Anonymous Said...




Anonymous said...

Hi, I absolutely love your blog! I just came across it yesterday while searching about living as American in Denmark. I am curious to know if danish men are attracted to black women (primarly american/west indian). What is your experience with them? Is there alot of interracial marriages/dating with black women and white men? Sorry for putting you on the spot. Im just curious :)!!!

Comments

Lenoxave said…
Amen, Hallelujah and thank you Suheir. Sometimes, I just get very tired of all this mess.
This poem is the bomb...I'm so proud of Suheir. I remember her from back in the days when I worked at Marie Brown Associates and with Glen Thompson from Harlem River Press. Those were truly the days...
Camille Acey said…
good sentiment from suheir, if only we could police these things, if only all desire was pure and correct and coming from the "right place". but alas desire is a messy stew of all of these things both bad and good, always and always. if we're going to fight the good fight, i dare to say that the area of desire is not a solid battleground. this isn't to say hands off, but rather to say roll your sleeves up and maybe wear some rubber gloves cause just digging through your own desire is funky work.
Well said Camille! I once had a high school social studies who said, "anyone who dates someone from another race but says that it has nothing to do with it is not telling the truth." That said, it's one of the reasons there is such a wide variety of humanity. It's how we became who we are.
Camille Acey said…
well, i actually meant something even further. i'd say "anyone who desires anyone (from any race) and says race (or gender or sexuality or any other number of 'isms') have nothing to do with it is not telling the truth." as my friend prof. jared sexton puts it (much more eloquently) in his book Amalgamation Schemes: There is no interracial relationship. If relationships exist at all, they exist within the matrices of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and all the other systems of domination that define our current reality.

again, i am not saying we should avoid probing into all this. i am just saying we should be prepared for all that we will dredge up. but, hey, sometimes if we don't know (and interrogate!) where we came from we don't know where we are going.
Politicizing relationships is definitely dangerous waters, but if you believe that "the personal is political" as Audre Lorde once wrote, well, yeah, there's room for a LOT of discussion.
One of the main questions that arises from this, is, what is the evolutionary function of relationships and working from that point, in terms of power, could be helpful in what you are putting out there. But there are so many ways to interpret things...
While I muse over humanity's capacity to love each other, despite differences, there is a grotesque distortion involved in the process of exotifying the other...that we may all do it is an open question. Again, I can't help but think of Baartman, for example, and so I tend to approach this topic from this angle. Again, who has the power? How is it used? There is a famous Danish writer here who has made quite a name for himself, for example, due to his very public openness with exotifying the Black woman: specifically in Haiti. The socio-economic implications of this is sickening. How many others have the luxury of building such careers? I know it is the status quo, but again, I am committed to commenting on this.
lab

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