“There is no love left between a black man and a black woman. Take me for instance. I love white women and hate black women. It’s just in me so deep that I don’t even try to get it out of me anymore. I’d jump over ten nigger bitches just to get to one white woman. Ain’t no such thing as an ugly white woman… and just to touch her long, soft, silky hair. There’s softness about a white woman, something delicate and soft inside of her. But a nigger bitch seems to be full of steel, granite-hard and resisting…I mean I can’t analyze it, but I know that the White man made the Black woman the symbol of slavery and the White woman the symbol of freedom. Everytime I’m embracing a Black woman, I’m embracing slavery, and when I put my arms around a White woman, well I’m hugging freedom” (Eldridge Cleaver 1968:107).

“No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women…. When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women”.

(hooks, bell:1981).

Here in the UK, the visibility of black women in representations of mainstream Black British culture is such that you might be forgiven for thinking we are an endangered species. The near erasure of Black British women from this terrain, which is in the main dominated by black men and white women, is rarely commented upon, despite its prominence. What is actually going on here? Is this some manifestation of the quite frankly ridiculous Eldrige Cleaver quote above. Or is it something else?

The (ahem) ‘urban’ (we know what they really mean) landscape that provides the basis of so much of Britain’s somewhat depressing representations of mainstream youth culture, borrows heavily from black culture, yet sometimes seems entirely devoid of black women. The characters who populate this world are black men and white women. Access may be permitted to the occasional mixed-race girl but beyond such tokenism, this is the white woman’s world!

From movies such as Kidulthood[1], to the presenters of the Kiss FM Takeaway show, who typify this phenomenon, the symbols of ‘Urban’ or Black British youth culture are routinely Black men and their white female partners.

British popular culture provides a wealth of examples to illustrate perceptions of what differently racialised women represent. Check out Wileys Heatwave video which is representative of this trend. Here, the absence of black models- in preference of white- is stark, but unfortunately is not an isolated example, it is an all too common feature of UK Black British popular culture.

“Within the binary thinking that underpins intersecting oppressions, blue-eyed, blond, thin White women could not be considered beautiful without the Other—Black women with African features of dark skin, broad noses, full lips, and kinky hair. Race, gender, and sexuality converge on this issue of evaluating beauty… African-American women experience the pain of never being able to live up to prevailing standards of beauty used by White men, White women, Black men, and, most painfully, one another.Regardless of any individual woman’s subjective reality, this is the system of ideasthat she encounters. Because controlling images are hegemonic and taken for granted, they become virtually impossible to escape” (Collins, 2000: 89-90).