We aren’t that far removed in this country from where just looking at a white woman would get a black man hung from a tree.
While we have made a lot of progress in interracial relationships, we aren’t at the point where everyone is cool with black men dating white women.
We certainly aren’t past the point where black men aren’t still stereotyped as oversexualized Mandingo warriors and white women are soft lily-white wall flowers.
We aren’t past the point where any accusation towards a black men coming from a white woman will carry more weight in our society. Where the presumed guilt of the black man is thought of more highly than his presumed innocence.
In my lifetime I’ve dated women of all different races, I can tell the difference in how I am perceived depending on who I am with.
Black men are often seen as predators as soon as we walked out of the door, so when someone like Lena Dunham says something like this about Odell Beckham Jr. it just reinforces those stereotypes.
“I was sitting next to Odell Beckham Jr., and it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards,” Dunham said in a chat with Amy Schumer.
“He was like, ‘That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.’ It wasn’t mean — he just seemed confused.”
“The vibe was very much like, ‘Do I want to f— it? Is it wearing a … yep, it’s wearing a tuxedo. I’m going to go back to my cell phone,’” she said. “ It was like we were forced to be together, and he literally was scrolling Instagram rather than have to look at a woman in a bow tie. I was like, ‘This should be called the Metropolitan Museum of Getting Rejected by Athletes.’”
Black men at an early age are taught to be leery of certain things because you don’t want to be falsely accused or have your name dragged through the mud.
My grandmother always told me and she wasn’t one to sugarcoat things.
“They will always believe a white person over you.”
If we look or compliment women we are predators, if we don’t look, we are still predators, but now we are predators with a preference.
As a woman Lena Dunham surely wouldn’t want stereotypes latched on to her, she should think about that next time when she does it to black men.
Flip the page for her apology that is more about her than Odell Beckham Jr.
