“Some black women look like rhinos.”
This was casually slipped into a conversation among two of my colleagues at my first job. The job was in a small Caribbean restaurant which was run by black people and most of us working for them were black; the man who said this was black too. Having someone compare your race to an animal is upsetting but when the person is from the same race as you, it’s just plain confusing. I don’t remember my response but I do remember how he defended himself: “I said some, I wasn’t talking about you.”
His defence will always be both unsettling and curious to me. Only “some”… what did he mean? Did these “some” have darker skin? Or were they the “some” who didn’t fit into the eurocentric beauty standard, who wear their hair naturally or who have wider noses? It’s like the “you’re so pretty for a black girl” backhanded compliments I would get from white peers in secondary school. It just didn’t sit right with me.
This is just one of many unpleasant interactions I’ve had with black men as a black woman, and I know I’m not the only one. Dating in the modern world is difficult for any person but when you’re a black woman it’s a strain. It feels like black women are constantly put at the bottom of the pile in terms of dating options, and the 2014 survey done by OKcupid confirms these feelings. According to data from the US dating app, out of every ethnic group black women were seen as the least desirable. Black men were also low on the list however, the difference between black women and black men is that black women voted for black men as their most preferred partner, whereas black men didn’t reciprocate this.
This survey was conducted in the US in 2014, so what about black women living in the UK right now? We conducted our own survey with British participants and found that most of the black women who answered preferred black men, whereas the black men again didn’t reciprocate this. Nyesha Bridgeman, a black British woman from London explained to me her unpleasant experiences she’s had whilst dating black men.
She said: “I do struggle to date black men because I think there is a high standard they put on us [black women]. My ex once said to me, ‘I need my woman to be a cook, a cleaner and a hairdresser!’ I was struggling to do his hair at the time. Even though he said it as a joke it made me feel not only uncomfortable but undervalued, like I wasn’t good enough if I didn’t do all these things for him. We were only 18 so I felt a lot of pressure.”
Callie Holley, an African American Master’s student researching black British women’s experiences in romantic relationships, at the University of Birmingham. She explained that even though the survey came out of the US, she’s found through her own research and experience, a lot of the struggles that black American women have, black British women also have to deal with.
Callie said: “Our generation of black women are independent and vocal about the injustices that black women have faced from the hands of black men; both in the public sector and the private sector, at home in interpersonal relationships, as well as when it comes to national movements and global movements that seek to liberate black people. So the jargon that comes with that “men are trash” I think that in a lot of ways black men go where they feel wanted. I’m not saying that black women are the reason why black men don’t desire them, I’m saying that this hyper-independent female culture is an aspect of it.
Another aspect is that black men are being raised by single black women without fathers in their lives, which creates this expectation of black women to sacrifice themselves at all costs. So they [black men] are being conditioned to believe that that is what love looks like. So in a culture where the expectation is that your partner will sacrifice themselves for you and then you come face to face with a woman who is a part of a culture who is saying ‘I am not willing to do that’, black men misinterpret that as not being loved.”
This created expectation of black women sacrificing themselves for their partner is known as the ‘mammy stereotype’. According to a paper in the National Library of Medicine, this portrays black women as overweight, asexual, hypermaternal and unthreatening servants. They have a limitless supply of emotional support, which reaches back to eras of slavery and segregation where the majority of black women worked as the help for white families.
Media representations of black women are usually on opposite sides of the spectrum, either they are the ‘mammy stereotype’ or they are hypersexualised. And if they’re not these two then it’s likely they are seen as masculine. In one study with 82 percent white participants, black women were more likely to be mistaken as men than that of white women. Black women are constantly faced with the challenge of the eurocentric beauty standard.
Callie said: “Black men in Britain see black American women in the media and have this assumption of an ideal black woman, that they have said black British women don’t live up to or try to emulate and fall short of. Which I think is incorrect because what you see in the media isn’t real.
Eurocentrism is very prevalent (in Britain). It’s interesting, there’s always been this quiet obsession with black beauty standards that we’ve seen time and time again. There is this hypersexualisation version of black women in the west. And the flip side of hypersexualisation is dehumanisation, we have a larger social culture that black men are good at
perpetuating: black women look a certain way which is attractive but is not lovable. They’re the object of desire, not real human beings to be recognised. And then if you don’t fit into what that object of desire looks like, be it a big butt or a small waist, then you’re already less than human and now you don’t even have the added worth of being attractive.”
Maybe these black women are the “some” that my colleague was referring to when he said that some black women look like rhinos.
David Coleman, a Professor of Demography at Oxford University was a part of analysing the 1991 census results which found that 40 percent of black men marry or live with white partners. Although it was a long time ago he believes that recent data show similar trends
Professor Coleman said: “If you look at the black men and black people as a whole you can see that there is a higher proportion of black men with white women, 18 percent in 2021. I think it’s interesting because it’s higher than other ethnic minorities.”
This shows that there may be a eurocentric ideal occurring amongst black men in the UK. However, what’s fascinating about this and the OKcupid data is that black women not only continue to desire black men but we rank them as the most desirable to date, when they do not seem to feel the same.
Nyesha said: “I feel like I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.”
She said: “Black men don’t seem interested in me when it comes to a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship, and then when I interact with white guys it almost always becomes a fetishisation situation. I don’t mind dating men outside my own race but I think it’s important to find someone who understands what it’s like to be a black person living in the UK, I don’t want to become someone’s teacher, teaching them the deep-rooted racism we have to face”.
Black people in Britain as a whole have to continually face systematic racism, and it has to be said that black men also struggle in the dating world. Black men are constantly fighting against stereotypes and labels as well as being fetishised. As part of the survey we conducted, some black male participants shared their struggles when it comes to dating. One spoke on negative labels that people have given him, he said: “When people assume that I’m a “roadman” cause I’m black, it’s just annoying.” Whereas others spoke about concerns of being fetishised.
It’s safe to say that black men have constantly been fetishised, similar to the hypersexualisation that black women face. Their portrayal in the media maintains this, with movies like the 2017 “Chocolate City”, a film whose main basis was sexualising black men’s bodies, which then turned into a UK tour. Or the fact there seems to be a running joke that black men have larger penis’. The sexualisation of black bodies can be traced back to a suedo-science created by eugenicist Francis Galton, who claimed that there were anatomical differences between black people and white people.
So clearly the odds are stacked against us. What can us black women do? Adhering to eurocentric ideals for a man’s approval is out of the question for me. Maybe we should just copy the men and go where we feel loved, even if that love is coming from within ourselves in order to no longer be the losing race .