Who's got Jungle Fever?

This was perhaps, the most difficult story I’ve ever written. No, this was, by far, without a doubt, the hardest story I’ve ever written. It challenged me in ways that no other story has even come close to doing.

I got the idea to write a story about a black man and a white woman because my repertoire is dangerously light on that theme. I have a ton of stories about white men with Black women, mostly driven by the fact that white men request interracial stories, NOT because that’s a preference of mine. In each of those stories, whether it be romantic or about domination, I make sure I show Black women in a healthy, positive, empowered light. They are never ghetto whores, or blinded by the mystical allure of interracial lust, they are in charge, intelligent, articulate women of color who are autonomous and, in some cases, dangerously efficient at manipulating the desires of white men. In most cases, people aren’t even aware enough to notice the social commentary; they just fast forward to the sex or they only absorb the story on a very superficial level.

Because I don’t have many stories about black men and white women, I decided to tackle it head on. My first inclination was to make it a romantic story and I almost wish I had. That would have been easier for me I’m sure. I could have written a story where the characters would just happen to be different colors and I could have made their choice to date interracially not one driven by stereotypes and racist beliefs but of two people with common interests who felt an attraction for one another. What do they say, always go with your first instinct?

When I sat down to write this particular story, I was overwhelmed with the need to address the large portion of Black men who date interracially and address some of the reasons they do so. They are the least culturally conscious so they are the last group of people to understand their motivations or be able to articulate them. They are also the demographic least likely to read a story of mine. So starting off, I was writing a story about a segment of the population who wasn’t even going to read it. That’s difficult for me because of the customized nature of my work. My goal in writing usually is to arouse the reader of my story and I knew from the beginning that if Black men who did date and fuck white women were to read the story, the things I wrote about in the story would offend them.

Then, I had to take into consideration that the demographic who WAS going to be reading the story the most was white men. They seek out erotic stories about Black men and white women more than any other audience. The vast majority of white men are oblivious to any reality other than their own so I had to choose every single word carefully. I had to put myself in the mindset of a white man who was going to be reading the story and try my best to educate them but also remember that most of what I was saying was going to go WAY over their heads. They weren’t going to be reading the story and taking away from it the more important messages of how dysfunctional most interracial sex really is. All they were going to be doing would be masturbating to the story, more than likely just skipping ahead to the sex parts. Still, I wanted to write a story that would give the few that were cognizant enough to pick up on the underlying themes something to think about.

Black people in general, unfortunately, in many instances, don’t look deeper than the superficial when reading my stories. So again, I’m faced with trying to educate people who were only going to take away from the story the concept that a Black man was saying he hated Black women, and that he was only attracted to white women, and not get the how’s and why’s of how that mindset was really formed in a lot of Black men. More importantly, I knew the vast majority of Black readers were going to see that behavior as merely self-hatred, not a manifestation of slave mentality that has gone un-addressed and unchecked for generations. For all of our flaws and shortcomings, being a victim to mindsets we learned in slavery that have been passed down for generations is not our fault. That doesn’t mean they are acceptable or excusable, it just means they need to be examined and healed.

This very well could be a true story. The characters were not atypical or unique in the fact that they did anything extraordinary; they were average. If you go into a racially mixed club in any town in America, you could see the characters of this story in real life. The things they said were things that have been repeated time and time again by real people, in similar situations. The numbers of Black men who date and/or fuck white women exclusively continues to grow by leaps and bounds, fueled by white America’s lust for the black male body (including the perpetuation of the Mandingo myth), a social climate where any discussion of race other than, “Color doesn’t matter,” is silenced, and racism that eats at the self-esteem of Black men whereby they feel as Darren felt.

Jenny wasn’t bright. One can only assume her attractiveness was the kind that can be found in any Hooter’s restaurant or a Girls Gone Wild video. Her commentary on race was cliché. Her need to be degraded and treated like a slut is symptomatic of a society that has raised a generation of girls to believe that their attractiveness is their only value in life.

Darren’s perceptions on race were formed by racism. For a child, being in an environment where your peers aren’t sensitive to race, where there is no racial tolerance, where Black children are in the minority, and being raised by parents who are trying to instill in them to deny their blackness, it becomes easy to see how self hatred could fester and grow in the mind of a young child. We live in a society that doesn’t show Black women as attractive and then we expect Black men to see them as such when ALL they’ve been shown are images of white women and told how beautiful they are. Black boys see countless images of white women. The first sexual images they see are more than likely going to be in Playboy or Penthouse and be of white women, so logically, their arousal is going to be tied to white women. Yes, Darren was self-hating, but I tried my best to show how he came to be. Well, I did the best I could in a story that was supposed to be erotic.

The entire first half of the story was dedicated to the examination of race in this society. Then, I transition by saying, “An intelligent person might want to contemplate what made this privileged, twenty-something white girl, who had never had a responsibility in her life, crave being used like a fucking rag doll by black men while spewing the most vile racist epithets . . . but who has time for such cerebral musings?” That creates the shift. Then the story becomes hardcore. The sex is visceral and raw, abusive even. It speaks to the way racist white men want to see white women treated by black men and, I can only assume, the ways in which interracial couples who are driven by racist fantasies might interact sexually. I had difficulty writing the sex portion, which is usually the easiest part for me, so I took the sex from another story and just changed the names. I was literally drained by writing the first half of the story to the point where constructing the sex scene was beyond my capabilities.

I’m proud of the finished product in a way that I’d love to see the story examined in a college class on race or debated and discussed in an academic setting. For now, I’ll have to be satisfied knowing that somewhere, someone might read it and walk away with a better understanding of the intricacies of race and sexuality.