Those who have loved and dated across the color line have to negotiate the realities of race in our society, and by extension, its impact on their relationships. For many, this is done through explicit conversations. For others, these dialogues come implicitly, through gestures, and taken for granted shared assumptions.
But how many folks actually talk about how race impacts their own sexuality, attraction, physicality, or notions of the erotic?
We live in a society that is structured around many different hierarchies of power, authority, and difference. As Foucault brilliantly observed, Power is not sitting out there in the ether, an abstraction that we just talk about in philosophy classes. Power acts through and upon bodies. Certain people are racialized in American society for example. Their bodies are locations of power--and yes resistance. Likewise, certain types of bodies are marked as "normal," while others are deemed "different" or "abnormal."
The "popular" imagination holds many assumptions about particular types of bodies. The black male body is something to be policed, controlled, and feared. It is both envied and despised. The Asian female body is "erotic" and "submissive." The black female body alternates between being fecund, always available, and out of control, while simultaneously being marked as "masculine," asexual, and unattractive. Latinas are "hot" and "sexy." White bodies of a certain type are taken as the baseline for what is considered "beautiful" or "normal."
Ironically, the bodies of black and brown people which are considered beautiful or attractive by the white gaze are judged as such either by how "different" they are from white norms (the exotic or savage) or how close these racialized bodies--almost like impostors or stand-ins--are to the normalized white body.
The very language we use to discuss race, the physical, and the sexual, is a quotidian example of Power in action. But, how are matters complicated when a significant part of a given person's sexuality, and sense of the erotic, is centered on playing around with the dynamics surrounding dominance and submission?