal, but it was not ours to begin with, we didn't give this shit to ourselves. And I need us to make sure that we don't continue to spread that bullshit rhetoric. It was produced by them. It is the house white supremacy built. It is a house that we have maintained and we need to stop. In a world where white supremacy reigns, darker skinned Black people will almost always be the target.