The White Kind of Body

Alok Vaid-Menon

A couple of years ago I performed a poem about my internalized racism and how it shapes my sexual desires. After the performance several people approached me in private and confessed that they, too, had grown up with white fetish, but never felt comfortable articulating that publicly. Since then I have traveled across the world sharing my poetry and facilitating workshops about desire, capitalism, and colonialism. Everywhere I go there is always that similar moment of confession: I feel the same way.

Race, it seems, structures our desires just as much—if not more—than gender. As queer people of color we find ourselves struggling to make sense of our identities and desires with the language of sexual identity politics that was never meant for us. In this piece I want to share my personal story as a queer South Asian growing up and show how the ways we have come to talk about sexuality perpetuate white supremacy. It is my hope that by (re) turning to our personal narratives—rather than merely adopting prescribed sexual identities—we can begin to imagine new ways of talking about sexuality, power, and identity that center racial justice.

Coming Out (White)

The mainstream gay narrative often requires a story that begins with trauma, abjection, and insecurity and ends with liberation, visibility, and confidence. We are asked: When did you know? When did you first figure it out? And we respond with the stories they want to hear: we tell them about screaming “I’m gay” outside in the middle of the night, we tell them about sneaking looks in the locker room, about that perpetual fear of being found out. But we do not tell them about the first time we were called a terrorist. We do not tell them about how we refused to speak our native tongue at home. These gay coming out stories privilege the trauma that comes from being a sexual minority, but they rarely hold space for the inherent violence of navigating the world with a body that is not white. For a culture so invested in notions of authenticity and visibility, the silence around racial justice from white queer people is revealing.

The truth is I have always been attracted to whiteness. I remember in kindergarten I would develop crushes on all the white boys in my class—those white boys who came from rich families with mothers who ran the parent-teacher organizations, those white boys who played Little League baseball and joined Boy Scouts. I’m talking about that kind of whiteness: that accumulation of culture and class that every immigrant is fed as representative of the American Dream.

These were the days I would go home and ask my mother why we didn’t go to church. I would tell my grandmother to stop wearing saris and put on pants instead. These were the days I’d ask my parents why we weren’t like other families: why we didn’t eat steak for dinner, and watch football, and do the things that normal families do. Growing up I always felt inadequate and embarrassed by my Brownness and my Hindu culture. I would willingly attend Christian youth groups with my white friends and feel so much more validation from their acceptance than from the elders in my own community.

This attraction was always about power. I wanted to be white so desperately because that meant I would finally be normal, finally be accepted. I admired the white boys in my kindergarten class because they had power, they had respect, they were beautiful.

When you are a Brown kid in the South you are never given the language to articulate your constant feelings of inadequacy. There is no lesson, there are no textbooks, there is no acknowledgment of your struggle. There is just the unbearable whiteness of being that swallows you whole and you hope that you are spit out still alive. It was only after 9/11 that I gained access to a word that finally described the distance between me and my classmates: race.

I remember it vividly: on September 12 my mother told me to be careful at school. My middle school had an assembly in the gym. We were all instructed to wear red, white, and blue and we gathered and sang the national anthem. I remember singing as loud as the rest, and I remember feeling part of something bigger than myself. I didn’t really understand what happened, but god-damnit I knew that I was American. I knew it in the same way my Hindu temple knew that it was a good idea to put an American flag on the back of our T-shirts: God bless America / we will never forget September 11. After the assembly a white classmate came up to me and asked me, “Why did your people do this to us? ” And for the first time everything made sense. The lines were drawn in the sand. I was Brown and they were white and there was nothing I could do about it.

The truth is, at some level, I began to believe everything they said. I began to believe that I was not an American. I began to believe that my people were guilty. And in the deepest parts of myself I began to believe that my people were ugly for it.

Coming into consciousness of my Brownness occurred at the same time I began to come into awareness of my queerness. It’s impossible for me to divorce these narratives—they have been, and will always be—interrelated. The boys I began to fantasize about were the same boys I wrote love letters to as a child, were the same boys I wanted so desperately to become. The boys—the men—I was sexually attracted to were the very white men who made me feel ugly, made me feel insignificant, made me feel worthless.

In some ways, my queerness worked as a mechanism of my racial oppression and contributed to my feelings of racial inadequacy. Now, the very white men who degraded me felt sexy to me. My desire shackled me to white supremacy. As much as I wanted to love my Brownness—I became even more drawn to, tantalized by, and attracted to whiteness. As much as I resented the racial trauma inflicted by the white men around me, I found myself deeply attracted to them. I found myself accepting their insults, their stereotypes, their constant racism—excusing it because at least they were paying attention to me. This is how insidious white supremacy is: it will not only terrorize you, but will make you desire your own oppression. How are you supposed to escape from a nightmare when it feels like a wet dream?

When I “came out” and began to consume queer media—pornography, blogs, movies, et cetera—the depictions of queerness upheld white supremacy. Queer characters were almost always white, gay porn almost always included white cisgender men— unless it was explicitly marked as interracial or racial fetish. At first I didn’t mind this. In fact, I enjoyed it; I found these depictions of whiteness seductive.

The representation of queer life on the screen proved to be fairly accurate when I moved to the Bay Area in California and finally had access to other queer people. Almost everyone was white. Nonetheless, I threw myself in headfirst, joining every political group and attending every function I possibly could. Now that I look back on it, consuming this media, coming out as “gay,” and organizing within a traditional “gay rights” framework made me happy at some level because I felt like I was becoming more white. Being “gay,” being part of a “gay” community, gave me an opportunity to escape from my race, gave me new connections to whiteness, new ways to intimately embrace it and experience its validation.

As I began to get more involved with mainstream gay life, I found myself feeling less Brown. I used language and identityframeworks that were inaccessible to the South Asian community I grew up with. When my family didn’t understand the word queer, rather than trying to understand where they were coming from I dismissed them as homophobic and transphobic. My white peers assured me that people of color “tended to be more traditional” and I believed them because I had to in order to sustain my delusion and our relationships. I went to parties and conferences with mostly white people who would identify me as the “minority in the room.” The more time I spent in white queer communities, the more I stopped thinking about race. This didn’t mean thinking about race only in the abstract, it meant that I stopped thinking about my family. I stopped thinking about my people. I became so focused on liberation for (white) queer people that I couldn’t see how that didn’t actually mean liberation for anyone else. White queers found any conversation about my experiences of racism going on to be an “unrelated issue,” so I even fabricated a more conventional coming out story to fit in. This is how effortlessly white supremacy works: it appropriates and distorts our own narratives and bodies into its own image before we even recognize how this might be affecting the rest of our people.

There Is No Brown in Your Rainbow

In queer communities I began to hear people talk about how validating their relationships with other queers were. There seemed to be this idea that all heterosexual relationships were inherently oppressive no matter what and that, in contrast, queer relationships were subversive.

The truth is my first and most transformative relationship was with a woman my first year of high school. She was South Asian. We started getting close after we shared our experiences with racial trauma, our experiences as diasporic Indians, and our anxieties about our Hindu religion in our small town. Our subsequent relationship was perhaps one of the most significant journeys for my path toward self-actualization. I began to feel beauty in Brownness, to not be ashamed of who I was and where I came from. Looking back, I was less attracted to her gender, and more attracted to her race. Dominant ideas of heterosexuality suggest that cis men enter relationships with the “opposite” gender. Heterosexuality is understood as an attraction to difference. But this model could not hold my intense desire for this woman. I was attracted to her because of our mutual sameness, not our difference. But at the time I did not have the language to explain what was going on. I grew up thinking that if you had desire for men like I did you had to be gay. So I told her that we could never be together.

My first queer relationships didn’t seem to live up to all they were built up to be. In all of my subsequent relationships with white men, I was unable to experience a sense of solidarity and kinship. Dominant narratives of homosexuality describe it as “same-sex” desire: we hear stories about how men “know how to please other men better because they have a penis.” We hear how same-sex relationships are more functional because both parties “get one another.” These ideas never really seemed to make sense to me. All of my relationships with white men have felt much more conflicted, racially charged, and oppositional. Embracing a white male body never feels comfortable, natural, same. It feels foreign.

As I began to participate in (white) queer communities I recognized that what attracted to me to these boys—what had always attracted me to whiteness—was its difference from me. Whiteness was a commodity, a property that I didn’t own and was systematically denied. I wanted to be with white guys because I was attracted to their power. I found myself turning down incredibly charming queer people of color, because I just didn’t get the same power trip.

My early and uncritical experiences with white men reminded me that I can never have access to this cultural capital, that I will always be Brown, no matter how much queers profess to be “one community.” I began to realize the extreme racism and colorism that governs much of queer life (especially for queer men): the lighter you are, the more attractive you are. The darker you are, the more likely you are to be friend-zoned.

The majority of the times I found myself invisible to the white queer gaze. I met white boys with dating profiles that read: No Asians/No Fems. Sexual racism and femmephobia like this was rarely as explicit; it manifested itself in more silent and pernicious ways: always being the “friend” and never anything more. When I would confront my white queer friends about why they didn’t date people of color they’d often say things like: “I don’t see race—get over it, it’s not important! ” And though they would often profess liberal and antiracist politics, they would still only sleep with and date other white cis men. When I began to meet white queer men who did date across the color line they would often say that race wasn’t central to their desire or relationship. The idea was that being gay already involved transgressing one taboo, why not jump over another? I heard this narrative a lot: queer desire is inherently transgressive so therefore it is somehow exempt from complicity.

Those white queer men who did express interest in people of color often articulated it in ways that were just as problematic, just in a reverse direction. One white boy told me that he had always wanted to be with a Brown man. He told me that I felt like a real man (disregarding how I identified). And, at the time, I not only accepted it, I fetishized it. For the first time in my life I experienced validation from the very body that taunted me growing up. I performed my race—in its most stereotypical forms—for him so that I could maintain his desire. In subsequent relationships I experienced similar fetishization. It manifested itself in sometimes subtle ways—comments on my rugged masculinity (gesturing to histories of associations with bodies of color and primitive animality) and cloaked racist sayings like “all South Asians are so sexy” (as if one sixth of the world’s population looks the same).

In all of these experiences—the ones where I was hyper invisible and hyper visible—one theme remained constant: I was always reduced to my race. My race was the primary basis of my desirability or undesirability. I never was able to enter interactions where my race was not salient—the paradigm established was that I was always the one with “the race,” while whiteness remained unmarked.

After severally racially charged experiences with white men I found myself in some of the deepest and most visceral racial trauma of my life. I found myself predicating my very self-worth on validation from white men. It didn’t matter how many people of color were attracted to me, only white guys counted. It didn’t matter to me how successful I was in school or how effective of an activist I was, only validation by white men could make me happy. What had begun as a survival strategy—fetishizing the very white men who made my life miserable in high school as a way to establish a sense of control at least in the realm of fantasy—ended up becoming a nightmare. This is how white supremacy operates: it offers you a promise of acceptance, always at a distance, so that you are always running after it. It is always an abusive dynamic: it creates dynamics where your entire self worth is predicated on the very people who hurt you the most.

There came a point in my life when I could not longer submit myself to the constant humiliation of arguing for my humanity to the very men who oppressed me. It might sound dramatic but there is something deeply personal about sexual intimacy—espe-cially for those of us who have grown up our entire lives being told that we are ugly. It was never about a date or a hookup, it was always about my worth is as a human being. I realized that I needed a more sustainable way to develop self-worth. Like so many people of color before me I sought refuge in my own. I began to build intentional community with other queer people of color and it was in these spaces that I experienced the healing justice I had always longed for. I recognized how my attraction to whiteness was linked to my own racial self-hatred. I recognized the ways in which desire for whiteness helps justify the continued subordination of my peoples. I finally felt part of spaces that held me in my entirety. Slowly I have begun to unhinge my sexuality from whiteness and expand the horizon of my desires. Naturally it’s a process, but I have finally begun to feel like I have control of my desires and I’d like to think that means something in a world determined to relinquish control from people of color.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

My story is similar to those of so many queer and trans people of color. We each have our own unique experiences of being disenfranchised by queer communities, but across the board we express our collective grief and rage at how queerness has come to signify whiteness. So many of us have never been able to disassociate our racial oppression from our gender and sexual oppression. The idea of seeing these as separate struggles not only feels inconsiderate, it feels deliberately misleading and violent. Yet, race neutrality and outright racial hostility continues to persist in queer white spaces and progressive sexuality spaces more generally. Many queers continue to organize, fuck, make art, dream, and build together in ways that do not actively address white supremacy. It is important to establish that this is not about ignorance; this is about power.

Race neutrality is not a passive act; it is a conscious act of prejudice. The refusal to engage with race is actually an acceptance of white supremacy. In our “postracial” and neoliberal moment racism actually operates by white people and other privileged people proclaiming that “race has nothing to do with.” What I have tried to demonstrate with my story is that the supposed universality of sexual identity politics actually masks over racism. Sexual identity politics only map well onto the experiences of white privileged people because they were made for them. I am not advocating for the inclusion of race into sexual identity politics. To do so would be to imply that racism is the exception, and not the norm. Rather, I am suggesting that we need fundamentally different ways of talking about and organizing around desire. I’d like to close with several suggestions that we can consider moving forward.

1. We need to stop expecting conversations about race and sexuality to only be had by people of color. To do so is to suggest that race only belongs to people of color and therefore to leave whiteness unchecked.

Race should not just be the intellectual and political preoccupation of people of color. White people also have a race. Whiteness has the privilege to be unmarked, especially when it comes to sexuality politics. While it might not be as immediately explicit, white people have also had their desires and identities mediated by their race. White people who are in relationships with other white people are still actively creating and engaging in race. Indeed, white fetish is not just a peculiar phenomenon found among people of color, rather it is the dominant framing of a world where whiteness is marketed as desirable. It should not be controversial or stigmatized to talk about racial fetish; it should be a practice we all engage in. None of us are somehow outside of white supremacy. White supremacy is a system and we experience its symptoms every single day. Our assumption should be that any idea or politics expressed in a racist society is going to be shaped by racist values. It is only until we can name racism that we can begin to have conversations about how to confront it. If you expect people of color to always be the ones to bring up race then actually you are making people of color do all the labor (and where have we seen that before!).

2. There is nothing inherently progressive about queer sexual identity or relationships. Relying on an equation that positions queer relationships as somehow more “subversive” than “heterosexual” relationships is racist.

Queer people often present themselves as more progressive than the average “straight” person because they are “less conservative.” Yet this binary between “conservative” and “progressive” masks over how both of these groups are complicit in white supremacy. Oppression is not just a feeling or attitude; it is a system of power. False dichotomies between “progressive” and “conservative” distract us from having real conversations about structural complicity. There is nothing really progressive about a politics of sexuality alone. Sexual identity politics has done the remarkable act of creating norms in which we are not allowed to question people’s desires or relationships because they are somehow “personal.” The political act in sexual identity politics is announcing or declaring one’s sexuality. Once this is accomplished one is magically outside of any scrutiny. This leaves us no space to comment on the oppressive forces at work when white cis men only sleep with other white cis men. Only focusing on gender without attention to race results in always positioning white people as more progressive. The real work of any politics around sexuality shouldn’t be just the articulation of our desires, but also the tough conversations about power and desire and the even more difficult task of transforming our desires.

3. Anchoring sexual identity to gender/sex object choice alone is racist.

The dominant understanding of sexual identity is that our identities are linked to the “sex” we are attracted to. Along with the inherent transphobia in such a paradigm, it is important to establish that the only people in this world who have the privilege to understand their sex/gender outside of race are white people.

Therefore, to establish that sexual orientation is solely about “gender” or “sex” (as if these things exist outside of race) is to perpetuate white supremacy. “Men” and “women” do not exist as stable and oppositional categories when you take into account racial and gender identity, and other various registers of difference. When we experience attraction it is not only due to sex or gender, it is also due to a host of other factors (class, race, education status, et cetera.) If we only narrate our identities through gender object choice we aren’t actually being honest about how power operates. The privileging of sex/gender in the ways that we discuss desire is not just coincidental, it is a carefully crafted strategy to maintain racial dominance.

4. We should no longer speak about desire and preference as if they exist outside of systems of power.

People are not born beautiful; they become beautiful because they have access to power. We live in a world that constantly teaches us that the very people who control the world (white cis able-bodied men) are the most attractive people. We are taught to fetishize whiteness and masculinity because our desire helps fuel our own subordination. Therefore the idea that our desires are somehow fixed or innate and cannot be changed over time is also about saying that racial and gender inequality in this world can never be changed. We must stop pretending that our sexual and romantic preferences are somehow separate from the material distribution of power in this world. We must stop pretending that sexual and romantic desire somehow exists outside of the other desires for power, wealth, property, and conquest. We must stop pretending as if we do not inherit our desires from histories of colonialism and contemporary white supremacy. We cannot ever fully disintegrate our individual wants from what we have been told to desire. We need to become more comfortable speaking about the ways in which all of our desires are implicated in these violent systems and how we actively (re) create power through exercising our desires.

5. We should stop prescribing identities and narratives for people and instead allow them to self-determine their own narratives.

What is, I think, both tremendously intimidating and exciting about sexuality is that when we take seriously how unique each one of our life histories is and how deeply our attractions and identities are linked to these histories, we recognize that no one word or identity can ever hold the complexity. Moving beyond sexual identity isn’t just about postmodern intellectual radicalism, it’s actually about doing what makes the most sense. Sexual identities do not actually adequately describe anyone; they are short signifiers that are more reductive than they are generative. What I hope we can do as people invested in sexual liberation is create more spaces for people to be more than a word or an identity. I want more spaces where people can speak honestly about all of the trauma we have experienced and discuss the ways in which our histories of violence (or lack thereof) have mediated our desires. I want us to stop attempting to categorize, label, and contain all of our pluralities. I want us to be able to embrace the chaos that comes from really doing meaningful introspective work on our desires without falling into the trap of identity. The idea of categorizing our sexuality into discrete identities is a colonial phenomenon. This process of challenging sexual identity politics and allowing a space to self-narrate our desires and identities is part of a greater struggle against white supremacy.