This week’s “Savage Love” touched on race. I advised a white man that felt guilty about his desire to be cuckolded by a black man—that is, to have a black man fuck his wife in front of him—that it was possible for him to act on his “racist” fantasies and still be considered a good progressive. (You can read it here.)

Some felt my response was racist….

The question Can’t Understand Cuckold Kink asked was racist, and your response was racist. A person cannot consider himself anything but sick and inhuman if their sexual gratification derives from the debased objectification of other people, regardless of anyone’s consent. Your entire argument would have one believe that a person’s sexuality should operate under situational ethics. I disagree. There’s never a good time to derive sexual pleasure from Black male dehumanization—not because of a question of consent, but because such treatment disavows the very concept of Black male humanity no matter what. It’s just wrong…. Frankly, I don’t know how anyone can consent to their own degradation, but a person can’t consider their fantasy objectifying another person and still perform said act because the soon-to-be-objectified person ‘consented.’

J. L.

While others felt it was not racist…

I am a faithful reader of “Savage Love” in the Philadelphia Weekly and after having just read your advice to CUCK (Can’t Understand Cuckold Kink) about the white man with a cuckold fantasy I felt the urge to give you kudos. As a heterosexual black woman, I have constantly been aware of the black, verile, “birth of a nation” stereotype and even though I am not a man, it has constantly bothered and insulted me to an indescribable point. I think you handled the advice very well, with just the right amount of social/racial consciousness and honesty but also bringing it back to what CUCK wanted which was sex advice. I’ll not go off into a tirade on racism & stereotypes b/c #1 that’d take forever and #2 that’s not what i want this email to be about.

Good to see there is another person out there with some sense regarding race that isn’t Black themselves. I’d call that progress and it does give me hope.

Girl With A New Appreciation For Savage

And some folks thought I missed the point…

There’s more to the b/w cuckold thing than what you wrote in your advice. At least in some situations, the white man who fantasizes/worries about “his” woman being fucked/raped by black men is actually transfering to the white woman his own unacknowledged lust for black men. The giant glistening black cocks are for him, not her.

Also, in the past two hundred years, identifying yourself as white, masculine and hetero has meant at least two three relationships of dominance: being dominant over non-whites, being dominant over “effeminate” or homosexual men, and being dominant over women of all colors. As writers and scholars of colonialism (George Orwell in “Shooting An Elephant,” Ashis Nandy in THE INTIMATE ENEMY) have pointed out, this exercise in relentless dominance is pretty tiring, and sometime what the white/masculine/hetero man wants is to hang up his racial and gendered boots
and NOT be so dominant.

The “white man’s burden” is precisely that: a burden, associated with particular ideologies of whiteness and masculinity. The burden can generate fantasies of equality (as it did with Orwell in BURMESE DAYS and E.M. Forster in A PASSAGE TO INDIA), or it can generate fantasies of being reduced to the state of the cuckold, where the top dog gets to be dominated for a change, and FREED, paradoxically enough, from the burden of having to be so relently white/manly/straight.

A third fantasy is identification, where the white man wants to BECOME black. CUCK’s fantasy of watching a black man fuck his wife is related to late-19th and early-20th century blackface performances. Listen to Marlon Riggs in the documentary ETHNIC NOTIONS: the blackface performance was entertaining to whites because it set them free to act out their inner desires, unconstrained by the rules of whiteness. Your letter-writer doesn’t just want to see a black man fuck his wife, he also wants to BE the black man fucking his wife. The black guy boning his wife is his own self, in blackface.

Sorry about the lecture. I teach history, if that’s any excuse.

Satadru

And, finally, it seems that Oprah isn’t interested this subject…

I just read your Village Voice article about the white male cuckold who dreams of a black dude fucking his wife. I just wanted to state that I’m a black man in New York City. I’m a member of several Yahoo groups that cater to white women that love fucking black men. You’d be surprised at the number of white males that post messages to the group seeking black men to fuck their wives. I’ve even emailed Oprah Winfrey about this, and suggested she do a show about it. Of course, I’ve never gotten a reply.

I once fucked an attractive 40something white businesswoman in a Manhattan hotel room while her husband watched and jerked off. White men watching black men fuck their wives or girlfriends is one of America’s biggest secrets.

Well Endowed Black Man Enjoys Boffing Any Cuckold’s Spouse