Thanks to Adrenalynn and Zoé Samudzi for feedback on the draft in clarifying ideas, correcting misconceptions, identifying missing elements and improving writing. Their contributions in no way make the following their fault. After finishing this draft a friend put me on to Mirielle Miller-Young’s book A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. After quickly rifling through it seems to cover parts of what follows if from a different angle. It came recommended and I pass along the recommendation here for people looking for an in depth treatment of some of what follows, specifically the parts dealing with black women. Special thanks to Jared Sexton for their text Amalgamation Schemes.

The term “interracial porn” seems a little sketchy on the face of it. But what exactly is going on with the marketing and labor practices of interracial porn? An examination finds fundamental problems, specifically a baseline anti-blackness. Here I lean heavily on Jared Sexton’s analysis in Amalgamation Schemes and, guided by numerous performers who have made public criticisms of interracial porn as a concept, read interracial porn marketing through Sexton’s analysis of miscegenation/antimiscegenation discourse. As per the industry, performers and consumers, I identify interracial porn as scenes between black men and white women. Interracial porn represents both an aspect of miscegenation/antimiscegenation as well as its deployment for purposes of capital accumulation. Tracing the history of this discourse illuminates interracial porn’s ethical problems.

“Race” and “Interracial”

“Interracial” necessitates a pre-existing “race” so we’ll start there. The late Patrick Wolfe writes of anti-black racism, “Though born of slavery, […] race came into its own with slavery’s abolition. So long as slavery persisted, race – for all its usefulness as a justification – was relatively redundant as mode of domination.” This rise of race, which is the same as saying the rise of racism, “means that the boundary that had previously separated a Free Black from a slave disappears, which is to say that, in place of the slaves, a new and more inclusive oppressed category emerges. […] In other words, emancipation cancelled out the exemption: you can be an ex-slave, but you can’t be ex-Black.”

Affirming the boundary of the newly unified black racialization was achieved in large part through sexual politics. Democratic Party supporters from the New York World newspaper coined the term “miscegenation” (from Latin, ‘group mixing’) in 1863 in an anonymous pamphlet intended to sway the 1864 elections in favor of the Democrats. The pamphlet, titled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, claimed a Republican Party goal of intermarriage between white and black populations. While there was a debate amongst white people on whether or not to continue African Slavery, there was consensus against intermarriage and the newly popularized term miscegenation. This is to say that the concept of “miscegenation” is a product of a preexisting antimiscegenation (this also is an example of white supremacy being a manipulative power tool between groups of powerful white people more than between groups of white people with and without power as per the popular “split working class” theory of racism.). As examined further below, this applied/s to white women with black men. White men with black women, primarily via rape – consensual sex between enslaver and enslaved is impossible – was an accepted if unmentioned practice. Miscegenation/antimiscegenation is fundamental to biological racism and is inherently gendered, focusing as it does on reproduction and sexual encounters. Post-slavery (“post”…), miscegenation eventually becomes the sexual political concept today discussed as ‘interracial,’ the change stemming from the shift from explicit white nationalism to white nationalism under the guise of multiculturalism.

Jared Sexton writes on antimiscegenation and gets to the crux of interracial porn’s racist politics.

“If white racial identity has a public reputation as a form of purity, then antimiscegenation is the mode of production for the value of whiteness. […] However, antimiscegenation is not the essence of white supremacy or antiblackness. Rather, white supremacy and antiblackness are fundamentally relational processes unfolding between antimiscegenation and its necessary failure. White supremacy and antiblackness, in other words, emerge in the interplay between miscegenation and the forms of resistance to it. An important claim follows from this reasoning: rather than establishing themselves in vulgar opposition to miscegenation, white supremacy and antiblackness produce miscegenation as a precious renewable resource, a necessary threat against which they are constructed, a loyal opposition, a double exposure. They rely upon miscegenation to reproduce their social relations; their relations are, in fact, this very reproduction.

Miscegenation is thus taken to indicate processes of mixing, meddling, or mingling between the general and the particular, between the ephemeral body of white universality and the strangely dense corporeality of its dark-skinned others, imagined as a sprawling and overpresent, anonymous in their racialized particularity. […] Antimiscegenation is not a convenient rationalization for some other instrumentality; it is a vital component of the creation of race ex nihilo, a social contraction articulated as the form of white identity.

Sexton sums up noting that “miscegenation is a name for the imperceptible productivity of white supremacy and antiblackness.”

Miscegenation/antimiscegenation’s “mixing, meddling or mingling” describes black as a contaminant, the contaminating element being slavery. One version of this is, in Wolfe’s phrasing, “the fact that the paternity of black women’s children continued to have no effect on their status which remained rigorously matrilineal.” Enslaved mothers gave birth to slave babies no matter the father’s status. Per Barbara Fields, U.S. society and law “considers a white woman capable of giving birth to a black child but denies that a black woman can give birth to a white child.” This is African Slavery’s racialization where enslaved women were (re)producers of property and commodities through childbirth. Wolfe continues, “Thus black women are not only barred from having white children. Along with black men, they are barred from having any children other than black ones.” Here white women are inherently violable and in need of constant guarding of their fragile purity, and black women inviolable and ever receiving. By “inviolable” I do not mean “protected,” but that there is nothing that can be done that will be considered a violation. Nothing done to black women will be termed harm. In Saidiya Hartman’s words, “No crime can occur because the slave statutes recognize no such crime.”

Anti-Black Pornography

Skin Diamond notes that, “Interracial is only ‘interracial’ if it involves a black man and a white girl.” Sexton concurs writing, “to be considered interracial, especially in the U.S. context, [a relationship] must involve a black person. This is not always the case, of course, and there are myriad historical examples of hysteria prompted by the prospect of sexual encounter between whites and nonblack people of color. What I sense, however, is that within the racist imagination, relationships with blacks, whether the other is white or a nonblack person of color, constitute interracial relationships par excellence.”

Diamond continues, “Technically, most of my porn is interracial but because I’m a black chick, it doesn’t count. People only wanna see the taboo of a black man with a white girl.” Diamond’s analysis of her scenes with white or other non-black men ‘not counting’ speaks again to the inviolability of black women and has two meanings. “It doesn’t count” in both marketing and accounting. This plays out in different earning potential for white and black women performers.

The higher earning potential happens in two ways. White women performers, especially successful ones, often follow a progression of roles. Lexington Steele describes it, “There are situations where it could be the industry, whether it’s her boyfriend, her husband or management that suggests she either doesn’t do [interracial] at all, or waits until a certain time when her rates can appreciate over time. Where it’s: girl-girl to boy-girl to anal to DP [double penetration] to, and then the ultimate she can charge her most is when she finally does interracial.” This is career path is unavailable to black women performers whose scenes are always already “racial” but never “inter” from an earning perspective, even when explicitly pointed out as such. For example Nyomi Banxxx recalled about a scene with a white male performer, “I had this conversation with my agent. I had this conversation with a director, because we were arguing about rate. I said, ‘I need to get paid for an interracial rate, IR.’ ‘No that’s not IR.’” This is one reason why Misty Stone says, black performers “do the same amount of work but [white performers] get different opportunities.”

Another aspect of higher earning potential for white women is some performers (or their managers or agencies) simply charge more to do scenes with black men, which is the same as saying they are racist. This is not universal and some producers, not to mention many white women performers, actively protest this specifically because it is so viscerally racist Unfortunately much of this resistance is articulated with demands to do interracial porn, to enact “the imperceptible productivity of white supremacy and antiblackness.” It is not asking white people to place their bodies in the way of racism, but to use them to (re)produce it. Further, it polices white women’s bodies to perform an ‘I’m not racist I fuck black men’ action which proves exactly nothing.

Both the higher rate via career progression and higher interracial rate effectively place a ‘hazard pay’ rate or ‘burden tax’ on doing scenes with black men. In other words, interracial porn labor schemes say ‘black dick comes at a price’ and that price will be paid to white performers. It goes without saying, though needs saying, that black women performers get no such ‘hazard pay’ for doing scenes with black men because the perceived contaminant, the reason for miscegenation/antimiscegenation discourse and higher rates for white women performers, cannot affect black women who are inviolable and already ‘Blacked’ as per the next section.

Black the Verb

This idea of the “one-drop rule” whereby any black ancestry produces a black positioning is the basis of miscegenation discourse and the fetish of interracial porn. The interracial porn website Blacked.com illuminates this. The name, Blacked, invokes blackness as a corruption, as an action. ‘Blacked’ is not sex between equals, it is something that is done to someone, specifically to white women. It is white purity that is being ‘Blacked’. ‘You, white woman, have been Blacked’. There are numerous other examples like the 2012 Vivid title, Allie Haze’s Been Blackmaled. Sex with black men is “blackmaling”.

The public, especially though not exclusively the white public, approaches interracial porn with miscegenation/antimiscegenation enacting “the imperceptible productivity of white supremacy and antiblackness.” The Twitter mentions of popular white porn actresses are filled with demands for and condemnations of interracial scenes (search at your own risk and with plenty of sage to burn). Those condemning treat interracial porn as violations of white purity and clarify what ‘Blacked’ actually means in practice. The number of scenes and films with ‘cuckhold/cuck’ storylines is part of black as a contamination, as a corrupting element. This weaponizes both black penises and masculinity while giving logic to the laser focus on black penises, colloquialized in interracial porn lingo as “BBC” (Big Black Cock). The motivations of those demanding interracial scenes are less clear. It appears to be a mix of demands to see black male representation with popular performers and fetishization of the interracial encounter, often both.

The ‘blacking’ racialization follows black men performers. Whereas black women performers are inviolable, black men performers are always violating, except in scenes with black women. Black men’s scenes are always already racialized. As Sexton notes, “The presence of Asian or Latino actors (nearly all of whom would be paired with white actors) would either leave the racial designation unchanged or move it into an ethno-specific label, such as Asian, Oriental, Hispanic, Spanish, Latin. Black films, in contrast, were those that starred only blacks.” Thus black men can generally not do ‘normal’ porn except when combined with white men in scenes or films; they can only do black or interracial. ‘Normal’ here means ‘white normative’. Yet, as ever under white supremacy, the ‘white’ is silent or, better put, unenunciated but clearly demonstrated. Thus scenes and films with exclusively black performers are labeled “ebony/chocolate/black” and scenes and films with exclusively white performers are not labeled “white/aryan/snowblind.” This turns into disparate earning potential between black and white men performers. Steele notes that “There is a differential between what I can accumulate versus someone else who is able to work with 100% of the talent pool.” Here he refers to the industry denying him normative white scenes and films as well as scenes with those performers who refuse work with black men. With black women and men performers the divergent earning potential compared to white colleagues is not simply the discriminatory pay rates common to racial capitalism, but a separate, racialized job profile. They are very nearly doing a different job altogether.

End “Interracial”

The problem of anti-blackness is fundamental to interracial porn. Interracial porn is a present day articulation of miscegenation/antimiscegenation. Anti-blackness is evident in the discursive fetishization of blackness, the exploitation of (anti)blackness for capital accumulation by porn companies and the divergent earning potential of white and black performers. It cannot be fixed as its very premise is the problem. Ending interracial porn is not the same thing as ending scenes with black men and white women. The encounter between black men performers and white women performers is not the anti-blackness; the use of the encounter is the anti-blackness. To repeat Sexton, “white supremacy and antiblackness produce miscegenation.” White supremacy and anti-blackness produce this “precious renewable resource” by turning specific porn performances into miscegenation/antimiscegenation, something “Blacked,” interracial. Interracial porn is the use of the racialized encounter as a means to accumulate profits. It continues from earlier regimes the idea of blackness not as an identity but as a “position of accumulation and fungibility.” There is no way to reform it. Ending interracial porn is not the same as hiding or avoiding racism. Performers and companies could still make audience-specific films but it is indefensible that profits are being made selling anti-blackness.