July 15, 2021 • 50 mins
What are your dating preferences? Do you prefer a certain ethnicity or race over another? What does it mean to have this sort of preference and where does it come from? Sociologist and social worker Sarah Adeyinka-Skold's latest research involved interviewing Black women about the unique difficulties they experience dating on and offline. In this episode, she and Laverne breakdown how the structures of white supremacy and patriarchy imprint themselves onto our dating habits. //
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to The Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. Think about the
embodiment of hegemonic masculinity, how eroticism gets even constructed or
manifested in our bodies, in men's bodies specifically, because basically,
(00:22):
what he's trying to tell you is that even though
his mind has advanced beyond what he thinks are appropriate
performances of men and women to be doing, his penis
has not. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Laverne
(00:50):
Cock Show. On today's episode, we're talking about the challenges
that college educated women of color experience dating in the
digital age. Now, many years ago, I was on this
website called Plenty of Fish and I got a message
from a man. I went to his profile and was shocked.
(01:14):
He said on his profile really disparaging things about why
he would never date black and Latino women, just things
that were so horrible and so stereotypical. I just can't
even bring myself to repeat them here today. And so
I was just like, why would this man write me? So,
in the spirit of research, I wrote him back and
(01:35):
I said, I read your profile. I'm obviously a black woman,
Why would you even, you know, write me and expressed
interest in dating me. And what he said was, Oh,
I can date you because you're light skinned. And then
he said and I've always been curious about trans women,
(01:55):
and so I just kind of remember sitting there and
just sort of being like, Wow, this is this is
really deep. And then I blocked him and I never
had any communication with him again after that. But over
the years, I've heard from so many black women, both
trans and non trans, who have expressed frustration dating and
attempting to date in the face of this kind of stereotyping,
(02:18):
blamed racism, colorism, misogyny, and treating trans women as experiments
and curiosities. When I came across Dr Sarah adayinka Schools
research on dating in the Digital Age with the focus
on college educated women of color, I knew I wanted
to have this conversation with her. Dr Sarah is a
licensed clinical social worker and assistant Professor of sociology at
(02:42):
firm And University. She explores race, family, and gender in
her research, with a focused interest in how forming intimate
romantic relationships reveal inequalities in these areas. Please enjoy my
talk with Dr Sarah. Hi, Dr Sarah. How are you
(03:13):
feeling today? Good? Miss Cox? How are you doing? I'm well,
you can call me the Burn, all right. I just
wanted to make sure, yes, my mother is Miss Cox. Okay.
Can you talk to us just about the nature of
your research and what what really inspired this look into
the challenges that college educated women of color experience and dating.
(03:35):
What was the beginning the nexus of genesis? I should say,
of you doing this, that's a great question soul. For me,
I've always been a little bit of a mushy romantic.
I love ear hustling about how people fall in love.
I'm all about that. And when I was in high school,
I was like, Okay, so I'm gonna go to college
(03:56):
and I'm gonna get married. It's gonna be lick yea.
And I went to call ligiend that is not what happened.
In fact, what I was noticing already was that my
white college age friends were already partnering and my black
female friends were not. We weren't getting together. And I
don't think that it was people weren't hooking up with us,
(04:16):
but there was definitely this field that we were going
to have to wait to find our partners, whereas a
lot of the white folks that I knew were like
in serious relationships at college. So my junior paper, where
did you go to school? Where did you do your
undergraduate I went to Princeton University, and so I took
(04:36):
a class with Mario Small, who I think is now
at Harvard, and sort of everything became clear for me,
my own understanding. I took a sociology class there, my
own understanding of being a black woman, and things that
hadn't made made sense to me started to make sense.
And so, you know, as someone who's interested in meeting
and meeting already, I was like, well, I gotta figure
(04:56):
out what's going on, Like why aren't I dating? Why
aren't my friend MS dating? Like what's going on? So
my junior paper looked at how black women do marry,
but they tend to marry down. I wrote a senior
thesis that looked at how institutions like schools are actually
matchmakers and we don't often think of them as matchmakers,
(05:18):
as schools can be mechanisms to facilitate homogamy, which is
where people get married along the same class, educational racial lines.
But if you meet at work, for instance, you might
be less likely to marry someone that is the same
as you in terms of class, in terms of in
terms of class, education, race, but that might be changing
(05:39):
now because work can be so um specific. So I
wrote a paper on that. I stopped there, and then
my advisor was like, you gotta go to graduate school
because maybe this is an important thing to study. And
I was like, oh, I don't want to go. And
I had told myself that, um, if I was still
interested in this in five years, I would I would
go to graduate school. So I read a book by
(06:01):
Richard Banks called His Marriage for for White People, and
the book pissed me off enough to be like, okay,
when we need to go to graduate school. Why did
the book piss you off? What was the press of
the book that pissed you off? The title is interesting.
His assumption was that black women simply were not open
(06:21):
to dating outside of their race. They were just closed off.
And so I was like, that's not correct. I've been
trying to day outside of my race. The wacky things
that I've been seeing online, the ways in which people
approach me was just incorrect. And I was like, this
can't stand. I really need to go research this myself.
And then you know, as you're getting into your mid twenties,
(06:43):
you're having these conversations with your non black friends and
your black friends, and you're starting to see, what our
experiences aren't that similar. They're similar in some ways, but
they're not similar in other ways. And so that basically
lit a fire under me, and I was like, I'm
going to get my PhD. And this is what I'm
going to study. And for me, um, the comparisons are
(07:04):
really key, right, I really want to talk to black women,
but I think the uniqueness of Black women's experiences they
really come into relief when you compare them to non
black women's experiences. And that's what made me do the
work that I'm doing. Girl, There's so many things that
you said there that I just I want to unpack
on so many different levels. The first one, you just
(07:26):
sort of alluded to marrying down, and if you just
go online, if you go to YouTube, there's so many
conversations about like hypergamy and black women and like marrying
up and what does that look like? And and then
the interracial dating piece. There's so we black women. I
saw one study that suggested that black women are less
likely than black men to date outside of the race.
(07:49):
That we are more statistically more likely to pursue relationships
with black men, and black men are with us. Right,
So where do we where do we even begin with this?
Let me give me We can start with the data
about black women being less likely to date and marry interracially.
(08:10):
We do see that in census data UM two thousand.
Intend we see the data that black men are actually
twice as likely to marry interracially as black women. But
I don't think this is solely an issue of preference.
I think in our world today, we really you know,
we have this rugged individualism. We tend to live in
this pretend world where like the way that the US
(08:34):
was set up to make black people three fifths of
our human and then to put them at the bottom
of the hierarchy doesn't at all impact our preferences. That
doesn't make any sense. So we have to recognize that
our preferences are within a particular kind of racial and
gender order, and they're influenced by that order. For a
(08:56):
long time, sexual abuses that black women experience at the
hands of white men didn't count as illegal. You can't
just ignore history and then pretend that black women are
just gonna grow up in a vacuum where now it's
just fine to date white or non black men and
(09:16):
they have to be careful. We're seeing this even in
our time now, like people are very bold about their
hate and their dislike for black women. You don't have
to look for Kamala Harris. So when black women in
my opinion, and I see this in my data. So
this isn't in my dissertation, it's in a forthcoming book
I'm called the Logic of Racial Practice. In my experience,
(09:39):
black women don't want to date black men just because
it feels good. It's about racial solidarity. How are you
going to go through a life where you're constantly struggling
and the person is like, maybe that's racial discrimination, maybe
it's not. You don't want that right. So, as this,
(10:01):
as white supremacy bears down more and more and more
on black women's lives, black women are trying to advance.
We are one of the most highly educated populations in
the US, but our college degrees, our post college graduate
degrees are not getting us the same things that it
is for non black women. So if we want to
(10:21):
date black men, is because love is intimate. We want
people to understand us and understand that struggle. And I
haven't talked to black men, so I don't know what
their reasons are for dating white women. I can't speak
to that. But for black women, it's a little less
than just like, well, I just want someone that's the
same race as me. That race has history behind it,
(10:45):
It has struggled behind it, it has resilience behind it.
And in a world like ours, where your blackness is,
people seek to trample upon it. They're saying, we want
to count all legal vote, but your vote is illegal,
right you? You want to be with someone that is
(11:05):
going to get that. The immediate thing that I think
about when I listened to you talk, it's trauma that
that did. The trauma. The history of the ways in
which black womanhood has been devalued in this country is
deeply traumatizing. I think about my mother and how my
mother there's no way she would ever date a white
man that she grew up in the segregated South. I
(11:28):
remember we were in it was twenty twelves. It was
eight years ago. We were in Vegas and she had
just retired and we were both in Vegas, for the
first time, and she was supposed to meet me by
the pool. Um. We were staying at the Mirage and
I went for a dip in the pool and get
out of the pool, and I have like ten messages
from my mother, and I listened to the first and
(11:48):
she's freaking out and she's like, you've got me about
here around all these white people, she said to me.
And I just founder and we sat down and I said,
are you afraid of white people? People? And she was
just so sort of riled up and it didn't clicked him.
And I was like, oh my god. And this is
eight years ago, so I'm like forty years old, and
I was like, oh my god. She grew up in
(12:10):
the segregated South, watched her father be called the N word,
was in segregated schools, and invested um desegregated schools, and
experienced to all that there was so much strong. She
was passed over for a promotion in the eighties for
a white woman who didn't have the same education, And
so I think it's our experience. But then I also
know that trauma has passed down in our genes and
in our d n A, and so I think about
(12:32):
that level of trauma as I listened to what you
just said. But then I think about two. How so
many black men, particularly black celebrities, rappers, et cetera, have
no problem expressing their disdain from black women right and
their desire not to date black women, or that that
black women must be light skinned. So the colorism, and
(12:53):
I think when we have this conversation, it has to
be we have to sort of talk about colorism, and
we have to talk about the ways in which certain
scan tones are privileged in the in the dating market.
What would you say to that? So I would say
that just based on the work that I've done, I
think it's important to think about hegemonic masculinity and when
we think about the intersection of race and gender for
(13:16):
black men, So in our world, patriarchy, masculinity, hegemonic masculinity
are very powerful ideologies. You know, when you read the
New York Times and people are asking, well, why did
Latino men vote for Trump? Why did Black men vote
for Trump? A lot of the answer is will they
really see him as a macho man? So what happens
(13:37):
I think, you know, based on my limited experience, is
that for black men, part of defining that masculinity is
putting that above racial solidarity right by showing I am
a man and because of white supremacy. One way I
can do that is by devaluing black women. I'm seen
(13:58):
as more valuable in the realm of white supremacy, in
the world of white supremacy, if I'm able to join
along with others to devalue black women who are at
the bottom of their racial hierarchy. So I think that
whether or not black men realize it, they're literally part
of that process of maintaining and perpetuating white supremacy by
(14:23):
devaluing black women, and oftentimes they don't understand that. And
so again with white supremacy, skin tone always matters. So
if my goal is a black man is to get
closer to whiteness, to get closer to white masculinity, of
course I'm going to date a lighter skin black woman
because all of it matters. Phenotype matters, skin color matters,
(14:47):
what her nose look like. All that matters in terms
of maintaining my place as a man and a black
man within this racial harchy and within this context, the
white supremacy. So that's how I, as a sociologists understand
those actions. What this is such a complicated thing to
(15:09):
talk about. I think too, because the question that comes
up for me is like, well, if we just have
our preferences, right, Like I just I am more attracted
to someone who's lighter skin and that's like, not racism,
It's just my preference. And a lot of people listening
to this will say that, what would you say to
the folks out there who are like, well, I just
(15:29):
have a preference and it's it's not necessarily racist or
misogynist or colorist. I just like what I like. I
would say say to them, You're not alone. That's a
totally valid perspective to have. I'm all about interrogation. Why
do you like what you like? Where does that come from?
(15:50):
When did you start liking it? What does it mean
for you to like it? And I'm not just talking objectively.
I'm married to a white man, so I had to
do that work for myself of like, well, what does
it mean to be attracted to white men? What does
it mean for a black woman to hold up whiteness?
What kind of life do I want to have with
(16:11):
a white man? Why does it matter if I'm not
or am I am married to a white man, so
I had to do that work for myself, and frankly,
what I found for myself is if I'm going to
be with a white man, he better bring me closer
and closer and closer and closer to pro blackness. His
treatment of me better upgrade my humanity all the time.
(16:34):
So I think it's fine to have preferences, but just
recognize that they don't exist in a vacuum. So interrogate,
do the work, reflect on where those are coming from
and why they are important to you. I think that
the thing too, it's like, if we do have our preferences,
then they have those preferences, should not dinnigrade women with
(16:56):
I remember there was I think famous singer or a
rapper or something who had a song about, you know,
women with their good hair or something like that, and
and people like this is colorist, this is upsetting, and
so that that even if we have our preferences, that
we're not in the process of denegrating people who don't
fall into their preferences right exactly. And that's where the
self reflection comes from, because what you might actually find
(17:20):
is if you're a non white person, is that you
actually might have some internalized racism that you haven't dealt with.
You might find that you have some internalized colorism that
you haven't dealt with. So some of my respondents they
were in this situation where they were always attracted to
white men, and then one woman said that she went
(17:41):
on a fast where she started to de colonize her
her preferences. She's like, why am I attracted to this
white guy, this mediocre white guy, when they're these black
men over here, these Asian men over here that are
meeting the same criteria. She started to do that work
of reflecting on those preferences, and so you might surprise yourself.
(18:05):
You might actually realize, wow, I'm holding onto these things
because the media's influenced me. How people define beauty has
influenced me. So that's why people don't want to do
the work, because they might be afraid to like go
or something. They might have to realize that, actually, I
don't think all people are the same. And so when
(18:26):
you do that work, though, then you can really start
to appreciate the humanity and other people. So you can
still have your preferences, but not at the expense of
denigrating other people. Yeah, I think it always comes down
to a critical, loving, critical self reflection when it comes
to all of these things that like, at the end
of the day, it's like not about looking at other
(18:48):
people and what their issues are, but like, how am
I implicated in perpetuating or creating a racism, misogyny, colorism,
et cetera. How am I participate eating and creating something
new and starting new and different kinds of conversations. This
(19:09):
is a good time to take a little break and
we'll be right back though after a little love is
thrown to our sponsors. Alrighty, now that's all taken care of,
(19:29):
Let's get back to our chat. My ex boyfriend was
white and we you know, posted on social media, and
I remember with the first few times we posted, there
were so many people who were frustrated and upset that
I was dating a white man. And someone said, you know,
why do all the lgbt Q celebrities when they get famous,
(19:52):
they find a white man? And there was just like
a lot of people were very very upset that my
boyfriend was white, and it was just kind of I
was like, most of the men I've dated are white men,
and you know, and it's something I've thought a lot
about and is something I've interrogated and but it's also
about who is of any race right is going to
treat me in the way that I feel I deserved
(20:14):
to be treated and I should be treated. And so,
you know, I happen to fall in love with a
white man who treated me really well, and so I
think a lot of it is about our options and
being open. You know, I think there's a there's a
piece of trauma though. I think I think for a
lot of black women, there's trauma around having been treated
(20:38):
it's purely dark skinned black women having been treated so
badly over and over again. As I was preparing for this,
I read so many accounts from dark skinned black women
who just have been made to feel like they are
just less than nothing by men, over and over and
over again. And I think about, how how do we
actually go into healthy relationships right where we can let
(20:59):
don't bring that baggage into it. And what have you
found in your research around the healing process that has
to happen from all the wounds of of the intersections
of misogyny and colorism and racism for the folks that
you've interviewed. Yeah, that's a great question. So one of
the things that I found in my UM work is
(21:20):
that women, regardless of what race they are, they often
experience negative interactions with men, both on and offline when
they're in their romantic partner search. And there are two
ways in which women will often deal with these negative interactions,
and one of them is emotion work, which is where
they prioritize men's feelings. So if men are intimidated by
(21:44):
their accomplishments, or men are intimidated by their educational level,
those sort of downplay. As part of this emotion work,
they'll ask the man a lot of questions about what
he's doing, have done that, Yeah, um. One of one
of my respondents talked about how they were going to
be lawyers. She has a PhD in sociology. One of
(22:06):
her friends was going to be a PR person in
l A and they these men came up to them
and they told them exactly what they were going to do,
and the men, she said, they shrank. So she turned
to her friends and she was like, we need to
tell people that were nannies or else we're never gonna
get laid. So that's priority. It's one of my favorite quotes.
(22:27):
So that's prioritization of men's feelings around their accomplishments. But
the other kind of coping mechanism that women did was
emotion and repair, which is where they prioritized their feelings. Right.
They weren't going to talk to any men that were
showing any hints of intimidation. They weren't going to talk
(22:47):
to any men who called them bitches online. They weren't
going to talk to any men who used criticized daization
as a way to include them as romantic partners. It
definitely shrank or pool, but you know what, they felt empowered.
So I would say to black women, especially, take care
(23:08):
of yourself. This world that we're in is not about you.
I know that sounds terrible to say, but take care
of yourself. Surround yourself with people who know your worth
and who know your value, and this is an ongoing process.
As a social worker, I'm all about therapy, even better
if you do it with a black person that maybe
(23:32):
even understands where you're coming from. But like, trauma really
needs you to air it out. It needs to be
out in the open. You need to let someone carry
that burden with you, because trauma will tell you that
you're not enough. Trauma will tell you that you're less than.
So you already have the value. You're already worth something.
(23:54):
People can't take that away from you. So the work
is in you finding it and stepping into it and
daily and again, this is not like a magical thing,
like you're not gonna wake up one they and be like,
oh my god, I feel totally fulfilled enough and love.
It's going to be a constant thing because of the
world that we live in, in in the American society that
we live in. So black women, you are already enough.
(24:16):
There's no here there about it. There's no discovering it.
It's just walking up and waking into it and living
it out. That's what that's about. That's so beautiful. One
of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you
is that the ways in which so many men online have,
the way they treat us, the way they the stereotypes
(24:37):
they have, the ways in which they approach us, that
is stuff that is systemic. That is something that is
not it's not our fault. It's not something that we
need to sort of blame ourselves for. And I think
it's really really important that we understand that's a lot
of these things are systemic. There's an element to this.
(24:58):
There's so many elements to this. But see the thing
about being intimidating. Many years ago, one of my first
interactions with men I was after I transitioned or I
don't even know if I had officially medically transitioned, but
a man with told me I was intimidating, right, And
I just sort of assumed that for whatever reason I'm
men find me intimidating. And this was like, you know,
(25:19):
before I, you know, had any sort of success or whatnot.
And so when I tried to understand and parse out
what that means, right, and some men like being intimidated
by me. They saw me as a challenge and they
were like it was hot for them that I was
intimidating for some reason. And other men have coward and
(25:40):
like sort of run away. And this has nothing to
do with me even being trans. These are men who
are who are attracted to me and knew I was trans,
And so it's but then I here accounts from black women,
women of color who were not trans, or women who
of all races who were very successful, and they um
here that they're intimidating, and so I I talk out
with my girlfriends about how much work we've all done
(26:03):
on our Most of my girlfriends are really my super
close girlfriends. The cow Council of Transistors we call call
herself the cops. Um. We do so much work on ourselves,
trying to evolve and be better versions of ourselves and
to go out into the world with a sense of worthiness.
And it's rare that we meet men who seem to
be doing the same work. You know, they say that
(26:24):
there woke and they're feminist and there whatever, but then
their practices don't really bear it out. Um. I think
I've told this story on this podcast before, but I
had a man many years ago tell me that he,
you know, he was a feminist and he loved women
and wanted to empower, you know, empower women. But then
when it came down to his penis working and him
(26:45):
becoming sexually aroused, the woman had to make less money
than him, She had to even be less attractive as
woke as he wanted to be an amazing he really
was an amazing, awesome guy, but like he literally they
could not physically get there for a woman who was
more successful. And so this is what we're up against. Yea,
(27:09):
so I think that, Like, I'm not in the business
of demonizing anyone. So what do we what is the prescription?
What do we do? I mean, you know, if this
is the world we live in, it's it's really fascinating
because I haven't done this work, but I think it'd
be really interesting to think about the embodiment of hegemonic
masculinity and the eroticism, how eroticism gets even constructed or
(27:36):
manifested in our bodies, and men's bodies specifically, because basically,
what he's trying to tell you is that even though
his mind has advanced beyond what he thinks are appropriate
performances of men and women to be doing, his penis
has not. So there's something about in sociology, they're famous
(27:59):
people were written about this, about the performance of gender,
about the performance of femininity and masculinity, and when you
perform it so long. So what you're really talking about
is like this deep embodiment of masculine performance and a
belief and a deep embodiment in what feminine performance is,
(28:22):
and then literally being unable to get aroused because your
penis does not believe and cannot get past the fact
that this woman is performing femininity in a way that
doesn't fit these ideals of gender norms. I'm literally stuck
in hegemonic masculinity. I'm literally stuck in a place where
(28:43):
I can't get up because a woman is not performing
femininity in the traditional ways. So I think that says
something about how deep patriarchy, misogyny, hegemonic masculinity. We see
them as structures, but it's literally playing out on his body.
And I think that that's powerful and real for a
(29:06):
lot of people, but maybe they haven't had even the
language to be able to talk about it in the
way that he has. Wow, that is so incredibly deep,
But I feel like that leaves us in a very
precarious position for a lot of women who date men.
Something that came up with you, just what you just said,
is that historically, right, the ways in which patriarchy has
(29:29):
sort of um and and racism has intersected in the
lives and bodies of black women, is that like womanhood
with something historically that was really preserved for white women.
When sojournal true declared and a woman in one in Ohio,
she said this in the context of her blackness being
disavowed because she wasn't a man in her womanhood being
(29:50):
disavowed because she was not a white woman, and so
that history sort of persists. You know, Black women have
often had their femininity sort of stripped from them by
misogyny and white supremacy and these assumptions that black women
are less womanly and less feminine. Well, I really think
it's back to back to what you said about structure,
(30:12):
and in sociology, we're always battling between how much does
the structure constrain our agency and how much agency do
we have. You are example of doing that work and
continue to do that work. I'm just talking about hetero
sexual women. I cannot imagine the barriers that trans women
(30:37):
are going through as they're searching for partners. It is immense, Right,
Intersectionality is gonna tell us that they're going to have
a lot more troubles than we are, both structural and agentic. Right,
But the thing is, like, you can't give up. You
have the cots. They are helpful to you, They help
(30:58):
you to live, they help you to serve vibe. So
the world isn't going to change that fast, but as
much as we can, we're responsible for how we react
to that. And how we walk in it. This connection
between sociology and social work is really important because sociology says,
this is the structure, and this is how the structure
(31:18):
constrains your agency, and then social work says, but let's
work together to empower that agency. And part of that
is recognizing that there's a structure that you can't deal with,
but there's all these other parts of your life that
you can deal with. So I honestly would say that
to the man that said his penis can't do it, well,
maybe there needs to be some work done there. Right,
(31:40):
you can't solve that problem. No woman can solve that problem.
And that's not her problem to solve. That's his work
to do. So let's leave men to do their work.
So we, all of us, white women, black women, we
need to call it out every time the structure lets
men off the hook and puts more bird in on us.
(32:01):
The reason we are where we are is because black
women sojourn or truth men like women like her, They
called it out every single time, and they did what
they could to make sure that it didn't go on.
So that's part of the work too. It's not just
this personal journey, you know, to who much is is given. Um,
you're just held more accountable. So as an upwardly mobile
(32:24):
black women, it's my job to call out patriarchy. It's
my job to call out racism, and then to act
in ways that resist that. So that's what I see
that we can do. We can't just let the structure
overtake our agency. If we have the means to advocate
for people, we need to do that too. M Hm.
(32:44):
I feel like there's a crisis that men um, I say,
heterosexual man specifically sis gender heaterosexual man, let's qualify that
are having a crisis that they're having around women's roles
shifting in society. And I I guess there's this promise
right from of all races if I am a man,
that I should be their breadwinner and I should make
more money, and I should do this and this and
(33:05):
this and this, and then the culture right that the
structure actually of society isn't set up for all men
to be able to do that. And so it's it's
like we've been lied to, we've been betrayed, and there's
this frustration, and a lot of times that frustration taken
out on women. UM, LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of color.
There is this set of assumptions and stories that that
(33:28):
that men have been told about themselves and if their lives, yes,
their lies. I see all this pain and trauma around
these sort of expectations around patriarchy. Does your research tell
us anything about how men can begin to heal around this?
I guess what the work is. I think that's a
great question, and my research is primarily with with women.
(33:52):
But I think that this is like some introduction to
sociology stuff. Gender is a social construction. I think a
lot of people think that what they've been told and
what they've learned is natural, and that becomes what they believe.
So because I'm a man, I'm entitled to a B, C,
(34:12):
and D and that's the natural order of things. And
so if you don't understand that gender is constructed in
a particular way where men are at the top and
women are at the bottom, and then whoever is deviating
from that is even further at the bottom, then it's
much easier for you to believe those narratives and to
(34:34):
believe those lies because we've been thought that. But we
also in many ways perpetuate this. So called natural order
of of male superiority to women, And so it's the
work has to start pretty simply, which is, it's actually
not true. What they told you was a lie. They
(34:57):
made it up so that they could create a particular
learn kind of society that operates a particular kind of
way and benefits a particular kind of person. So if
we understand that masculinity and femininity are construction and they're
made real by our performance of them, then that can
help us go a long way. So if you read
(35:19):
this article, it's called doing gender. They have this story
where they share where agnes Um is a trans woman
and she's deating this assist herald man, and he basically
tells her, you can't do this because men will think
that you're overbearing. You should sit this way, you should
dress that way. So what that man is actually alluding
(35:41):
to is trans women are learning the performance of femininity,
and he appreciates that because part of that performance means
that they're performing as though men are superior, they're performing
as the women are inferior. So to heal is to
(36:02):
come to the reality that what you're performing, how you're
defining yourself is all constructed in a particular way to
serve a particular kind of purpose. Now I don't know
how how you move forward from there, but you know,
I think it's it's kind of like a you just
got to admit this is who I am, this is
(36:24):
what it is, So we got to admit first, gender
is a construction. So how am I playing into that narrative?
And maybe that's where men sis herold men who can
find the liberation that they need. And there are plenty
of sis herold men that understand this, so it's not
like they have to walk alone. So the education is
(36:46):
there if people want to seek it out. If you
just want to lie and feel sorry for yourself, you
want to you know, grovel in the emasculation and that
kind of thing you can, but that's not used in
your agency. And literally, humanity is all about being able
to use our agency. So if you want to grab
(37:06):
onto your your your humanity, then you can learn more
about what it is you're feeling and why you feel
that way. Well, I think it's not always wallowing in
any masculation. A lot of times it's about blaming other people.
It's about lashing out, right. It often functions and lashing
out and get people for various things. And the one
thing I'll say about my own men who said they,
(37:28):
you know, appreciate trans women sort of embracing a certain
kind of femininity, that like the reality of my experience
and dating is that even though a man might be
attracted to me because he presumes I embraced a certain
kind of feminity, wants it, gets to know me and
understands I'm feminists and understands that I'm not really interested
in any of anything traditional. I don't want to get married.
(37:48):
There are a lot of things I don't want to do,
and so it's it's tricky, right, alrighty, it's that time again.
A lot more coming now, we'll be right back already.
(38:14):
Then let's just dive right back in. So much of
my experience as a trans woman has been like sort
of being fetishized and being sort of treated this sort
of fascination or experiment, and the experiences of so many
women of color are also very similar. Right, We're we're
(38:34):
fetishized in a really interesting and specific way. You know,
there's so many people over the years who have who
I've heard people say that, you know, I'm not racist,
I you know, my boyfriend's black or I'm not racist,
my girlfriend's black, And I'd like to remind those people
that slave owners had sex with the slaves, but that
does not mean that they were not engaged in a
system that subjugated black folks. So what I actually think
(38:58):
about racial fetish and relationship to trans fedish because I
think this we experienced a lot of women of color
online and trans women and around being fetishized. What what
is your research told you about that? That's what I
definitely found. One of the things I really wanted to
explore was, well, what does the exclusion of black women
look like online? And what is the inclusion of black
(39:22):
and non black women look like online? And so when
it comes to you know, in a racial dating, a
lot of times this inclusion is about fetishization. When you
see someone's full humanity, then your their power is equal
to yours. Fetishization is all about wielding your superiority over
(39:45):
some other person that you deem inferior, but you're upgrading
them because you think they fit a special category. If
you're not seeing people as fully human, So it's all
about I think about it as like colonization, right, because
we don't really see this fetishization the same way if
women are doing it, but with men, it's all about, oh,
I'm putting how I view you onto you. You're not
(40:09):
defining your humanity. I'm defining your humanity. So feticization is
all about power, and it's all about sis men being
able to put their view of what minority women are
like and obscuring their humanity at best and at worst,
defining it on behalf of women. And that's where the
(40:31):
assumptions come from, even when we talk about trans fetishization.
So it's like, well, because I think you care about
your femininity, this is what I think femininity is, these
traditional ways of being feminine. So once you don't fit that,
oh no, but then that's again me putting my assumption
(40:51):
of what I think femininity is onto you, and that's
a power play and nobody wants that. Yeah. I just
about this thing that I say to my girlfriend. She
was telling us a story about this guy they had
met online and she had gone to meet him downtown
and he was like, um, okay, believe when I say this,
but he wanted to go into his car and have
(41:12):
sex with her in his car, and she was like, no,
you're gonna take me out if you're gonna do this,
And I said, girl, you wanting him to take you
out and treat you like a human being, that's your fantasy.
Him wanting to get you in the car, that's his fantasy,
And ultimately it's about his fantasy, not yours. So he
(41:33):
never took her out, right, she didn't. She didn't get
in the car. But like so often what I found, Um,
it's about their fantasy and not mine. And so one
has to be willing to walk away from their fantasy
because it's not going to serve as it just that
she wanted to get in the car, you know, And
(41:53):
I'm not shaming anybody for that. And that's the structure.
The structure is set up so that his fantasy is
probably sitized over your fantasy, and you don't have to
be about that. You can use your agency to resist
the structure and look for someone who wants to have
the same fantasy as you. Yeah, the fantasy that can
become a reality exactly. So you've talked about dating closet racist.
(42:18):
Can you explain what that looked like for you? Oh? Yes,
I can. Um, Oh my god, this story is so embarrassing,
so basically I did it. This guy who you know,
said he was interested in black women and he was cute,
and I was like, I thought he was cute. I
thought he was interesting. And with me, you know, within
(42:39):
two or three dates, we start to talk about race.
This is something I find important. It is important to
my own survival. So he's like, well, I think that
the idea was that he felt like I was too
much like Malcolm X and not enough like MLK. These
were the words that he used. So he felt that
racial progress we just have to wait. So he called
(43:01):
me militant. I was a militant black person, and that
I need to appreciate slow progress. And that's when I
knew I was in trouble because I was like, no, one,
that's about my humanity and it's about my blackness. It's
gonna tell me that I need to wait on progress.
(43:23):
And all of the people both Nigerian and African American
that have come before me and set me up for
where I am, they did not wait for progress. So
that's when I was like, Oh, you might like black women,
but you don't like black humanity, so you're a closet racist. Wow,
(43:46):
that's really deep. How did it end. Did you say
that to him? Did you just like not call him back?
Because is there a moment where you thought, let me
see if there can be a transformational moment, a teachable
moment here? How did that play itself? So I'm ashamed
to admit that this casual relationship went on for a
little too long. It was like two or three months.
(44:07):
And there had been signs that he might be a
closet racist, that he might be someone who's like a
social conservative, like people need to make their own money.
But I'm like, you're living in an apartment that your
parents are paying for, Like what are you actually talking about? Um?
And so these things sort of emerged, and so that
was the last conversation we had. I dropped him off
(44:30):
at his house. Girl, he didn't even have a car.
I dropped to make their own moneys didn't have a car.
But yet you want to talk about how people need
to pull themselves by the bootstraps, Okay, whatever, So all
that emerged. I dropped him off at his house and
I was just like, we're not gonna need to get along.
(44:51):
We don't agree on things that are very important to me.
And then he called me and left me a long
message that I just deleted and I never spoke to
him again. Hmmm, do you remember what the message said?
I'm really sorry for the things I said. I didn't
mean it. I really hope that we can talk again.
And I'm not sure that I understood those kinds of things.
(45:13):
Mm hmm, blessed. It's hard. He's probably doing the very
best two cod ah and and as Berni Brown tells us,
if we assume people are doing the best that they can,
then we must set boundary exactly. So my boundary was
I'm never going to see you again, and I need
to really be more careful about white men that I date.
(45:36):
If I'm dating a white man, the signs are probably
always there. I just kind of was like, Oh he's cute,
blah blah blah blah. But I was just like, oh, no, no,
no, no no, no, I need to be way more careful.
I think, as if you're dating anyone, that this is
that we have to look for, because the information is
usually there. People are usually telling us who they are
through various actions, and it's our job. I think that's
(45:58):
just part of the process that our job over time
is to learn what the what they're telling us and
to discern that is faster. And I think the beautiful
thing about what you've shared here is that I bet
the next time you met a white man or any man,
you were more stupid, you were more adept than like
looking for those things. And so I think that's how
we learn, is that we have these experiences. Yeah, and
(46:19):
that's part of the invisible work, invisible labor that black
women are are doing often times, right, this is the
work that you don't even know that you're doing it
half the time. And everyone is doing this work in general,
and when they're dating and trying to make sure that
they're not hooking up with people who are toxic for them,
But then black women have this added layer of like,
(46:41):
am I dating somebody who's about my humanity or not?
So I like to end every podcast with this question
what else is true? And it comes from the community
resiliency model and the idea of shifting, stay and being
(47:01):
in this space of both and right that the world
might be very challenging right now, and it might be
hard for me, but there is something else that is true.
There's something that is positive or neutral in my body
and in my life that I can also focus on,
and so I'd like to ask you, Dr Sarah, what
else is true for you today? Well? What else is
(47:23):
true for me and for all the black women out
there and for U Laverne is that black women are enough.
That's what else is true, m HM. In a world
where black women are devalued and degraded, black women may
not feel as fair enough, but their humanity already exists.
(47:45):
They just need to wake up and walk in it. Amen. Amen,
I am enough. You are enough. Praise being. Thank you
so much, Dr Sarah. Where can people find you online?
You can find any of my work, any of my
articles on Twitter at love e scold and so everything
(48:06):
that I've published is available via link that way, and
folks are also free to email me as long as
they're not stalking me or sending me bad messages. Um
Sarah dot Audienca Scold Audienca hyphen scold at Fermin dot
du so. People can reach me there, but Twitter is
probably the best way to reach me. If you're looking
(48:28):
for me, um it's Dr Sarah a s. You can
also find me that way. So yeah, amazing. Thank you
so much for your work, your research, and thank you
so much for spending time with me today, no problem.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it,
and it was really a lovely conversation. Yea. I wasn't
(48:58):
prepared for how difficult this one would be for me.
I think it's because it's the piece of weaving in
my own kind of personal narrative and how painful a
lot of it's been for me. So I'm so very
grateful to Sarah having that sort of courage to be
(49:22):
vulnerable and to talk me through it and to give
me great data, research and perspective to try to get
to something hopefully that is substantial for me and for
all of you. Thank you for listening to The Laverne
(49:48):
Cox Show. If you like what you hear, please rate, review,
subscribe and share with everyone you know. Join me next
week when I talked to Dr Karen Franklin, for forensic
psychologist and award winning researcher about why some people target
transgender and other sexual and gender minorities and assaults and
(50:09):
hate crimes. Knowing why it is the first step to change.
You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Laverne
Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox for Real. The
(50:33):
Laverne Cox show is a production of Shonda land Audio
in partnership with I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shondaland Audio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to The Laverne Cox Show, a production of Shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. Think about the
embodiment of hegemonic masculinity, how eroticism gets even constructed or
manifested in our bodies, in men's bodies specifically, because basically,
(00:22):
what he's trying to tell you is that even though
his mind has advanced beyond what he thinks are appropriate
performances of men and women to be doing, his penis
has not. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Laverne
(00:50):
Cock Show. On today's episode, we're talking about the challenges
that college educated women of color experience dating in the
digital age. Now, many years ago, I was on this
website called Plenty of Fish and I got a message
from a man. I went to his profile and was shocked.
(01:14):
He said on his profile really disparaging things about why
he would never date black and Latino women, just things
that were so horrible and so stereotypical. I just can't
even bring myself to repeat them here today. And so
I was just like, why would this man write me? So,
in the spirit of research, I wrote him back and
(01:35):
I said, I read your profile. I'm obviously a black woman,
Why would you even, you know, write me and expressed
interest in dating me. And what he said was, Oh,
I can date you because you're light skinned. And then
he said and I've always been curious about trans women,
(01:55):
and so I just kind of remember sitting there and
just sort of being like, Wow, this is this is
really deep. And then I blocked him and I never
had any communication with him again after that. But over
the years, I've heard from so many black women, both
trans and non trans, who have expressed frustration dating and
attempting to date in the face of this kind of stereotyping,
(02:18):
blamed racism, colorism, misogyny, and treating trans women as experiments
and curiosities. When I came across Dr Sarah adayinka Schools
research on dating in the Digital Age with the focus
on college educated women of color, I knew I wanted
to have this conversation with her. Dr Sarah is a
licensed clinical social worker and assistant Professor of sociology at
(02:42):
firm And University. She explores race, family, and gender in
her research, with a focused interest in how forming intimate
romantic relationships reveal inequalities in these areas. Please enjoy my
talk with Dr Sarah. Hi, Dr Sarah. How are you
(03:13):
feeling today? Good? Miss Cox? How are you doing? I'm well,
you can call me the Burn, all right. I just
wanted to make sure, yes, my mother is Miss Cox. Okay.
Can you talk to us just about the nature of
your research and what what really inspired this look into
the challenges that college educated women of color experience and dating.
(03:35):
What was the beginning the nexus of genesis? I should say,
of you doing this, that's a great question soul. For me,
I've always been a little bit of a mushy romantic.
I love ear hustling about how people fall in love.
I'm all about that. And when I was in high school,
I was like, Okay, so I'm gonna go to college
(03:56):
and I'm gonna get married. It's gonna be lick yea.
And I went to call ligiend that is not what happened.
In fact, what I was noticing already was that my
white college age friends were already partnering and my black
female friends were not. We weren't getting together. And I
don't think that it was people weren't hooking up with us,
(04:16):
but there was definitely this field that we were going
to have to wait to find our partners, whereas a
lot of the white folks that I knew were like
in serious relationships at college. So my junior paper, where
did you go to school? Where did you do your
undergraduate I went to Princeton University, and so I took
(04:36):
a class with Mario Small, who I think is now
at Harvard, and sort of everything became clear for me,
my own understanding. I took a sociology class there, my
own understanding of being a black woman, and things that
hadn't made made sense to me started to make sense.
And so, you know, as someone who's interested in meeting
and meeting already, I was like, well, I gotta figure
(04:56):
out what's going on, Like why aren't I dating? Why
aren't my friend MS dating? Like what's going on? So
my junior paper looked at how black women do marry,
but they tend to marry down. I wrote a senior
thesis that looked at how institutions like schools are actually
matchmakers and we don't often think of them as matchmakers,
(05:18):
as schools can be mechanisms to facilitate homogamy, which is
where people get married along the same class, educational racial lines.
But if you meet at work, for instance, you might
be less likely to marry someone that is the same
as you in terms of class, in terms of in
terms of class, education, race, but that might be changing
(05:39):
now because work can be so um specific. So I
wrote a paper on that. I stopped there, and then
my advisor was like, you gotta go to graduate school
because maybe this is an important thing to study. And
I was like, oh, I don't want to go. And
I had told myself that, um, if I was still
interested in this in five years, I would I would
go to graduate school. So I read a book by
(06:01):
Richard Banks called His Marriage for for White People, and
the book pissed me off enough to be like, okay,
when we need to go to graduate school. Why did
the book piss you off? What was the press of
the book that pissed you off? The title is interesting.
His assumption was that black women simply were not open
(06:21):
to dating outside of their race. They were just closed off.
And so I was like, that's not correct. I've been
trying to day outside of my race. The wacky things
that I've been seeing online, the ways in which people
approach me was just incorrect. And I was like, this
can't stand. I really need to go research this myself.
And then you know, as you're getting into your mid twenties,
(06:43):
you're having these conversations with your non black friends and
your black friends, and you're starting to see, what our
experiences aren't that similar. They're similar in some ways, but
they're not similar in other ways. And so that basically
lit a fire under me, and I was like, I'm
going to get my PhD. And this is what I'm
going to study. And for me, um, the comparisons are
(07:04):
really key, right, I really want to talk to black women,
but I think the uniqueness of Black women's experiences they
really come into relief when you compare them to non
black women's experiences. And that's what made me do the
work that I'm doing. Girl, There's so many things that
you said there that I just I want to unpack
on so many different levels. The first one, you just
(07:26):
sort of alluded to marrying down, and if you just
go online, if you go to YouTube, there's so many
conversations about like hypergamy and black women and like marrying
up and what does that look like? And and then
the interracial dating piece. There's so we black women. I
saw one study that suggested that black women are less
likely than black men to date outside of the race.
(07:49):
That we are more statistically more likely to pursue relationships
with black men, and black men are with us. Right,
So where do we where do we even begin with this?
Let me give me We can start with the data
about black women being less likely to date and marry interracially.
(08:10):
We do see that in census data UM two thousand.
Intend we see the data that black men are actually
twice as likely to marry interracially as black women. But
I don't think this is solely an issue of preference.
I think in our world today, we really you know,
we have this rugged individualism. We tend to live in
this pretend world where like the way that the US
(08:34):
was set up to make black people three fifths of
our human and then to put them at the bottom
of the hierarchy doesn't at all impact our preferences. That
doesn't make any sense. So we have to recognize that
our preferences are within a particular kind of racial and
gender order, and they're influenced by that order. For a
(08:56):
long time, sexual abuses that black women experience at the
hands of white men didn't count as illegal. You can't
just ignore history and then pretend that black women are
just gonna grow up in a vacuum where now it's
just fine to date white or non black men and
(09:16):
they have to be careful. We're seeing this even in
our time now, like people are very bold about their
hate and their dislike for black women. You don't have
to look for Kamala Harris. So when black women in
my opinion, and I see this in my data. So
this isn't in my dissertation, it's in a forthcoming book
I'm called the Logic of Racial Practice. In my experience,
(09:39):
black women don't want to date black men just because
it feels good. It's about racial solidarity. How are you
going to go through a life where you're constantly struggling
and the person is like, maybe that's racial discrimination, maybe
it's not. You don't want that right. So, as this,
(10:01):
as white supremacy bears down more and more and more
on black women's lives, black women are trying to advance.
We are one of the most highly educated populations in
the US, but our college degrees, our post college graduate
degrees are not getting us the same things that it
is for non black women. So if we want to
(10:21):
date black men, is because love is intimate. We want
people to understand us and understand that struggle. And I
haven't talked to black men, so I don't know what
their reasons are for dating white women. I can't speak
to that. But for black women, it's a little less
than just like, well, I just want someone that's the
same race as me. That race has history behind it,
(10:45):
It has struggled behind it, it has resilience behind it.
And in a world like ours, where your blackness is,
people seek to trample upon it. They're saying, we want
to count all legal vote, but your vote is illegal,
right you? You want to be with someone that is
(11:05):
going to get that. The immediate thing that I think
about when I listened to you talk, it's trauma that
that did. The trauma. The history of the ways in
which black womanhood has been devalued in this country is
deeply traumatizing. I think about my mother and how my
mother there's no way she would ever date a white
man that she grew up in the segregated South. I
(11:28):
remember we were in it was twenty twelves. It was
eight years ago. We were in Vegas and she had
just retired and we were both in Vegas, for the
first time, and she was supposed to meet me by
the pool. Um. We were staying at the Mirage and
I went for a dip in the pool and get
out of the pool, and I have like ten messages
from my mother, and I listened to the first and
(11:48):
she's freaking out and she's like, you've got me about
here around all these white people, she said to me.
And I just founder and we sat down and I said,
are you afraid of white people? People? And she was
just so sort of riled up and it didn't clicked him.
And I was like, oh my god. And this is
eight years ago, so I'm like forty years old, and
I was like, oh my god. She grew up in
(12:10):
the segregated South, watched her father be called the N word,
was in segregated schools, and invested um desegregated schools, and
experienced to all that there was so much strong. She
was passed over for a promotion in the eighties for
a white woman who didn't have the same education, And
so I think it's our experience. But then I also
know that trauma has passed down in our genes and
in our d n A, and so I think about
(12:32):
that level of trauma as I listened to what you
just said. But then I think about two. How so
many black men, particularly black celebrities, rappers, et cetera, have
no problem expressing their disdain from black women right and
their desire not to date black women, or that that
black women must be light skinned. So the colorism, and
(12:53):
I think when we have this conversation, it has to
be we have to sort of talk about colorism, and
we have to talk about the ways in which certain
scan tones are privileged in the in the dating market.
What would you say to that? So I would say
that just based on the work that I've done, I
think it's important to think about hegemonic masculinity and when
we think about the intersection of race and gender for
(13:16):
black men, So in our world, patriarchy, masculinity, hegemonic masculinity
are very powerful ideologies. You know, when you read the
New York Times and people are asking, well, why did
Latino men vote for Trump? Why did Black men vote
for Trump? A lot of the answer is will they
really see him as a macho man? So what happens
(13:37):
I think, you know, based on my limited experience, is
that for black men, part of defining that masculinity is
putting that above racial solidarity right by showing I am
a man and because of white supremacy. One way I
can do that is by devaluing black women. I'm seen
(13:58):
as more valuable in the realm of white supremacy, in
the world of white supremacy, if I'm able to join
along with others to devalue black women who are at
the bottom of their racial hierarchy. So I think that
whether or not black men realize it, they're literally part
of that process of maintaining and perpetuating white supremacy by
(14:23):
devaluing black women, and oftentimes they don't understand that. And
so again with white supremacy, skin tone always matters. So
if my goal is a black man is to get
closer to whiteness, to get closer to white masculinity, of
course I'm going to date a lighter skin black woman
because all of it matters. Phenotype matters, skin color matters,
(14:47):
what her nose look like. All that matters in terms
of maintaining my place as a man and a black
man within this racial harchy and within this context, the
white supremacy. So that's how I, as a sociologists understand
those actions. What this is such a complicated thing to
(15:09):
talk about. I think too, because the question that comes
up for me is like, well, if we just have
our preferences, right, Like I just I am more attracted
to someone who's lighter skin and that's like, not racism,
It's just my preference. And a lot of people listening
to this will say that, what would you say to
the folks out there who are like, well, I just
(15:29):
have a preference and it's it's not necessarily racist or
misogynist or colorist. I just like what I like. I
would say say to them, You're not alone. That's a
totally valid perspective to have. I'm all about interrogation. Why
do you like what you like? Where does that come from?
(15:50):
When did you start liking it? What does it mean
for you to like it? And I'm not just talking objectively.
I'm married to a white man, so I had to
do that work for myself of like, well, what does
it mean to be attracted to white men? What does
it mean for a black woman to hold up whiteness?
What kind of life do I want to have with
(16:11):
a white man? Why does it matter if I'm not
or am I am married to a white man, so
I had to do that work for myself, and frankly,
what I found for myself is if I'm going to
be with a white man, he better bring me closer
and closer and closer and closer to pro blackness. His
treatment of me better upgrade my humanity all the time.
(16:34):
So I think it's fine to have preferences, but just
recognize that they don't exist in a vacuum. So interrogate,
do the work, reflect on where those are coming from
and why they are important to you. I think that
the thing too, it's like, if we do have our preferences,
then they have those preferences, should not dinnigrade women with
(16:56):
I remember there was I think famous singer or a
rapper or something who had a song about, you know,
women with their good hair or something like that, and
and people like this is colorist, this is upsetting, and
so that that even if we have our preferences, that
we're not in the process of denegrating people who don't
fall into their preferences right exactly. And that's where the
self reflection comes from, because what you might actually find
(17:20):
is if you're a non white person, is that you
actually might have some internalized racism that you haven't dealt with.
You might find that you have some internalized colorism that
you haven't dealt with. So some of my respondents they
were in this situation where they were always attracted to
white men, and then one woman said that she went
(17:41):
on a fast where she started to de colonize her
her preferences. She's like, why am I attracted to this
white guy, this mediocre white guy, when they're these black
men over here, these Asian men over here that are
meeting the same criteria. She started to do that work
of reflecting on those preferences, and so you might surprise yourself.
(18:05):
You might actually realize, wow, I'm holding onto these things
because the media's influenced me. How people define beauty has
influenced me. So that's why people don't want to do
the work, because they might be afraid to like go
or something. They might have to realize that, actually, I
don't think all people are the same. And so when
(18:26):
you do that work, though, then you can really start
to appreciate the humanity and other people. So you can
still have your preferences, but not at the expense of
denigrating other people. Yeah, I think it always comes down
to a critical, loving, critical self reflection when it comes
to all of these things that like, at the end
of the day, it's like not about looking at other
(18:48):
people and what their issues are, but like, how am
I implicated in perpetuating or creating a racism, misogyny, colorism,
et cetera. How am I participate eating and creating something
new and starting new and different kinds of conversations. This
(19:09):
is a good time to take a little break and
we'll be right back though after a little love is
thrown to our sponsors. Alrighty, now that's all taken care of,
(19:29):
Let's get back to our chat. My ex boyfriend was
white and we you know, posted on social media, and
I remember with the first few times we posted, there
were so many people who were frustrated and upset that
I was dating a white man. And someone said, you know,
why do all the lgbt Q celebrities when they get famous,
(19:52):
they find a white man? And there was just like
a lot of people were very very upset that my
boyfriend was white, and it was just kind of I
was like, most of the men I've dated are white men,
and you know, and it's something I've thought a lot
about and is something I've interrogated and but it's also
about who is of any race right is going to
treat me in the way that I feel I deserved
(20:14):
to be treated and I should be treated. And so,
you know, I happen to fall in love with a
white man who treated me really well, and so I
think a lot of it is about our options and
being open. You know, I think there's a there's a
piece of trauma though. I think I think for a
lot of black women, there's trauma around having been treated
(20:38):
it's purely dark skinned black women having been treated so
badly over and over again. As I was preparing for this,
I read so many accounts from dark skinned black women
who just have been made to feel like they are
just less than nothing by men, over and over and
over again. And I think about, how how do we
actually go into healthy relationships right where we can let
(20:59):
don't bring that baggage into it. And what have you
found in your research around the healing process that has
to happen from all the wounds of of the intersections
of misogyny and colorism and racism for the folks that
you've interviewed. Yeah, that's a great question. So one of
the things that I found in my UM work is
(21:20):
that women, regardless of what race they are, they often
experience negative interactions with men, both on and offline when
they're in their romantic partner search. And there are two
ways in which women will often deal with these negative interactions,
and one of them is emotion work, which is where
they prioritize men's feelings. So if men are intimidated by
(21:44):
their accomplishments, or men are intimidated by their educational level,
those sort of downplay. As part of this emotion work,
they'll ask the man a lot of questions about what
he's doing, have done that, Yeah, um. One of one
of my respondents talked about how they were going to
be lawyers. She has a PhD in sociology. One of
(22:06):
her friends was going to be a PR person in
l A and they these men came up to them
and they told them exactly what they were going to do,
and the men, she said, they shrank. So she turned
to her friends and she was like, we need to
tell people that were nannies or else we're never gonna
get laid. So that's priority. It's one of my favorite quotes.
(22:27):
So that's prioritization of men's feelings around their accomplishments. But
the other kind of coping mechanism that women did was
emotion and repair, which is where they prioritized their feelings. Right.
They weren't going to talk to any men that were
showing any hints of intimidation. They weren't going to talk
(22:47):
to any men who called them bitches online. They weren't
going to talk to any men who used criticized daization
as a way to include them as romantic partners. It
definitely shrank or pool, but you know what, they felt empowered.
So I would say to black women, especially, take care
(23:08):
of yourself. This world that we're in is not about you.
I know that sounds terrible to say, but take care
of yourself. Surround yourself with people who know your worth
and who know your value, and this is an ongoing process.
As a social worker, I'm all about therapy, even better
if you do it with a black person that maybe
(23:32):
even understands where you're coming from. But like, trauma really
needs you to air it out. It needs to be
out in the open. You need to let someone carry
that burden with you, because trauma will tell you that
you're not enough. Trauma will tell you that you're less than.
So you already have the value. You're already worth something.
(23:54):
People can't take that away from you. So the work
is in you finding it and stepping into it and
daily and again, this is not like a magical thing,
like you're not gonna wake up one they and be like,
oh my god, I feel totally fulfilled enough and love.
It's going to be a constant thing because of the
world that we live in, in in the American society that
we live in. So black women, you are already enough.
(24:16):
There's no here there about it. There's no discovering it.
It's just walking up and waking into it and living
it out. That's what that's about. That's so beautiful. One
of the main reasons I wanted to talk to you
is that the ways in which so many men online have,
the way they treat us, the way they the stereotypes
(24:37):
they have, the ways in which they approach us, that
is stuff that is systemic. That is something that is
not it's not our fault. It's not something that we
need to sort of blame ourselves for. And I think
it's really really important that we understand that's a lot
of these things are systemic. There's an element to this.
(24:58):
There's so many elements to this. But see the thing
about being intimidating. Many years ago, one of my first
interactions with men I was after I transitioned or I
don't even know if I had officially medically transitioned, but
a man with told me I was intimidating, right, And
I just sort of assumed that for whatever reason I'm
men find me intimidating. And this was like, you know,
(25:19):
before I, you know, had any sort of success or whatnot.
And so when I tried to understand and parse out
what that means, right, and some men like being intimidated
by me. They saw me as a challenge and they
were like it was hot for them that I was
intimidating for some reason. And other men have coward and
(25:40):
like sort of run away. And this has nothing to
do with me even being trans. These are men who
are who are attracted to me and knew I was trans,
And so it's but then I here accounts from black women,
women of color who were not trans, or women who
of all races who were very successful, and they um
here that they're intimidating, and so I I talk out
with my girlfriends about how much work we've all done
(26:03):
on our Most of my girlfriends are really my super
close girlfriends. The cow Council of Transistors we call call
herself the cops. Um. We do so much work on ourselves,
trying to evolve and be better versions of ourselves and
to go out into the world with a sense of worthiness.
And it's rare that we meet men who seem to
be doing the same work. You know, they say that
(26:24):
there woke and they're feminist and there whatever, but then
their practices don't really bear it out. Um. I think
I've told this story on this podcast before, but I
had a man many years ago tell me that he,
you know, he was a feminist and he loved women
and wanted to empower, you know, empower women. But then
when it came down to his penis working and him
(26:45):
becoming sexually aroused, the woman had to make less money
than him, She had to even be less attractive as
woke as he wanted to be an amazing he really
was an amazing, awesome guy, but like he literally they
could not physically get there for a woman who was
more successful. And so this is what we're up against. Yea,
(27:09):
so I think that, Like, I'm not in the business
of demonizing anyone. So what do we what is the prescription?
What do we do? I mean, you know, if this
is the world we live in, it's it's really fascinating
because I haven't done this work, but I think it'd
be really interesting to think about the embodiment of hegemonic
masculinity and the eroticism, how eroticism gets even constructed or
(27:36):
manifested in our bodies, and men's bodies specifically, because basically,
what he's trying to tell you is that even though
his mind has advanced beyond what he thinks are appropriate
performances of men and women to be doing, his penis
has not. So there's something about in sociology, they're famous
(27:59):
people were written about this, about the performance of gender,
about the performance of femininity and masculinity, and when you
perform it so long. So what you're really talking about
is like this deep embodiment of masculine performance and a
belief and a deep embodiment in what feminine performance is,
(28:22):
and then literally being unable to get aroused because your
penis does not believe and cannot get past the fact
that this woman is performing femininity in a way that
doesn't fit these ideals of gender norms. I'm literally stuck
in hegemonic masculinity. I'm literally stuck in a place where
(28:43):
I can't get up because a woman is not performing
femininity in the traditional ways. So I think that says
something about how deep patriarchy, misogyny, hegemonic masculinity. We see
them as structures, but it's literally playing out on his body.
And I think that that's powerful and real for a
(29:06):
lot of people, but maybe they haven't had even the
language to be able to talk about it in the
way that he has. Wow, that is so incredibly deep,
But I feel like that leaves us in a very
precarious position for a lot of women who date men.
Something that came up with you, just what you just said,
is that historically, right, the ways in which patriarchy has
(29:29):
sort of um and and racism has intersected in the
lives and bodies of black women, is that like womanhood
with something historically that was really preserved for white women.
When sojournal true declared and a woman in one in Ohio,
she said this in the context of her blackness being
disavowed because she wasn't a man in her womanhood being
(29:50):
disavowed because she was not a white woman, and so
that history sort of persists. You know, Black women have
often had their femininity sort of stripped from them by
misogyny and white supremacy and these assumptions that black women
are less womanly and less feminine. Well, I really think
it's back to back to what you said about structure,
(30:12):
and in sociology, we're always battling between how much does
the structure constrain our agency and how much agency do
we have. You are example of doing that work and
continue to do that work. I'm just talking about hetero
sexual women. I cannot imagine the barriers that trans women
(30:37):
are going through as they're searching for partners. It is immense, Right,
Intersectionality is gonna tell us that they're going to have
a lot more troubles than we are, both structural and agentic. Right,
But the thing is, like, you can't give up. You
have the cots. They are helpful to you, They help
(30:58):
you to live, they help you to serve vibe. So
the world isn't going to change that fast, but as
much as we can, we're responsible for how we react
to that. And how we walk in it. This connection
between sociology and social work is really important because sociology says,
this is the structure, and this is how the structure
(31:18):
constrains your agency, and then social work says, but let's
work together to empower that agency. And part of that
is recognizing that there's a structure that you can't deal with,
but there's all these other parts of your life that
you can deal with. So I honestly would say that
to the man that said his penis can't do it, well,
maybe there needs to be some work done there. Right,
(31:40):
you can't solve that problem. No woman can solve that problem.
And that's not her problem to solve. That's his work
to do. So let's leave men to do their work.
So we, all of us, white women, black women, we
need to call it out every time the structure lets
men off the hook and puts more bird in on us.
(32:01):
The reason we are where we are is because black
women sojourn or truth men like women like her, They
called it out every single time, and they did what
they could to make sure that it didn't go on.
So that's part of the work too. It's not just
this personal journey, you know, to who much is is given. Um,
you're just held more accountable. So as an upwardly mobile
(32:24):
black women, it's my job to call out patriarchy. It's
my job to call out racism, and then to act
in ways that resist that. So that's what I see
that we can do. We can't just let the structure
overtake our agency. If we have the means to advocate
for people, we need to do that too. M Hm.
(32:44):
I feel like there's a crisis that men um, I say,
heterosexual man specifically sis gender heaterosexual man, let's qualify that
are having a crisis that they're having around women's roles
shifting in society. And I I guess there's this promise
right from of all races if I am a man,
that I should be their breadwinner and I should make
more money, and I should do this and this and
(33:05):
this and this, and then the culture right that the
structure actually of society isn't set up for all men
to be able to do that. And so it's it's
like we've been lied to, we've been betrayed, and there's
this frustration, and a lot of times that frustration taken
out on women. UM, LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of color.
There is this set of assumptions and stories that that
(33:28):
that men have been told about themselves and if their lives, yes,
their lies. I see all this pain and trauma around
these sort of expectations around patriarchy. Does your research tell
us anything about how men can begin to heal around this?
I guess what the work is. I think that's a
great question, and my research is primarily with with women.
(33:52):
But I think that this is like some introduction to
sociology stuff. Gender is a social construction. I think a
lot of people think that what they've been told and
what they've learned is natural, and that becomes what they believe.
So because I'm a man, I'm entitled to a B, C,
(34:12):
and D and that's the natural order of things. And
so if you don't understand that gender is constructed in
a particular way where men are at the top and
women are at the bottom, and then whoever is deviating
from that is even further at the bottom, then it's
much easier for you to believe those narratives and to
(34:34):
believe those lies because we've been thought that. But we
also in many ways perpetuate this. So called natural order
of of male superiority to women, And so it's the
work has to start pretty simply, which is, it's actually
not true. What they told you was a lie. They
(34:57):
made it up so that they could create a particular
learn kind of society that operates a particular kind of
way and benefits a particular kind of person. So if
we understand that masculinity and femininity are construction and they're
made real by our performance of them, then that can
help us go a long way. So if you read
(35:19):
this article, it's called doing gender. They have this story
where they share where agnes Um is a trans woman
and she's deating this assist herald man, and he basically
tells her, you can't do this because men will think
that you're overbearing. You should sit this way, you should
dress that way. So what that man is actually alluding
(35:41):
to is trans women are learning the performance of femininity,
and he appreciates that because part of that performance means
that they're performing as though men are superior, they're performing
as the women are inferior. So to heal is to
(36:02):
come to the reality that what you're performing, how you're
defining yourself is all constructed in a particular way to
serve a particular kind of purpose. Now I don't know
how how you move forward from there, but you know,
I think it's it's kind of like a you just
got to admit this is who I am, this is
(36:24):
what it is, So we got to admit first, gender
is a construction. So how am I playing into that narrative?
And maybe that's where men sis herold men who can
find the liberation that they need. And there are plenty
of sis herold men that understand this, so it's not
like they have to walk alone. So the education is
(36:46):
there if people want to seek it out. If you
just want to lie and feel sorry for yourself, you
want to you know, grovel in the emasculation and that
kind of thing you can, but that's not used in
your agency. And literally, humanity is all about being able
to use our agency. So if you want to grab
(37:06):
onto your your your humanity, then you can learn more
about what it is you're feeling and why you feel
that way. Well, I think it's not always wallowing in
any masculation. A lot of times it's about blaming other people.
It's about lashing out, right. It often functions and lashing
out and get people for various things. And the one
thing I'll say about my own men who said they,
(37:28):
you know, appreciate trans women sort of embracing a certain
kind of femininity, that like the reality of my experience
and dating is that even though a man might be
attracted to me because he presumes I embraced a certain
kind of feminity, wants it, gets to know me and
understands I'm feminists and understands that I'm not really interested
in any of anything traditional. I don't want to get married.
(37:48):
There are a lot of things I don't want to do,
and so it's it's tricky, right, alrighty, it's that time again.
A lot more coming now, we'll be right back already.
(38:14):
Then let's just dive right back in. So much of
my experience as a trans woman has been like sort
of being fetishized and being sort of treated this sort
of fascination or experiment, and the experiences of so many
women of color are also very similar. Right, We're we're
(38:34):
fetishized in a really interesting and specific way. You know,
there's so many people over the years who have who
I've heard people say that, you know, I'm not racist,
I you know, my boyfriend's black or I'm not racist,
my girlfriend's black, And I'd like to remind those people
that slave owners had sex with the slaves, but that
does not mean that they were not engaged in a
system that subjugated black folks. So what I actually think
(38:58):
about racial fetish and relationship to trans fedish because I
think this we experienced a lot of women of color
online and trans women and around being fetishized. What what
is your research told you about that? That's what I
definitely found. One of the things I really wanted to
explore was, well, what does the exclusion of black women
look like online? And what is the inclusion of black
(39:22):
and non black women look like online? And so when
it comes to you know, in a racial dating, a
lot of times this inclusion is about fetishization. When you
see someone's full humanity, then your their power is equal
to yours. Fetishization is all about wielding your superiority over
(39:45):
some other person that you deem inferior, but you're upgrading
them because you think they fit a special category. If
you're not seeing people as fully human, So it's all
about I think about it as like colonization, right, because
we don't really see this fetishization the same way if
women are doing it, but with men, it's all about, oh,
I'm putting how I view you onto you. You're not
(40:09):
defining your humanity. I'm defining your humanity. So feticization is
all about power, and it's all about sis men being
able to put their view of what minority women are
like and obscuring their humanity at best and at worst,
defining it on behalf of women. And that's where the
(40:31):
assumptions come from, even when we talk about trans fetishization.
So it's like, well, because I think you care about
your femininity, this is what I think femininity is, these
traditional ways of being feminine. So once you don't fit that,
oh no, but then that's again me putting my assumption
(40:51):
of what I think femininity is onto you, and that's
a power play and nobody wants that. Yeah. I just
about this thing that I say to my girlfriend. She
was telling us a story about this guy they had
met online and she had gone to meet him downtown
and he was like, um, okay, believe when I say this,
but he wanted to go into his car and have
(41:12):
sex with her in his car, and she was like, no,
you're gonna take me out if you're gonna do this,
And I said, girl, you wanting him to take you
out and treat you like a human being, that's your fantasy.
Him wanting to get you in the car, that's his fantasy,
And ultimately it's about his fantasy, not yours. So he
(41:33):
never took her out, right, she didn't. She didn't get
in the car. But like so often what I found, Um,
it's about their fantasy and not mine. And so one
has to be willing to walk away from their fantasy
because it's not going to serve as it just that
she wanted to get in the car, you know, And
(41:53):
I'm not shaming anybody for that. And that's the structure.
The structure is set up so that his fantasy is
probably sitized over your fantasy, and you don't have to
be about that. You can use your agency to resist
the structure and look for someone who wants to have
the same fantasy as you. Yeah, the fantasy that can
become a reality exactly. So you've talked about dating closet racist.
(42:18):
Can you explain what that looked like for you? Oh? Yes,
I can. Um, Oh my god, this story is so embarrassing,
so basically I did it. This guy who you know,
said he was interested in black women and he was cute,
and I was like, I thought he was cute. I
thought he was interesting. And with me, you know, within
(42:39):
two or three dates, we start to talk about race.
This is something I find important. It is important to
my own survival. So he's like, well, I think that
the idea was that he felt like I was too
much like Malcolm X and not enough like MLK. These
were the words that he used. So he felt that
racial progress we just have to wait. So he called
(43:01):
me militant. I was a militant black person, and that
I need to appreciate slow progress. And that's when I
knew I was in trouble because I was like, no, one,
that's about my humanity and it's about my blackness. It's
gonna tell me that I need to wait on progress.
(43:23):
And all of the people both Nigerian and African American
that have come before me and set me up for
where I am, they did not wait for progress. So
that's when I was like, Oh, you might like black women,
but you don't like black humanity, so you're a closet racist. Wow,
(43:46):
that's really deep. How did it end. Did you say
that to him? Did you just like not call him back?
Because is there a moment where you thought, let me
see if there can be a transformational moment, a teachable
moment here? How did that play itself? So I'm ashamed
to admit that this casual relationship went on for a
little too long. It was like two or three months.
(44:07):
And there had been signs that he might be a
closet racist, that he might be someone who's like a
social conservative, like people need to make their own money.
But I'm like, you're living in an apartment that your
parents are paying for, Like what are you actually talking about? Um?
And so these things sort of emerged, and so that
was the last conversation we had. I dropped him off
(44:30):
at his house. Girl, he didn't even have a car.
I dropped to make their own moneys didn't have a car.
But yet you want to talk about how people need
to pull themselves by the bootstraps, Okay, whatever, So all
that emerged. I dropped him off at his house and
I was just like, we're not gonna need to get along.
(44:51):
We don't agree on things that are very important to me.
And then he called me and left me a long
message that I just deleted and I never spoke to
him again. Hmmm, do you remember what the message said?
I'm really sorry for the things I said. I didn't
mean it. I really hope that we can talk again.
And I'm not sure that I understood those kinds of things.
(45:13):
Mm hmm, blessed. It's hard. He's probably doing the very
best two cod ah and and as Berni Brown tells us,
if we assume people are doing the best that they can,
then we must set boundary exactly. So my boundary was
I'm never going to see you again, and I need
to really be more careful about white men that I date.
(45:36):
If I'm dating a white man, the signs are probably
always there. I just kind of was like, Oh he's cute,
blah blah blah blah. But I was just like, oh, no, no,
no, no no, no, I need to be way more careful.
I think, as if you're dating anyone, that this is
that we have to look for, because the information is
usually there. People are usually telling us who they are
through various actions, and it's our job. I think that's
(45:58):
just part of the process that our job over time
is to learn what the what they're telling us and
to discern that is faster. And I think the beautiful
thing about what you've shared here is that I bet
the next time you met a white man or any man,
you were more stupid, you were more adept than like
looking for those things. And so I think that's how
we learn, is that we have these experiences. Yeah, and
(46:19):
that's part of the invisible work, invisible labor that black
women are are doing often times, right, this is the
work that you don't even know that you're doing it
half the time. And everyone is doing this work in general,
and when they're dating and trying to make sure that
they're not hooking up with people who are toxic for them,
But then black women have this added layer of like,
(46:41):
am I dating somebody who's about my humanity or not?
So I like to end every podcast with this question
what else is true? And it comes from the community
resiliency model and the idea of shifting, stay and being
(47:01):
in this space of both and right that the world
might be very challenging right now, and it might be
hard for me, but there is something else that is true.
There's something that is positive or neutral in my body
and in my life that I can also focus on,
and so I'd like to ask you, Dr Sarah, what
else is true for you today? Well? What else is
(47:23):
true for me and for all the black women out
there and for U Laverne is that black women are enough.
That's what else is true, m HM. In a world
where black women are devalued and degraded, black women may
not feel as fair enough, but their humanity already exists.
(47:45):
They just need to wake up and walk in it. Amen. Amen,
I am enough. You are enough. Praise being. Thank you
so much, Dr Sarah. Where can people find you online?
You can find any of my work, any of my
articles on Twitter at love e scold and so everything
(48:06):
that I've published is available via link that way, and
folks are also free to email me as long as
they're not stalking me or sending me bad messages. Um
Sarah dot Audienca Scold Audienca hyphen scold at Fermin dot
du so. People can reach me there, but Twitter is
probably the best way to reach me. If you're looking
(48:28):
for me, um it's Dr Sarah a s. You can
also find me that way. So yeah, amazing. Thank you
so much for your work, your research, and thank you
so much for spending time with me today, no problem.
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it,
and it was really a lovely conversation. Yea. I wasn't
(48:58):
prepared for how difficult this one would be for me.
I think it's because it's the piece of weaving in
my own kind of personal narrative and how painful a
lot of it's been for me. So I'm so very
grateful to Sarah having that sort of courage to be
(49:22):
vulnerable and to talk me through it and to give
me great data, research and perspective to try to get
to something hopefully that is substantial for me and for
all of you. Thank you for listening to The Laverne
(49:48):
Cox Show. If you like what you hear, please rate, review,
subscribe and share with everyone you know. Join me next
week when I talked to Dr Karen Franklin, for forensic
psychologist and award winning researcher about why some people target
transgender and other sexual and gender minorities and assaults and
(50:09):
hate crimes. Knowing why it is the first step to change.
You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Laverne
Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox for Real. The
(50:33):
Laverne Cox show is a production of Shonda land Audio
in partnership with I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
Shondaland Audio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Laverne Cox
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