Why Her Though? | A Thought Starter on the Black Girlfriend, White Wife Phenomenon

Have you ever watched a man date exclusively Black women for years, and then announce his engagement to a white woman, and felt something you couldn't quite name? This episode is about that feeling, and everything underneath it.

In Why Her Though | A Thought Starter on the Black Girlfriend, White Wife Phenomenon, Gabby Turner gets into one of the most layered conversations in contemporary dating culture: the specific vitriol directed at Black women who date interracially, and what it reveals about how Black women's bodies, choices, and relationships are perceived by everyone except themselves. What started as a observation about the Summer House reunion quickly became something bigger: a pattern that shows up on Love Island, in Travis Kelce's dating history, in the West and Ciara situation, and in comment sections across the internet every single day.

This episode covers the Madonna-whore complex and what it actually means when Black women are sorted into the "desire" category at birth. It covers the historic hypersexualization of Black women's bodies, dating back to Saartjie Baartman in 1810, and why that history isn't just context, it's the foundation of this phenomenon . It covers the sociological concept of Black exceptionalism in partner selection, the experimentation versus commitment perception that so many Black women have named, and what it means that research actually shows white men and Black women couples are substantially less likely to divorce than white and white couples by year ten of marriage.

Gabby also makes room for the directions the vitriol comes from, as they are not all the same. From the internalized shame Black women sometimes carry for dating outside their race, and the question of whether white women who pursue men with an exclusively Black dating history are always just passive endpoints in the pattern. As a biracial woman with a front row seat to multiple sides of this conversation, Gabby isn't speaking from inside the wound. But she's close enough to understand the weight of it.

There's no clean answer here. That's kind of the point. While I've Got You is a short-form podcast about culture, identity, and the moments worth slowing down for. New episodes weekly.

Transcript

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I'm Gabby and you're listening to While I've Got You. Let's start the show. Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. So the conversation I noticed that we need to discuss started uh a little bit earlier in this year. I am late to the Summer House scandal. I binged all of the seasons from four and then caught up the last four or five episodes of season 10 earlier this year, a couple months after the West Sierra and Amanda scandal broke. And I've seen a lot of conversation throughout the season when the scandal broke, and then multiple like throughout this entire reunion, so many black women who have expressed knowing this exact hurt of being attracted to andor dating and uh afraid of commitment white man right before he settles down and gets serious with a white woman. And that's not the only example. It's probably the most prevalent one because we're seeing everything going on right now. But of course, I've seen the same conversation happen and be uh talked about or surrounded with Travis Kelsey, who has a years-long history of dating black women, including Kayla Nicole and a couple others before her, and is now like settling down in an engaged Taylor Swift. Like I mentioned before, West and Sierra, and the fact that West is actively trying to rewrite their relationship and the history that they have, like calling her his ex-girlfriend, when Jesse is like, Hey, I think I might have feelings. What if we made out? And when it's convenient for him and being territorial over her, but then minimizing their relationship, like we saw in the reunion when Andy asks about them making out at the end of summer, and he's like, I think that was just ear stuff. Whatever that means. I also noticed it last year with Nick and Alandria from Love Island, USA, who are still together about a year in, and we still have a whole host of haters that assume it can't be real. Even in this current season, we're seeing that same level of either protection to even scrutiny of people trying to extend something towards Trinity and her couple with Bryce. So the conversation is alive again, and with so many more weeks of Love Island USA and them dragging the summer house situation probably until we get the next season. It's not going anywhere. So I wanted to talk to you about it. I also want to note that as a biracial girl, I have seen different sides of this interracial dating conversation play out. My dad is a black man who has predominantly dated white women, and my mom has lived the other side of this with the white women are taking good black men narrative. So I'm looking at this conversation not entirely from the inside. My mom is not a black woman who dates white men. I'm not traditionally a black woman who dates white men, so I'm not looking at this conversation entirely from the inside, but I think just close enough to understand the weight of it. So I do want to give that caveat before we dive in. This experience, phenotype, whatever you want to call it, has so many layers. And while I was trying to sort of write out what I wanted to cover for this episode, I was having such a hard time knowing which string might cause the whole thing to unravel. I wasn't sure if I wanted to look at it from the perspective of all love matters, love who you love, everybody mind their business, or if I wanted to look at it from the perspective of why does this happen, what is the historical context, how do we dismantle this perception? There's just so much to it. So one of the first places that I started was with the Madonna whore phenomena, which was defined by very controversial, very well-known Sigmund Freud, in which essentially he is saying that men split women into two categories: the saintly, motherly Madonna or the promiscuous whore, one of which can be loved and not desired, which is the Madonna, and the other who can be desired but not loved, which is the whore. This, of course, takes us down this whole other spiral, even just in the Madonna horror phenomenon, where we have to acknowledge that because as women we are raised and honestly, the world is raised in such a patriarchal society. We as women not only are labeled by and beholden to this phenomenon, but we also participate in it as well. It is internalized and how we carry ourselves, how we judge other women. All of that also exists in this, and we are not even going to address it today. From this complex, I think it leads us very differently into the layer that being a black woman adds to that. We have to also acknowledge the historic hypersexualization of black men dating back as far as 1810 with the example of Sarkey Bottman. She was a South African woman who was taken to Europe and essentially sex trafficked and then exhibited in quote-unquote freak shows where people would pay to see her body, and then after her death, parts of her body, including her genitals, were put on display in Paris up until 2002, in which she was returned back to South Africa and buried there. So we have such a specific historical example of the hypersexualization of black women. If you are a black woman, you've probably experienced the hypersexualization of your body. And so it is not just something that we can gloss over. I wanted to give a little bit more of that example and also add it as a layer to the Madonna whore phenomena as well as how this differentiates black women in interracial dating. Even in sociological research, we see that race remains a dominant criterion in choosing a long-term partner. Even among people who date interracially, there's a concept known as black exceptionalism, which is this willingness to date across race, but then drawing the line at black partners when it comes to legal commitment. The concept or the perception of the experimentation phase is real. And the commitment phase defaults to familiarity and family, social circles, who are you going to spend the rest of your life with, and who are you most comfortable bringing into areas that you are most familiar in, into your inner circle. And for white men, that typically means returning to white women for the quote-unquote stable chapter of their life. Regardless of the fact that research tells us that white men and black women couples are actually substantially less likely to divorce than couples that have two white partners by 10 years of marriage, which is contradictory to the idea that black women are made to be placeholders. It's also important to know that this conversation doesn't come from one direction. It obviously comes from a long history of racism and oppression and disenfranchisement that leaves white women who feel threatened. It leaves them carrying their own unconscious bias about what an acceptable wife looks like. It leaves an internalized bias about what black women, how we feel about ourselves and what we think a wife should look like. It leaves black men who feel abandoned in the same vein of white men are taking our women, that like older generation narrative. And it leaves so many people, including probably some people listening, including myself at times, I'm sure, who have decided that a black woman's romantic choices belong to a community and not unto themselves. I mean, this conversation truly, truly is so complex, and I'm sure I'm missing things even in the amount of work that I did to try to hold this holistically. It has to hold the hate that black women get for dating white men, while white men seem to get praised as heroes for loving black women. Like, think about how often you might see the comment under a black woman in a white man's post that says, love this for her, love us being loved, that you don't necessarily see in other relationship dynamics. The potential for internalized shame from the narrative that black women are abandoning something, that again, as a black woman, we're supposed to be the givers, the caretakers, the ones who have been unceremoniously tasked with holding black men up in a dynamic that is so often unbalanced and unreciprocated. I think it also has to make room for the roles that white women themselves play in this. Not at all by any means saying that all white women or white women in general in any way should be the gatekeepers of white men. I don't think that black women should be the gatekeepers of black men, and I don't think white women should be the gatekeepers of white men at all. Let me be clear. I am just wondering and posing the question if there is a subconscious, like getting one over type of energy and pursuing and winning a man who has historically only dated black women. That in some way it implies the white wife isn't just like a passive endpoint in the pattern. In some cases, I am thinking there may be an active dynamic where becoming the quote-unquote exception to his history feels more like a status move than, or in addition to it being true love, that there's a level of it being a status move. Like the black women before the white wife weren't competition but something to forgive or overlook as like the past childishness of someone who wasn't yet a man. Like boys will be boys, and that's why he was he was just going through that phase of dating black women, and now he's ready, so now he's gonna marry a white wife. The same culture that casts the black woman as the fun phase and a place for experimentation, also in a lot of ways and a lot of contexts, hands the white wife a crown for being the quote serious one, the one that he chose. While neither woman in this hypothetical scenario made those rules, I think we have to acknowledge that at least one party benefits from it. I think we see some inklings of this with the West and Sierra situation because Amanda wasn't a stranger. She really had a front row seat to every conversation Sierra brought up about race, who she dates, and how she got to see the gravitational pull that ha Sierra has with the people around her. In aura, respectfully or disrespectfully, that Amanda just doesn't have in the same way. She was considered a best friend, and the proximity changes things and makes me question is there some like unconscious or in this case potentially conscious thing at play here? Regardless of who the white wife turns out to be, whether a friend, a stranger, a co-worker in relation to the black girlfriend, the question to me stays the same. What is actually going on here? Unfortunately, as you can probably tell, I do not have a clean answer to pull from all of this. I don't know whether to say, black girl, date who you want to date, or society, mind your business, stop commenting so hard on people's relationships. If you like it, I love it, should be everyone's motto for consensual relationships. Or if I just think it's important to acknowledge the numerous layers and nuances in these type of conversations. So, while I've got you, I'm just gonna say thanks for listening, and I'll see you all next time. Bye.