Like me, Rumya Putcha, assistant professor at the University of Georgia’s Institute of Women’s Studies and the School of Music, was immediately reminded of her own childhood upon hearing of T.I.’s behavior.

In her Indian American family, Putcha says the production and performance of masculinity were intertwined with anxieties about status and belonging.

“My father’s relationship to his family and community was, in his mind, compromised by whether or not I played the part of a daughter that was being disciplined,” she says.

“Putcha also points out that in cultures of South of Asia, “marriage economies — a mechanism of white colonial/supremacist patriarchy” — depend on women performing “controlled sexuality,” often expressed through art forms like dance and singing.

“If you can succeed in those spaces, then there’s a good chance you’ll be able to participate in certain types of cishet marriage practices, and perhaps reproduce certain kinds of class and caste privilege,” Putcha says.

As a Black woman, I can identify with this. But I see a significant difference between my experiences and those of a South Asian immigrant like Putcha.

For so long, Black women have been dehumanized and hypersexualized, deemed unsuited for marriage. In fact, during slavery, most places in the U.S. banned legal marriage between the enslaved. So in this historical context, the concept of “marriage economies” has a slightly different meaning for Black Americans.

While other families may believe they are conforming to expectations by ensuring their daughters’ purity and marriageability, many Black families may see themselves as resisting stereotypes and defying expectations when doing the same.

Consider rapper Kanye West, whose struggles with bipolar disorder and trauma seem to have informed his adoption of an increasingly conservative lifestyle. In addition to supporting President Donald Trump and insisting that “slavery was a choice,” West has recently decided to exercise a greater level of control over those around him.

According to his wife, Kim Kardashian, Kanye has “changed all the rules,” attempting to ban six-year-old daughter North from using makeup and exercising control over Kardashian’s clothes. He’s also asked employees to refrain from premarital sex as they worked on his 2019 album, Jesus is King.

For West — who famously sees himself as a revolutionary thinker, artist, and at times, a “god” — these restrictions are likely to be less about conformity and more about transcendence into a different world, a world that is largely off-limits to him because of his race.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes for The Atlantic, Kanye desires “a White freedom… a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch.” In other words, Kanye seems to want to cultivate his image by controlling the bodies of the women in his life, just as White men have done with their wives for centuries. To him, and many other misogynistic men of color like him, attaining this control is revolutionary while letting it go is a failure.

Black Jewish writer Y.M. Carrington points out that, like Kanye, the urge to liberate oneself from the constraints of systemic racism might be where T.I.’s behavior is stemming from.

“As descendants of the enslaved, Black women and girls have been seen as unrapeable and sexually insatiable,” they said. “We’re still dealing with the idea that Black girls and women are inherently ‘whores.’ Maybe [T.I.] wants to make sure his daughter is a ‘good girl’ and not like those ‘other Black girls.’”

Jalessah Jackson, lecturer of gender and women’s studies and African and African diaspora studies at Kennesaw State University, says “Because of adultism, many parents think their children belong to them. This idea of ownership eliminates bodily autonomy.”

If children — particularly female-assigned children — are frequently seen as property, then they can be used as tools to attain benefits of Whiteness. As Putcha points out, men of color often have a need to be respected that “ends up falling on the women and girls of their households.”

At the same time, it shouldn’t be forgotten that often it is our own women — our mothers and grandmothers — who take up the burden of policing and shaming female-assigned children for their sexuality. Due to their own experiences with sexual violence, they often believe in the chilling consequences of nonconformity.