Erotic race play reveals how white supremacy is a perversion of unmatched proportions

"White supremacy itself is a sexual fantasy." -Sherronda J. Brown Tweet This

I’ve been thinking a lot about porn and erotic display lately, but not in a way that brings me any pleasure. I’ve been thinking about them in an inquisitive, almost anthropological way that raises within me more questions than it does answers, and creates more discomfort and disgust than it does gratification. This is because the porn and erotic display that I have been thinking about a lot lately features gay neo-Nazis and alt-right furries.

As I toggled between various social media platforms one evening not long ago, I happened upon photos of alt-right furries draped in Confederate flags, hoisting up pro-Trump signage, worshipping swastikas, and proudly extending their paws in the Heil Hitler! salute. I soon found myself down the rabbit hole with #AltFurry, #BroniesforTrump, #AltBrony, and #AnimeRight hashtags on Twitter. I regret my subsequent Google searches, which led me into unfamiliar corners of the internet where terms like “furry supremacy” and “The Furred Reich” lay waiting.

A plethora of thoughts and questions were conjured up in that moment—the first being, “But why, though?” I am familiar with race play (and the things surrounding it) as a concept in BDSM and kink, but I never allowed myself to think critically and deeply about this phenomenon until the moment I found myself staring at my phone with a bright red, Confederate flag-clad, Trump-humping fox looking back at me.

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Sexual desires can be utterly terrifying and wholly disturbing, especially when they involve race. How bizarre it is to bring racism and anti-Blackness into the sexual realm, I thought. Or is it that anti-Blackness already exists there?

I considered how much of the anti-Black rhetoric we hear centers on our sexual lives. How Black bodies become splintered against our will into animality, sex, and aesthetic, coveted with great peculiarity and violence in the white imagination. Stereotypes about Black sexuality rely on white supremacist notions of Black subjects as non-human, non-living, and non-sentient (the beastiality, and even necrophilia, flowing in the undercurrent of all of this is not lost on me, but I have not the words for it presently).

Black sexuality, as well as reproduction, become heavily policed on interpersonal, social, and judicial levels. Myths of Black sexual deviance are cited as proof of the superiority, purity, and humanity of whiteness.

And I arrived at the conclusion—which perhaps is not necessarily a novel one—that because white supremacy has a compulsory preoccupation with power, violence, and domination, sexual fantasy creates an opportune space for the white superiority mythos to not only manifest itself, but also to flourish. The exploitative dehumanization of and dominance over Blackness provides white gratification in both the social and sexual arena.

White supremacy itself is a sexual fantasy.

Neo-Nazi porn is immensely popular at the moment, and I resent the fact that I now possess this knowledge. The current cultural and political climate allows for it to thrive, in part because racism is woven into the very fabric of pornography and kink.

Stereotypes about the dangerous Black phallus along with the immediate sexual accessibility and availability of Black pussy are abundant and evident in porn titles and action. The same is true of myths about the inherent purity of whiteness, the exoticism and fire of Latinx performers, the natural tightness of the tiny Asian, etc.

So while racism in porn is not necessarily a direct response to current events , its recent boom in popularity is indeed reactionary. What we see produced by the porn industry is a reflection of society, because it responds to customer demand.

With the rise of Trump, the naming of the “alt-right,” the neo-Nazi resurgence, the battle over Confederate flags and monuments, and ongoing KKK rallies and marches, overt racism and bigotry are very much a part of current popular culture because white people react violently to concepts like diversity and Black liberation. That reactionary white supremacist violence is showing up in sexual spaces as well as social ones.

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The two are entwined, in fact. “Cuck” has reared its head as one of the relatively new favorite insults hurled by the GOP and the alt-right against other white people who they feel are not conservative enough. As a shorthand for “cuckold,” this term comes with racist and pornographic undertones that white men exploit as a way to transmute their fears about loss of power into a weapon against other white men. Derived from a popular pornographic scenario in which a white man is cuckolded by, and obliged to watch, a Black “bull” fucking his white wife, this insult has layers.

“Cuck” not only calls up white men’s historied sexual anxieties about Black men’s lust for white flesh and sexual ownership over white women, and the simultaneous fear and fetishization of the Black phallus, but it also speaks to their current social anxieties. The use of “cuck” as an insult directly challenges the masculinity and virility of white men who they believe do not take racist, xenophobic, and nationalist enough stances against immigration and efforts toward racial diversity, inclusion, and equality.

Fear of the corruption of “white purity”— whether by non-white immigrants and citizens gaining institutional power over white nationalists, or by the Black phallus gaining sexual power over white cuckolds and miscegenating with white women— is also a fear of sexual and social humiliation. Both of these fears are tied up with the fetishization of power and power play. And these fears often result in apocalyptic whiteness, a violent response to the white genocide fable.

Whiteness has a perverted obsession with Blackness that can manifest as a desire to have total dominion over it. This obsession expresses itself in racial fetishization, negrophilia, finding sexual satisfaction and release in the promotion of racial genocide, and many other detestable forms.

Writing about anti-Blackness and white violence has helped me to understand white supremacy as a perversion of unmatched proportions. I see how its violence extends to all manner of places and taints everything it touches.

White supremacy is so sadistic that it allows sexual gratification to reside alongside racial hatred, so that sexual release can be found in the dehumanization of Blackness.

Power play is a beguiling force on multiple levels. People’s desire to dominate whomever they hate extends to sexual proclivities, and perhaps many of those violent desires take root in sexual fantasies to begin with. White supremacy is, at its most base level, a fetishization of power. To have that fetishization manifest through created tableaus of racialized violence in pornography and erotic display is so characteristic of whiteness that I’m not sure why I was ever surprised to find Confederate flag toting, Trump loving, neo-Nazi furries on my timeline.