By Tabias Olajuawon / BlackYouthProject, AFROPUNK contributor

This essay contains discussion of racialized sexual violence and anti-Black fetishism

“You are not to touch other flesh

without a police permit.

The State wants to seize your bed

And sleep with you…

The message is clear:

your penis..

your anus, your orgasm,

these belong to the state.

The erogenous zones

are not demilitarized….”

Essex Hemphill, “The Occupied Territories”

Recently, there has been a trough of information, articles, and public outrage surrounding white men and the sexual violence they render. Specifically, the news cycle has focused on the stories of upper-middle class and wealthy white women and their experiences with sexual harassment, sexual violences, misogyny, and rape.

To be clear, non-consensual contact or commentary about anyone’s body or sexual practices is vile. That much we can agree on. However, in listening to this commentary, I could not help but think about what was missing from the picture. Then it dawned on me; it was color, it was Black folk, it was me.

It is hard for white people to think, interracially, about rape. That is to say, it is hard for white folks to think about Black people considering any of their sexual advances unwanted, let alone violent; because to not desire whiteness is to undo it, to refuse it is to realize and actualize the fact that Black people are not property and are full of desires, capable of pain. That we are not the negroes your history book told you about.

It is hard for white folks to think interracially about rape because white desire—the fictitious belief in an inherent Black yearning for white sex, sexual advances, contact and verbal commentary or approval—was endemic to our nation’s first clauses of illegal and legal raping and lynching. That is to say, the very notions of property and legal relationships in U.S. law are situated on the seminal understanding that Black bodies are the primary, legal vehicle for the exorcism of the most private and public yearnings of white men and white women.

This is true of the slaveholder who raped the women on his plantation—as well as the men and children—and their mistresses, who used the threat of lynching as insurance if their male slaves refused to participate in their racial-sexual fantasies. If you want to understand sexual violence and, more specifically, racial-sexual terror; find a BlaQueer—across genders, if any—and ask us why it took so long and why it was so hard to “come out.”