If you didn’t know who Steve Lacy was (like I did), you probably do now. Recently on the Twittersphere screenshots of one of his Tumblr posts surfaced. The post contained the answer to an anonymous question: “…don’t you think you owe it to yourself to break down the dynamics that lead you to have a blatantly anti-black preference in partners ?”
Screenshot from Steve Lacy’s Tumblr
Let that simmer for a moment.
Steve Lacy then goes on to explain how his preferences aren’t anti-black at all because he’s been surrounded and has grown up with black males. They’ve always been his “competitors” and he “sees them as brothers.” What I’m getting that is he doesn’t feel attraction to black guys solely because he’s been around them his whole life. That doesn’t sound right to me, it makes no logical sense. “I’m a n**** from crompton, I don’t dislike black people…I’m just not attracted to black boys. that is it. [sic]”
Lacy feels as it’s almost incestuous for him to want to date black men. How is that not anti-black? How is not being attracted to a whole race of people justified? It isn’t, and shouldn’t be. Lacy has no actual reasoning for his preferences, and just dug himself into a bigger hole.
By him saying they will not date a certain race, he’s treating a whole group of people as the few he’s grown up with, which is making a generalization. Lacy’s comparing every black boy on earth to the people he grew up with, which is inaccurate, but just wrong. That’s equivalent to me meeting one POC who says they hate black people and thinking “Everyone of that particular community is racist.” Not okay.
On top of that, Lacy’s reinforcing the racial hierarchy by putting every other race on a pedestal and lowering black men. Almost as if he’s too good to date black men, that they’re below him. Instead of judging people based on themselves as an individual, he’s putting all black people under an umbrella and completely cutting them out of the picture. If you haven’t met someone, how are they going to be your “competitor” and how will you “see them as brothers?” You can’t because you haven’t met them yet.
Sadly, Lacy isn’t the only person in the world to have racial preferences. Many people do, and for some reason, they think it’s completely valid. When most people think of someone as attractive, it’s usually a non-black person, a white person. In most of the media we consume, we only see white people, society has conditioned us to think that only white is beautiful and everyone is else is “meh.” Diversity is just starting to peep through with beauty ads, showing more Asian, Hispanic, and Black men and women. Movies and TV shows are slowly starting to have more diverse casts.
As a society, we’ve been conditioned to see only white people as beautiful because this has what’s been fed to us by the media. But, people are able to take off their tunnel vision glasses and see the big picture. Steve Lacy is able to change his toxic, anti-black racial preferences in dating and so can anyone else. All people need to do is stand up and realize, that they’re wrong, their preferences are wrong, and then they can move on and deal with their deep-rooted prejudice against people of a certain race.
