Is sexual race play racist ?
This is not a question that has an easy answer, and I suspect anyone who thinks it has an easy answer is selling something.
Race is complicated. Race play touches on some very uncomfortable realities about history. That’s what makes it powerful (and, for people who have that particular kink, fun). That’s also what makes it dangerous.
Many years ago, I was at a play party hosted in a public dungeon with one of my partners and I met a Black submissive woman with a taste for race play. Specifically, what really got her off was white plantation owner/African slave **** fantasy. She said she had a very hard time finding partners who would do that with her, and I believe her. White people who want to treat others with respect can easily feel like race is a subject covered with land mines.
I do not understand what it feels like to grow up in the United States as a person of color. I can’t understand that. That experience is inaccessible to me, because I’ve grown up with a form of privilege so pervasive and so ubiquitous that it was, for most of my life, invisible to me.
That means There is and probably always will be discomfort dealing with questions about race for me. On the one hand, I am aware of the atrocities that have ben perpetuated by systemic racism for centuries. On the other, even though I am not personally and directly responsible for those atrocities, they have benefitted me and continue to benefit me. I can’t opt out of being white or living in a system that structurally privileges white people. So if I had a lover who asked me to role-play these kinds of scenarios for me, I probably would not be able to.
There’s a certain irony there. It is my fear of being perceived as racist that informs the discomfort I feel with race play, yet at the same time I do believe that sexual role-play isn’t real (I do **** play and resistance play, for instance) and I do believe that treating someone with respect means treating them the way they want to be treated, and if someone of a different race wants to engage in race play, there’s nothing wrong with doing that…and rather a lot wrong with telling them they shouldn’t want it. So that creates cognitive dissonance that’s hard to work through.
There’s a second layer of irony in the fact that I think it’s probably pretty common that fear of being perceived as racist would likely stop a lot of white people from engaging in race play, so a person who wants to do it might end up finding it easier to locate partners if those partners were unaware of racial history or racial privilege…or were genuinely, unashamedly racist themselves.
Is t inherently racist to do race play? I think it’s not necessarily racist, no. But I do think the question is too big for a simple answer.
When you’re done with a BDSM scene, there are some things you can simply put down. You can take the ropes off and put them away. But you can’t take off your race. It’s still a part of you, even when the scene is over. And you’re still going to walk out the bedroom door into a world where racial oppression is an inescapable fact of life for huge numbers of people.
Race is complicated. Race play touches on some very uncomfortable realities about history. That’s what makes it powerful (and, for people who have that particular kink, fun). That’s also what makes it dangerous.
Many years ago, I was at a play party hosted in a public dungeon with one of my partners and I met a Black submissive woman with a taste for race play. Specifically, what really got her off was white plantation owner/African slave **** fantasy. She said she had a very hard time finding partners who would do that with her, and I believe her. White people who want to treat others with respect can easily feel like race is a subject covered with land mines.
I do not understand what it feels like to grow up in the United States as a person of color. I can’t understand that. That experience is inaccessible to me, because I’ve grown up with a form of privilege so pervasive and so ubiquitous that it was, for most of my life, invisible to me.
That means There is and probably always will be discomfort dealing with questions about race for me. On the one hand, I am aware of the atrocities that have ben perpetuated by systemic racism for centuries. On the other, even though I am not personally and directly responsible for those atrocities, they have benefitted me and continue to benefit me. I can’t opt out of being white or living in a system that structurally privileges white people. So if I had a lover who asked me to role-play these kinds of scenarios for me, I probably would not be able to.
There’s a certain irony there. It is my fear of being perceived as racist that informs the discomfort I feel with race play, yet at the same time I do believe that sexual role-play isn’t real (I do **** play and resistance play, for instance) and I do believe that treating someone with respect means treating them the way they want to be treated, and if someone of a different race wants to engage in race play, there’s nothing wrong with doing that…and rather a lot wrong with telling them they shouldn’t want it. So that creates cognitive dissonance that’s hard to work through.
There’s a second layer of irony in the fact that I think it’s probably pretty common that fear of being perceived as racist would likely stop a lot of white people from engaging in race play, so a person who wants to do it might end up finding it easier to locate partners if those partners were unaware of racial history or racial privilege…or were genuinely, unashamedly racist themselves.
Is t inherently racist to do race play? I think it’s not necessarily racist, no. But I do think the question is too big for a simple answer.
When you’re done with a BDSM scene, there are some things you can simply put down. You can take the ropes off and put them away. But you can’t take off your race. It’s still a part of you, even when the scene is over. And you’re still going to walk out the bedroom door into a world where racial oppression is an inescapable fact of life for huge numbers of people.
7 years ago
