I was watching a TikTok video, what a surprise. It was a male dancer from Tokyo, and thought crossed my mind:
I know he does not play about Latinas.
The moment the thought formed, I stopped myself. Where did that even come from?
He was doing afro and hip hop inspired dances. In some videos he wore a durag. His styling leaned “urban” in the way the internet tends to flatten that word. But none of this actually told me anything about who he dates, what he desires, or who he loves. And yet my brain jumped there immediately.
I tried to trace the thought back. Was it cultural appropriation? Not really. I believe there is a difference between appropriation and appreciation, and I tend to be fairly relaxed about it. A person with untamed curly hair wearing a durag for its intended purpose doesn’t bother me. A person engaging with Black culture as an aesthetic? Doesn’t particularly bother me either. Do I think it’s wrong in some cases? Yes. Would I personally do it in such a blatant way? Probably not. But that wasn’t what this reaction was about.
I realised something else was at play.
This post is not about cultural appropriation. It’s not about shaming anyone’s preferences either. Love who you love. Be who you are. What I’m interested in here is a pattern I’ve noticed over time, and the quiet logic that seems to organise it.
I’ve noticed that non-Black men who openly love Black culture tend to date women who exist in close proximity to Blackness without fully embodying it: Latinas, mixed women, light-skinned women, brunettes who can carry the aesthetic.
That realisation didn’t make me uncomfortable. If anything, it made me curious. Where was this assumption coming from? Was it misogynoir? Had others noticed this pattern before, named it, studied it? Should I go back and revisit bell hooks’ work and see whether she had already mapped this terrain long before I stumbled into it via TikTok?
I was trying to find language and theories for this when a film I watched years ago came back to me. One of the only films to ever represent my island on a big screen: Palmeras en la nieve.
And that’s where this post really begins.
Who gets to be loved:
Set during the Spanish colonial period in Equatorial Guinea, the film centres on a romantic narrative shaped by power, distance, and racial hierarchy. Within the story itself, there is a clear distinction drawn between tribes. The Bubi tribe, which I belong to, is portrayed as noble, gentle, and morally “pure,” positioned closer to nature and emotional depth. This sense of tribal superiority is not subtle; it is embedded in the film’s logic and reinforced visually and narratively.
At the centre of the love story is a Bubi woman, framed as desirable, innocent, and worthy of devotion. Yet even as a teenager watching the film for the first time, something about this representation felt off to me.
The woman cast to play this “ideal” Black love interest was not a dark-skinned, fully Black Bubi woman. She was mixed. Lighter-skinned. Palatable in a way that made her legible as romantic to a Spanish audience. At the time, this barely registered as an issue. There were so few Black women, mixed or otherwise, being cast in Spanish cinema that representation of any kind felt rare enough to be accepted without question.
But looking back now, it’s hard not to see what was happening.
The film constructs a hierarchy of Black womanhood. The Bubi woman who is loved, protected, and mourned is lighter, softer, framed through innocence and emotional depth. Meanwhile, darker-skinned Black women appear elsewhere in the film as enslaved bodies, background figures, or sexual objects, present, but never centred.
This is not incidental. Casting is never neutral.
What Palmeras en la nieve shows us, perhaps unintentionally, is a hierarchy of valuable partnership. Proximity to Blackness is allowed, even celebrated, as long as it does not fully embody the social, historical, and political weight of being a dark-skinned Black woman. Desire moves toward what feels safer, more digestible, more easily romanticised.
Watching the film again through this lens, I realised I had seen this pattern many times before, not just in cinema, but in real life. In the way Black culture is adored while Black women’s bodies are sidelined.
This is not about individual attraction or moral judgement. Preferences are personal, and desire is complicated. When the same pattern appears across media, geography, and generations, it stops being accidental and starts asking to be read.
In Palmeras en la nieve, the choice to cast a mixed woman as the embodiment of “pure” Black femininity reflects what the filmmakers likely believed audiences would find appealing. But that choice doesn’t exist in isolation. It mirrors a broader cultural logic in which Black womanhood is split into categories: the lovable and the excessive, the romantic and the sexual, the idealised and the disposable.
And this is where the film stops being just a historical romance and starts echoing something much closer to the present.
Naming the pattern:
Maybe it is because I am a Black woman in academia, or maybe it is because I have consumed too much theory on Black bodies, but by the time I finished writing this post, the argument felt not obvious, just repetitive. As if this discourse had already been articulated too many times before. I hesitated before publishing. Another Black girl writing about Black womanhood and desirability. Another text that risks being read as “too political,” too expected.
What unsettled me wasn’t the content itself, but my own self-consciousness around it. Why did I feel more hesitant to write about race than I ever have writing about grief, queerness, loneliness, or found family? Why did this feel like overexposure?
When I asked myself whether what I was noticing could be reduced to misogynoir, the answer was both yes and no. Yes, because the term already exists for a reason. Coined by Moya Bailey, misogynoir describes the specific intersection of racism and misogyny. It explains why Black women’s bodies are so often either hypersexualised or rendered invisible, while rarely being afforded complexity, softness, or romantic centrality.
But misogynoir alone doesn’t fully explain why this hierarchy reproduces itself even among those who love Black culture.
This is where colourism enters the picture. Colourism operates both within and outside Black communities, shaping casting decisions, romantic narratives, and beauty standards. It teaches audiences, and participants, that proximity to Blackness is acceptable, even attractive, as long as it is mediated through lightness, ambiguity, or mixture.
The result is a learned hierarchy of desire.
Black culture becomes consumable. Black aesthetics become aspirational. But Black womanhood, especially dark-skinned, fully embodied Black womanhood, remains politically charged.
This is not simply an “outsider” problem. That’s the uncomfortable part.
When Black media itself repeatedly sidelines dark-skinned women as romantic leads, when desirability narratives overwhelmingly centre women who fit Eurocentric or colourist standards, those patterns do not stay contained. They are observed, imitated, and normalised. Desire is not born in a vacuum; it is socialised.
At that point, I realised that my thought process was nothing new. I just failed this time to connect the obvious dots to a popular conversion I’ve known since I was 12. This is something bell hooks wrote about extensively: the commodification of Black culture alongside the devaluation of Black people themselves. To love the culture without loving the bodies that produce it is not contradiction; it is the system working as designed.
SO, WHAT THEN?
I usually feel a sense of clarity, even relief, after finishing posts that emerge from a passing social media thought. But this time, the process started feeling like a chore midway.
I hesitated before posting. Not because I doubted the argument, but because nothing in it felt particularly revelatory. There was no moment of discovery, no satisfying click at the end. If anything, what I learned wasn’t something new about the logic behind my initial reaction, but something older and more uncomfortable: that Blackness is no more “political” than any other subject I have already written about.
The difference is not in the content, but in the expectation placed on it.
Writing this didn’t teach me anything new about desirability, misogynoir, or learned hierarchies of attraction. What it taught me instead is that repetition does not invalidate thought, and familiarity does not strip an idea of its weight. That the pressure to be original, particularly when writing about Black womanhood, is often just another way of discouraging myself from speaking at all.
So I clicked publish anyway. Not because this post offers a revelation, but because this blog is a space for personal thinking, not for innovation quotas. And sometimes, writing is not about arriving somewhere new, but trusting that your way of seeing still deserves room.
References:
- Bailey, M. (2010) They aren’t talking about me…: Black women, misogynoir, and the digital divide. Transforming Anthropology, 18(2), pp. 108–120.
- hooks, b. (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press.
- hooks, b. (2000) All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow.
- hooks, b. (2015) Black Pain: Writing on Race. London: HarperCollins.
- Hunter, M. (2007) ‘The persistent problem of colorism: Skin tone, status, and inequality’. Sociology Compass, 1(1), pp. 237–254.
- Wells, F. (Director) (2015) Palmeras en la nieve [Film]. Spain: Warner Bros. Pictures España.
BISILA 