The Mandingo Paradox

A Study into American societies' problematic notions about its most Deviant and its most Pure- and how the popularization of Online Alt-Right Theory refuses to let them die

NSFW/TW: Features mentions of SA, racialism and explicit images

I wanna start getting posts out each week but with school just starting this one’s about two in the making. I hope you get something from it, thank you.

Introduction

Events such as the ousting of sports broadcaster and radio-media host Shannon Sharpe, music producer and artist Kanye West’s comments towards his marriage history and recent features of Mary (played by actress Hailee Steinfield) in Director Ryan Coogler's latest feature film Sinners and the inclusion of singer-songwriter Sabrina Carpenter, trademarked by her PG-13 Lil Kim-esque “Juno Dance” at the Black Dandy Met Gala have shifted the spotlight onto the public presentation white women using promiscuity and positive social standing to introduce themselves to and navigate Afrocentric-spaces. 

The pivot done by various non-BIPOC presenting women to amass a swath of appeal before having their later in life comedown is not a new phenomenon; having existed alongside Western culture since the introduction of the black diaspora into the New World. There has always existed a complex and often less-than-idealized dynamic between Afro-Derivative Men and Caucasian Women. But, with the recent advent of social media and mass distribution, we are being exposed to both these occurrences and their reactions in real-time. Thrice removed from the days of call-in pushback and received anonymous hate letters, under each of these individuals’ reportage and accounts exists a very-vocal majority of burner-account commentators hailing a slurry of derogatory racial terms at the women, and reserving a kind of crude humor steeped in the downplaying of intelligence or expectations toward the men. 

This report will seek to find the root cause of where this behavior comes from, identifying historical points of contingency which have contributed to the perceived demand of women to play into such stereotypes, break the guard around men who hold their own internalized perceptions of race within the realm of the sexual and identify the newly-formed complex of inferiority that has cast itself over the discussion of these topics. 

And most importantly, how we can educate ourselves and challenge uncomfortable truths about ourselves to make way for a better future.

Thank you for reading Stuck in Babylon and this is: The Mandingo Paradox

The Complex Case for American societies' longstanding interrelation between its most Deviant and its most Pure

I. Prelude

The Origins of Racialism

Before inclining ourselves toward the racial undertones of interracial sexual imagery and some not-so-subliminal case studies of it, we must understand how this topic has become viewed as devaluing and grotesque in the first place. Existing to many as a societal perversion, negative views toward the interracial-intimate did not begin in Antebellum America, but it was during this time that the newly-pseudoscientific schools of phrenology (character and skull) and physiognomy(character and phenotype) began to proliferate. Steeped in the unique racial hierarchy of the new world, researchers used the allusive authority of the old one to justify spreading the beliefs that certain behaviors were inherent, unavoidable naturalisms and that undeniably concrete differences between the races existed, which should be upheld. They sought to correlate certain physical endowments, facial structures, and body types toward a tendency for barbarism, tempestuous behavior, intelligence or occupation, and justified social, racial, religious, and political narratives that appealed to disenfranchising the “Other” under the guise of respecting common science. According to Harvard University, after physiognomy’s neoclassical revival in 1772 by Johann Kaspar Lavater, his essays and writings on “the human face” became widespread throughout most of Europe, and phrenology parlors appeared in Europe and America along with “automated phrenology machines” for self-diagnosis or as a source of entertainment. Even more dangerous in tandem, they state “these pseudosciences should not be viewed as fanciful, benign, or just misguided scientific endeavors of the 18th and 19th century, but rather portentous and troublesome practices, leading to or even perpetuating prejudices and long-standing biases.”, as they would become to be known under the monikers of Racialism, Race Science, or Race Realism, and it would be Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the man credited with identifying the “five distinct human types” (Caucasian, Ethiopian, Mongolian, American, and Malay), who asserted that Caucasians were “the primary or immediate of these five principal Races.” Both Mongolians and Ethiopians were extreme deviations from this ideal, and Native Americans and Malays were somewhere in between. (Branson)

By piecing these ideas together, we can begin to see why people began to believe that any display or participation in an interracial relationship would be seen as such a transgression against themselves, and depicted as a perversion only sought after by societies most curious or decrepit as they slept with someone inherently under them in what was assumed to be nature’s very own divisory caste system. 

II. Guess who’s coming to Dinner

Introduction of the Black Male

But before I get off topic, you might be wondering how with such a clearly-defined prior concrete framework, we would get to bizarre strings of colloquialism like PAWG TAKES BBC, BlackToWhite Raceplay and Queen of Spades swinger collectivists (More on those later), but that's what we’re gonna find out now. It may come as no surprise that black bodies exist as some of the most sexualized amongst the population. The exact roots of this phenomenon are no coincidence, as they derive from a consistent and calculated effort through social change, politics, and history to appeal to the prior inclinations of race science that would point to the idea of Black Men being more physically and sexually dominant than their white counterparts. Under the violence of chattel enforcement, these men could be contained, humiliated, broken, and controlled. But the unique issue these relationships posed was one of mother-ship. During chattel slavery, the fate of a child would depend on the designation of the mother, so those successfully conceived by a black man and white woman would pose both a legal and social threat to the division which was believed to be natural and required to be upheld. The child was now calculated to be both a true European and a freed-African, an impossible dichotomy, which was legally confusing to exist (Hodes, 1-6). An imaginary number in the slavery equation. One to be hidden, thus becoming a point of fascination and perversion for audiences and participators alike.

In the wake years following the Civil War, Freedmen and emancipation brought with it a new series of social concerns, as white Americans believed that Black Men would now struggle to control their urges in a free yet marginalized society, and as a result, actively seek to assault and entice curious white women whenever possible, corrupting the “keepers of racial purity”. The archetype of the Mandingo Brute, or Black Buck became especially relevant throughout this time, being the 19th and 20th centuries, further asserting the physical and sexual dominance of the newly-emancipated as a threat to their would-be sexual competition. Yet this could not be further from the truth, as white women, often captivated by the stereotypes surrounding African libido and physical appearance, would use their social status, proximity, or privilege over working-class blacks and freedmen to pursue them.

Writers Note: I believe it goes without saying that this is and was not always the case. As any human being working in proximity to another, many interracial relationships form due to common allegiances, interests, mutual attraction and as naturally any other relationship does. It is, however, important to recognize that the perception of this dynamic does historically exist, and benefits from the often overlooked or underplayed yet widely held intrinsic beliefs about libido and mental/anatomical differences that contribute to the continued fetishization of seeking out, judging and being in interracial relationships in the minds of many. Positive stereotypes are still stereotypes

Thus, it is through this craze that the sexual act between the Black Man and White Woman was vilified as something truly decrepit: a premeditated fulfillment of an animalistic urge through defiling the sanctity of a paragon on the part of the Man, and an abuse of the systemic power over him by the woman opposed to something seen as equivalent to other same-race relations. 

This way of thinking is perpendicular to the common trope today that I will define as emulation: the belief within both BIPOC men and white ones that dating a white woman is a performative act. Seen as a means of attaching oneself to the historic social status that they’ve enjoyed, and signaling to others that they’ve recognized the pedestal that they have in America. We see this line of thinking perpetuated by celebrities and mass-media. Who routinely play on the trope of the now-successful Black Male, who has spent years refining his academic and financial game taking the final leap into his proximity toward whiteness, by leaving his stayed-down partner of color in order to exclusively chase white women he sees as apart of his social standing or higher. Ideas like this are harmful for a myriad of reasons, but one I would like to point out that the main is that this notion keeps us confined within the idea that in order to become successful, we must conform and approximate ourselves toward those who already are. This also sets up the idea that Black Women are responsible for “holding men down” and aren’t capable of fostering the kind of relationship and connections needed to enrich their partner; an argument you’ll see a lot of in the internet discourses surrounding interracial relationships or from men who pride themselves on exclusively dating white women to justify degrading Black Women in the process. These actions are not mutually exclusive, but they do go hand in hand.

“I have a love-hate relationship with the paparazzi, but actually I love them because they are empowering us. They are empowering us over Vanity Fairthat want to say that Kate Upton is Marilyn Monroe. Kate Upton ain’t Marilyn Monroe, Kim is Marilyn Monroe. You know that. She was controversial. She [is] controversial.”

                           “And when he get on, he'll leave yo' ass for a white girl”
                                                 Gold Digger, Song, Kanye West

III. White Inferiority Complex and the Modern Day

Welcome back, 20th-Century Science

                                                 Don’t worry, I wouldn’t show you that 
                                                             But guess the name of it

For the last entry in this discussion, I wanted to hone in on what I feel is a modern and serious phenomenon. In light of recent exploits by right-wing pundits, online media personalities and porn industry executives, you’d be hard pressed into believing that some scheming plot is underway: being backlined and commanded by a silent-sworn cabal to usher in an era of white genocide and replacement theory with black and brown men and babies at the stern of this ship. But while easy to write these off as the incoherent and overly-obsessed ramblings of a select few, I decided it'd be worth its while to look into this topic more across the various boards of the internet, find what the hurt point of this contingency is, and see how we can plug it in before it infects the minds of more politicians and people with platforms: we can't ignore it. In my opinion, I believe the recent limelight shed on white fragility and sensitivity in the modern day is a direct result of two main factors.

One, being the unignorable force that Afro-American culture has become in the 21st century, and the second being the byproduct of their own intrinsic brainwashing left alive by remnants of pseudo-scientific phrenological information and selective bias. Since their introduction to the Americas all the way up to the freedmen's Jazz era, the cultural contributions of Black Americans exist as a unique culmination of both our inherited tastes and material conditions. “Certain musical riffs on the piano were drawn from the ‘rat-tat-tat’ of gunshots, a not infrequent sound heard in the often mob-controlled clubs where artists were compelled to perform. Similarly, blues emerged from the work songs of slaves on plantations, with a call-and-response pattern ingrained in jazz to this day.” (Narsu) With the same ringing true for other Afro-genres such as Disco and Hip-Hop, which were quick to be adopted and sought after by all audiences in the alternative spaces and open-ended clubs which hosted them, leading to their brief commercialization through access, and Rap music becoming the multi-billion dollar export it is today. 

And to the second point, the topics that we discussed earlier. I believe this increased visibility in media (movies, video games, television, music, etc) to become stamped by the culture and tap into the in-community market culminates onto the groundwork of this phenomena today, and leads many patrons, who grew used to white american male MCs as the default, seeing these spaces dominated by Black Men has reawoken some latent desire to “prove” the former as still inferior and defend the position that this new era of representation is apart of a sinister plot, and not a natural occurrence of the world having access to something that has always been sought after.

But in the typical fashion of internet culture, things get a little bit weirder when they go online: especially when it comes to pornography. Perpetrators of the White Replacement Theory viewpoint have proposed that this space where both white women and men are heavily beguiled by interracial porn scenes is all imagined, and they (a dog-whistle moniker used to reference to Jewish/Semitic groups of people and families who own capital, often supplemented with a matching set of three parentheses (((like-so))) ) are “using interracial cuckold pornography as a tool to emasculate white men and manipulate them into accepting interracial relationships.” (Mashable)

No Joke. (Shoutout internet archive cause we are not giving that guy traffic)

A multitude of derogatory names and phrases have spawned from this circle to refer to white women who partake in interracial relationships, with “mudshark” and “coalburner” being two of the most popular.

But truthfully, the statistics say otherwise. With the majority of this content being consumed, created, and shared by rural Americans and those in Anglo-Saxon, homogenous, conservative states. I know you all remember this meme.  

The continued idea of Black Men as a sexually-charged object of obsession, fed to us from a young age and well into adulthood, is still as harmful as ever. Opening up the door to centuries of misinformation and moralization, today’s Americans have not strayed far from their roots. Pinpointing, this preoccupation with interracial taboos in the modern day is as much a materialization of anxieties and something brought upon by making it taboo in the first place, as much as its not a forced narrative spearheaded by the latent Other who seeks to destroy of the West.

I know today was a lengthy read, but if you made it this far thank you for seeing it through. As always this has been your fun-fact for the week. My name is Joshua McBride, and thank you for reading

References, for those who wanna do some extra reading

1. Harvard University. (2012, September 24). Face to face: Physiognomy & phrenology. Preserving Harvard’s Library Collections. https://archive.blogs.harvard.edu/preserving/2012/09/24/face-to-face-physiognomy-phrenology/

2. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. (n.d.). Popular and pervasive stereotypes of African Americans. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/popular-and-pervasive-stereotypes-african-americans

3. Hodes, M. E. (1997). White women, Black men: Illicit sex in the nineteenth-century South (Vol. 63). Yale University Press.

4. Ferris State University. (n.d.). The brute caricature. Jim Crow Museum. https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/brute/homepage.htm

5. Acclaim Magazine. (2024, February 9). Kanye West calls Kim Kardashian a modern Marilyn Monroe. https://acclaimmag.com/music/kanye-west-calls-kim-kardashian-modern-marilyn-monroe/

6. Genius. (n.d.). “See, I invented Kanye, it wasn’t any Kanyes / And now I look and look around and there’s so many Kanyes”. https://genius.com/37759

7. McGowan, S. (2025, March 17). Jazz education as a white boys’ club. The Skidmore News. http://skidmorenews.com/new-blog/2025/3/17/jazz-education-as-a-white-boys-club

8. Chang, A. (2023, November 6). Why does alt love interracial couples so much? Yahoo Life. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-does-alt-love-interracial-150150119.html