“Colorblindness,” “Illuminated Individualism,” Poor Whites, and Mad Men: The Tim Wise Interview, Part 2

TW: [I think what's going on is] that there are valid questions about how are the images are being received in a racialized society.  There’s a fear, and it’s understandable, of women of color being seen by people as a sexual stereotype. So this is why the scene in Monster’s Ball several years ago — for which film Halle Barry won the Oscar — was problematic. Not only was it an aggressive scene in which the line between consent and resistance wasn’t clear at all, but it was, in the eyes of many people, a scene that triggered any number of real emotional memories of a whole history of white male aggression towards black women, and the sexualization of black women. I think folks of color are understandably concerned about the way men and women of color are portrayed, sexually, and in relation to whites, because the imagery is so fraught with historical baggage. For whites, I think racism of course still animates the resistance to certain scenes of that nature, or videos like the Ciara/Justin Timberlake example, and especially when the pairing is white/black. No doubt about that. Interestingly, of course, whites have constructed an entirely different set of assumptions about interracial relationships and sex when the pairing is, say, white and Asian, In that case, the sexualization of Asian women, in particular, as passive, ends up playing into any number of distorted sexual fantasies, which are both rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy.

The bottom line is that racism and the history of racism always complicates interracial connections, be they friendships or romantic relationships. Folks who have been in interracial relationships for twenty years will tell you that: that nothing is as simple and straightforward as just, “oh, we love each other,” ya know? There’s always this other layer there, which both partners have to deal with in order to work through the hard times that all couples have. If a couple is having a fight and one partner is white and the other one is black, I’ve heard story after story of how both partners are wondering, “Is this the time,” ya know, when race is going to come into this fight? Is my partner thinking about this conflict racially? That kind of thing. It’s real

AP: Speaking of sexualized interracial interactions, we touched a bit on the economics of interracial porn.  You said that the genre itself “exploded,” but the “wealth isn’t being shared” and who’s “calling the shots and has access” are skewed.  Would you like to expound on that?

TW: There’s a lot to unpack here. Why the genre has become so much more popular in recent years, which it has, is a phenomenon I couldn’t begin to explain, sociologically or psychologically. The same is true with lots of sub-genres of porn, like Gonzo and such. I don’t know if perhaps both of these are in some strange way reactions on the part of white men to the fact that women generally, and people of color in particular, are gaining (however slowly) opportunities and certainly visibility in the culture, and so this is some kind of strange backlash to that — as in, a way to really objectify women even more than usual, or to project all kinds of deep-seated psychological fears about black male sexuality in particular onto black men, via porn — or whether it’s something else. But certainly we know that there are these deep-seated beliefs and stereotypes about folks of color, which are making their way into porn more and more. And the dynamics are usually pretty clearly in keeping with those stereotypes. So, ya know, it’s the black male dominating the white female. It’s the white female lusting after the black male. As with most porn though, the payoff for this kind of thing is usually a white producer, white studio, white distribution network. The folks of color whose bodies are turned into these templates for mostly white fantasies are not, in all likelihood, the ones reaping the most significant benefits.

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