Black Girl Magic

The second time I ever opened my legs for a man he looked at me, smiled, and said, “I’ve never fooled around with a black girl before”. Past versions of myself would have entertained him and said something like, “Welcome to Paradise”. The woman I am today would leave him battered and bruised. The woman I was at this point was affronted but proceeded anyway. I did not understand the harm I was doing by allowing my identity to be commodified, sold, and fetishsized. 

What was the difference between having sex with me and having sex with a white woman? Did he think my pussy was a portal made not of matter but of “black girl magic”? Did he take me for a “ freak”, assuming that I would enjoy chains and whips because bondage has been encoded into my DNA? Did he see me as a means to fulfill his primordial urge to domesticate? 

Admittedly, I think the answer is a bit more simple. This man did not want to fuck me because he thought it would be a transcendent experience. This man wanted to fuck me because he wants to fuck himself.

It not I that aroused him, but the thought of his own power over me. My black body serves as a reminder of how big, and strong, and deserving he is as a white man. How could he not believe this? The entire world has conspired to affirm this. As a man– a white man, his mere existence will be met with praise. As a black woman, my existence is hardly even considered. Every dollar he makes will hold more value than my own. Every door I will only ever peer through is held wide open for him. 

The same four centuries that have granted him sovereignty have damned me to live as Sisyphus. “I’ve never fooled around with a black girl before”, he says.