So today I found myself in one of those Facebook conversations I despise: with the ignorant who want to remain as such.
It started with a “joke”.
And then I took a breath and counted to 5
Well, it all went downhill from there:
Let’s get one thing straight – I’m not!
And that’s one joke for free 🙂
Back on topic: This “joke” is about dicks. Big black dicks. Big black cis-dicks.
“Why oh why, Niki, is this not funny?” You may be asking yourself. “Isn’t that true?”
Well, firstly, no it’s not and secondly, it’s fucking racist. Since I’m on a really nice painkiller (my lower back did something sprainy on Sunday), I’ll explain.
The big dicked Mandingo myth is bullshit. It sexualizes black men. Fuck, it over-sexualizes black men. Where black women get the “unable to be raped because they want it all the time”, black men get the “always sexual animals” bit. Two sides of the same coin.
It’s a myth that of course is still perpetrated in porn, and in fucking excuses for “jokes” like the one above. It’s a myth that started riots (remember Rosewood? You should look that up) and excused lynching when white women screamed that a nigger raped them or looked at them or something that wasn’t actually true (gee, I wonder where the MRAs are at when such consequences to false rape allegations are brought up?). It’s the fear of the sex hungry nigger ruining “their” women with their gigantic dicks.
It’s a myth that causes insecurity in black men who aren’t hung like my arm, and insecurity that might well lead to more expressions of toxic masculinity to compensate.
It’s also really fucking nosy to invite yourself into someone’s pants and judge their size by their very race.
Did I mention it wasn’t funny? I mean, fuck, it’s tired and old and more worn than thrift store underwear. If you’re gonna punch down, be creative about that shit.
Or don’t bother.
A statement is not automatically beyond criticism just because it’s a joke. A person who thinks it should be clearly doesn’t care all that much about freedom of speech.
Indeed, an excellent point! A racist or sexist or ethnic joke may be a joke, but it’s also racially, sexually or ethnically offensive.
For many white people, a white man is not strongly identified with “white men”, while black a man is very nearly equated with “black men”, so the guilt of one taints all. Throw in the misogyny of “our women” and their “virtue”, and yeah, race riots where it doesn’t matter much whether this crime really happened or this black man was involved, because each black man is associated with every real or imaginary crime committed by any black man.
Generally, whites don’t see a white man, we see a man. When whites see a black man, we definitely see a black man. It’s insidious, it’s evil, and it’s me. It takes a conscious act of will every day to address it. It’s hard, necessary work each of us must do.