Hello everyone. This is my first blog entry for Uzrui-Unveiled.com. I wanted to start with a personal story, something that’s been in the back of my mind for years and eventually led me to want to create this website. When I was a young boy my family relocated from Denver to College Park, Georgia. My older brother and I would often join up with a pack of local boys and ride our bikes out to a wooded area behind our neighborhood. There was an old, abandoned car secreted by the trees, and in the trunk of the car was a treasure trove of nudie magazines. I can’t begin to imagine how the car or the magazines came to be located there, but it became a fabled spot for all the neighborhood boys, a place of forbidden wonders. It was the first time I saw the image of a naked woman. It was the 80’s, and I was mesmerized by the women with their big hair and even bigger bushes. But all the women in the magazines were white, and the trunk of forbidden wonders was my first exposure to the systematic indoctrination that only white women can be considered as ambassador for beauty or be thought of as sexually attractive.
My family moved back to Denver Colorado a short while later, and I wouldn’t understand the far-reaching consequences this indoctrination would have on myself and my black, male peers until I became an adult. We were unknowingly being conditioned to believe that only white women could be sexually appealing, and that conversely helped condition black women into believing they were sexually unappealing. This conditioning also instilled in us the perception that white women were more sexually accessible and more capable of fulfilling physical desires. The encumbering of our physical attraction to black women was one of society’s attempts at preventing us from, in the words of Asheru, ‘making symbolic relations with worthy women.’ Colorado’s monochromatic climate helped strengthen and reinforce what I had been taught, as it provided only a limited pool of black women to help break the conditioning.
As I came into my adult years I had a reckoning with society’s conditioning. Despite being constantly bombard with images of attractive white women in TV, Movies, and Magazines, I never took any interest in dating white women. I embraced my innate attraction to black women, and my first marriage was to a dark-skinned woman native to Kenya. Though the marriage eventually failed, I was bitten by the photography bug during my tenure in it. My love for photography, my deep admiration for the female form, and my fond memories of the trunk of forbidden wonders all caused me to turn my endeavors towards glamour nude photography.
Playboy Magazine had done some absolutely stunning photosets of black women, but such sets were few and far between, as black women seemed to have only a token presence on that platform. I decided that I wanted to take photos as beautiful and sexy as the ones Playboy had done, but I wanted my photos to be all about celebrating black beauty, rather than being about some poor attempt at integrating black beauty into the spectrum of what mainstream society considers to be beautiful; black women who can be overtly sexy and openly desired. A far cry from the slaves whose harsh beauty was once secretly coveted by their masters. I began actively seeking black women to feature in my compositions, but my search for black models yielded disappointing results. It quickly became evident that white women were as overrepresented in the adult modeling pool as they were in the actual adult content.
A June 2020 Rolling Stones article by EJ Dickson quotes adult video performer Ana Foxxx expressing apparent frustration with the lack of inclusion of black women in adult content, when she said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, ‘Ana, we wish I could shoot you more, but we only shoot so many black girls.’” To better understand this troubling trend, let’s take a closer look at Playboy Magazine. In its 67-year history, they’ve had 31 playmates who could be considered black, with only two of them being named Playmate of the Year. That’s a rough average of 0.46 black playmates per year, one black playmate every 26 months.
Ida Lungvist, only the second black playmate to be named PMOY, was awarded the title in 2008. It was a decision I always found suspicious given that Ida Lungvist is a mixed woman of Swedish and Tanzania heritage. Tanzania neighbors Kenya and shares a common language, and Kenya, of course, is the native country of the father of former president Barack Obama. Despite Playboy’s history of rarely shooting black playmates, and more rarely naming one PMOY, they managed to dig up a black PMOY with an East African heritage the same year Barack Obama was elected. If you’ve seen Ida’s photos, it’s clear she was deserving of the PMOY title, but one can’t help but to question the timing of her PMOY award and dismiss it as the type of tokenism that plagues the adult industry. This tokenism sends a variety of negative messages: that black women aren’t sexually attractive, that the viewers of adult content don’t want to look at them, and that the adult industry will only depict enough of them to satisfy misguided attempts at diversification. To be fair, Playboy has shot photos of a number of black women over the years who were simply featured models rather than actual playmates, so the thirty-one black playmates I mentioned above is not exhaustive of all the black females they have featured in their fabled history, nor of the women of varying ethnicities.
Negative associations with nude modeling may also be responsible for thinning the pool of black, female models. Search engine results for glamour nudes featuring black women, more often than not, link to hardcore porn sites, meaning that black women understand that if they choose to pose nude, they will not be disassociated from adult video performers. I have no qualm with those who choose to pursue a career in adult video. Quite frankly, I believe they provide a valuable service to those who are sexually repressed and need an outlet. However, I also believe that black women should be afforded the opportunity to do something bold and liberating that demonstrates their sensuality and sexuality without being forced to fully delve into the adult industry, the same opportunity that their white counterparts have been given in bulk.
Exclusion of black women from adult content, both by the design of its producers and by the choice of the models, has to be looked at from a variety of perspectives, but it’s clear that systemic racism plays a part. To give the perpetrators the benefit of the doubt, one could argue that exclusion of black women from adult content is unintentional, that white women being the majority in the content reflects the desires of a mostly white viewership. So, let’s build a more diverse viewership. Let’s celebrate black beauty.
