Existing under ‘the white gaze’

Kwaku Dapaah
Nov 4 · 4 min read

Writing in vol.2 issue iii of Loose Associations, British-Ghanaian writer and former artistic director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Ekow Eshun, states that: “Being a black man means being subject to the white gaze, which is to say the accreted history of fear and fantasy that frames how white society regards black people. It means becoming an object of prejudice and fascination and psychological projection.”

This question is rarely posed but I want to extend it to the reader: what are some of the positive preconceptions of black men? If a sample of the British population were anonymously asked their view on it, ideas concerning natural athleticism, physical strength, sexual virility, and musicality would no doubt appear in some form. Whole dissertations could be written on any one of these aspects, but for the purpose of this piece, let us touch — lightly — on the physical and sexual images of black men under the white gaze and how these can negatively impact the mental health of black men. It is worth noting that these stereotypes are often concerned with visceral attributes, which is indicative of the way black men are at times otherised and examined like a subordinate species.

Without deeper consideration, these stereotypes could well be viewed by some as favourable characteristics, and while forgivable, this fails to recognise that they are rooted and intrinsically associated with negative counterparts inherited from the once widely-accepted “scientific” racism of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Black men’s exaggerated physical strength has historically been linked to our depiction as intrinsically violent, impulsive and intimidating; in the worst cases being the subjects of zoomorphic descriptions, comparable to apes and other “beasts”. But there is also more subtle dehumanisation, to the extent that even as children, studies show that black boys are mistaken as being on average 4.5 years older than they actually are. It’s not surprising then that black boys are often not afforded the assumption of innocence that their white counterparts receive — according to the latest Department for Education figures, Black Caribbean boys in particular are three times more likely to be permanently excluded from school than the school population as a whole. Similarly, stop and search figures as well as arrest rates have exposed to the wider public a well-known fact among black people — that black men are disproportionately the targets of greater police attention. For those of us who grew up in an urban area of the UK, recollecting the humiliation that comes with public stop and searches for the evidently punishable offence of existing in a group of more than two other black kids is not difficult.

As some of us grew into men and entered the professional world of work, police harassment may have become less of a feature in our lives, but the hyper-awareness of how society views black men and the resultant obligation that many of us feel to police our own bodies to make others feel comfortable in our presence is a legacy of this treatment: from subconsciously softening the loudness and bass in your voice to (prior to the mainstream acceptance of sport/streetwear) feeling self-conscious when wearing a tracksuit on public transport at the thought that you will be mistaken for one of those “scary” knife-wielding blacks — our shadow archetype of today. Even when crossing the road or overtaking a woman on a dimly-lit street so that she does not feel threatened by your presence, I for one can admit that this can slowly eat away at your humanity; the perceived need to accommodate the fears that others have of you as a neverending act of service.


Sexual

“Oh Romelu Lukaku, he’s our Belgian scoring genius, with a 24-inch penis, scoring all our goals, bellend by his toes” — Manchester United fan chant

It is easy to forget that the supposed admiration of the stereotypically “well-endowed” black man also goes hand-in-hand with fear of the sexually deviant savage, which is to say that the chants by Manchester United fans about Romelu Lukaku’s penis or the Linford’s Lunchbox fiasco in the 1990s, are not as complimentary as supposedly well-meaning white people believe. Many can attest to the fetishisation that black men under the white gaze have become accustomed to and which some unfortunately — and often inadvertently — interpret as something to gleefully embrace. A public but by no means isolated example of this was brought to light in a Twitter thread by popular sex and relationships blogger, Oloni.

In the thread, a clip is included of an episode in which the two white female hosts of the Guys We F***** podcast go back-and-forth recounting a sexual encounter with a man who is described as a “real black guy” with “basketball player height” and a “deep voice” but who, much to her dismay, didn’t “act black enough” — which in her own words meant being more like “a thug”. The not-so-subtle overemphasis on the imagined physical and characteristic features of black men by non-black people in a sexual context is symptomatic of an exoticisation, curiosity and feeling of danger associated with the mythological inherent virility of black men which ultimately dehumanizes us collectively.

Shout out this social anthropologist/evolutionary biologist who explains why white woman’s sexual attraction to black men isn’t a fetish and then goes on to fetishise black men in the very same thread. This is from me just searching “black men” in twitter and I get this example written yesterday :(

On the other side of this coin is fear. To use a classic example, Shakespeare’s Othello is rife with the imagery of the corrupting nature of a black man’s sexuality when entangled, even consensually, with a white woman. One might be tempted to chalk these backwards ideas to the racism of the Elizabethan period and claim that “we” — I always wonder who this collective “we” is — have progressed in our views and moved on from this type of thinking. However, the disownment and devaluation of women that have partaken in these taboo relations proves otherwise and further demonstrates that the insidious notion that sexual relationships with a black man somehow defiles the non-black counterpart still exists today. Wesley Morris’ Last Taboo: Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal With Black Male Sexuality explores both of these areas fantastically.

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reflecting and occasionally documenting the process

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