“White supremacy itself is a sexual fantasy.” — Sherronda Brown

Milo Yiannopoulos is a white supremacist. Perhaps doing so with his tongue-in-cheek, the former Brietbart journalist admitted as much this weekend when he posted multiple photographs of his wedding to his long-time boyfriend “John,” declaring himself the “WORST WHITE SUPREMACIST EVER” while linking to a Daily Mail article about the wedding on Facebook.

John, whose face and last name are obscured from every photo, is Black. Yiannopoulos has previously bragged about being “bottom for tall black men,” explaining how he used to hold a paint sample called “Pharoahs Gold 5” up to men at clubs to determine if they were dark enough to have sex with—his particular version of a paper bag test. He has also claimed that he likes “black guys for my love life, straight white males as employees, and girls as drinking buddies.” For him, Black men are sexual objects and nothing more.

A post shared by MILO (@milo.yiannopoulos) on Sep 30, 2017 at 10:40pm PDT

Yet John, whose wedding jacket featured the phrase “Blind For Love” stitched across the back, has spent over a decade in a relationship with the conservative author and Nazi provocateur, whose speaking tour prompted violent protests at university campuses across the country this summer.

The irony of this faceless Black groom, who is also Muslim according to an interview Milo did with Bloomberg, “loving” a white supremacist illuminates just how the myth that love is not political, or that whom you love can’t be helped, has been used to cover up white supremacist propaganda for ages.

While it is beyond a doubt that sexual attractions are influenced by things like genetics, it is equally unquestionable that society influences our attractions (what to speak of the way it influences which genes are turned off and on in the first place). This is why identical twins are far more likely to share the same sexual orientation, but twins who share DNA don’t always have identical sexualities.

Love is a mixture of personality predispositions and political choices, which is why whom you decide to sleep or build a life with says just as much about you as whom you decide to be friends with.

In this “postracial” world that is increasingly showing itself to be anything but, this reality causes very real dissonance within the minds of those who claim to be pro-Black or body positive or anti-ableist, but whose dating practices are anything but. It is much easier to disregard working on the most intimate display of one’s politics—love—when the narrative is that love can’t be helped. Rather than self-reflecting on the obvious proof of internalized anti-Blackness in not dating other Black people as a Black person, you get to tell the lie that dating has nothing to do with things you need to work on, letting yourself off the hook.

This is how white supremacy works. It does not want you to evaluate how you can divest from it, because it relies on everyone’s investment, even those who are harmed by it.

It requires that we believe the way things are now are natural and unchangeable, when they have been affected by centuries of violent social programming. We know white supremacist beauty standards exist, that anti-Black ideas about Black people of all (non)genders exist, but supposedly we can’t help whom we love, even though white supremacy has already been helping for ages.

If Yiannopoulos and John are “Blind For Love” like John’s jacket proclaims, then Yiannopoulos would have never sought Black men out in such disgustingly fetishistic ways in the first place. If races don’t fall in love with other races, and love is just about humans falling in love with other humans, then the dehumanizing way Yiannopoulos speaks about Black people, both within his own personal relationships and outside of them, would not exist. There is no such thing as blind love, there is only the blinding light of white supremacy that obscures all the ways we might resist it.