What do people (that aren't Black) see when they see Black people ? And, particularly, what do they see when they see Black women ? I have been haunted by this issue since discovering Nicole R. Fleetwood&Simone Browne's work.

I've been revisiting Sydette Harry's excellent article: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/everyone-watches-nobody-sees-how-black-women-disrupt-surveillance-theory and I've been (recently) haunted by this question: "What is the solution for being constantly watched, if no one sees you at all?"

I can't articulate, though I will try, how much I have been interested in visuality and Blackness. The mugshots, the passport pictures, the videos of Black people enduring violence, the stop&frisk initiative, the auction block, the stage.

And then there are the willful moments of visuality: the streets as runways, the church clothes, the burlesque dancers&the strippers, the nudes exchanged between two willing parties, the family photographs, the Onlyfans pictures&videos, the bathroom selfies.

What happens when Black (and I'm specifically talking about Black women&girls at this point) speech acts occur and how does it intersect with how Black women&girls are seen visually ?

I'm going to ask (or rather, repeat) another question that has been looping in my brain for a while, and the originator of this question is Simone Browne ( @wewatchwatchers): "What happens when my Blackness enters the frame ?"

I want to if at least not solve, explore these questions. How do performance spaces, the current pandemic, stop&frisk policies, the rise of online indie porn (especially with COVID-19), the daily surveillance interact and play off each other ?

And I want to evoke parenting, because of @thotscholar excellent theorizing on the timeline. What happens when Black parents contribute to the surveillance of Black (girl) children, such as T.I checking his daughter's virginity yearly ?

What is the concept of fast tailed girls (look up the excellent #FastTailedGirls hashtag started by Mikki Kendall&Jamie Nesbit Golden) if not a reworking of Jezebel, used to shame Black teenage girls&regulate their sexuality ?

Black girls&women are the paradoxical dot on the foreground. Watched obsessively, while deliberately unseen, they disappear in the static&noise of a pornotropic gaze.

They're too loud (both visually&sonically), yet magically you can't hear them and they disappear from the frame when it comes to credit the gestural&performative behaviors you've cannibalized&distorted.

They're everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Chopped apart and dehumanized while the way they adorn their body is both mocked&used as an ideas' board.

They start trends, but they're very rarely credited, and when they are, it's because they had to fight for it. I'm thinking here of @BriMalandro and her coining the Yehaw agenda, to then have her erased from her own creation in full sight while it was completely misread.

However, I also&principally want to talk about the way Black women&girls are literally perceived in public (and private) spaces.

Black women/girls are endangered because they're thought of as unworthy of protection. Worse, they're considered the danger itself. @Blackamazon's stories about her (violent) interactions with men are part and parcel of these perceptions.

You're not the dainty, fragile white woman/girl. You're not the exotic&submissive Southeast Asian woman/girl. You're not the mysterious Desi woman/girl. You're not the fiery but highly fuckable non Black Latina.

It's not that all those women/girls don't get attacked/harassed, it's the manner in which they get attacked/harassed and how it wildly differs from Black women&girls' harassment/attack.

When you're stuck in the vestibule of girlhood/womanhood (h/t Hortense Spillers), awaiting confirmation papers that'll never arrive, you become the incarnation of all that is monstrous&beastly.

And when you're dark skinned, the effects of such perception considerably amplify. You're no longer a woman/girl, hell you're not even human, you stand for all that is abject&horrid.

The skin obscures everything else. I want to quote here Nicole R. Fleetwood: "And the troubling affect of blackness becomes heightened when located on certain bodies marked as such."

And to add to this: "Colorism attempts to fix a scale of blackness based on dominant structuring principles of the field of vision and through an understanding of the black body as a visibly identifiable body, even in traces."

Jayna Brown speaks of the figure of the octoroon, or the tragic mulatto woman, whose frail body&melancholy have her ultimately dying for the well being of all Black people.

Then, she speaks of the healthy, voluptuous (or rendered so by artificial means) bodies of light skinned (or forcefully made light skinned) Black women on the stage. But here again, the figure of the octoroon reigns supreme.

There is a multiscalar sexual dimension to the way (Black) light skinned women/girls are visually perceived, whether they're mixed or not. They become a hot commodity whose treatment blends sexual fetishism&eroticized exotification.

This is why it's so troubling to see Black men dreaming of having mixed/light skinned "exotic looking" children with non Black women.

There is a tweet that I have never recovered from, which is a Black man showing pictures of racially ambiguous (light-skinned of course) girl children captioning them with "Hispanic&Black. Look at the production".

Besides the utter creepiness of collecting pictures of random girl children, why is a Black man speaking of "production" positively when there is a damaging history of using Black men as breeding stock to create new units of labor ?

Why is he simultaneously sexualizing not only the non Black women of color (of course, none of them dark) that he would "produce" those children with, but also the reproduction of racial ambiguity, and, which is the most worrying, the little girls themselves ?

It's not that this kind of Black men don't also idealize their (potential) racially ambiguous sons, it's that this kind of discourse is openly&shamelessly expressed majorly around the fantasy of "exotic" little girls, brown enough to add flavor.

The desire for whiter looking women, something that Matthew Knowles called (aptly) "eroticized rage", is a phenomenon that is rooted in the fury that Black (cishet) men feel when they're denied the goodies, so to speak, of white heteropatriarchy.

The desire for light skinned non Black women or/and mixed looking Black women follows another logic: that of the disdain of and disgust for Black women that "look it". The visuals of obvious Blackness stains certain bodies and marks them as damaged goods, not to be consumed.

This doesn't mean that Black girls and women whose Blackness is visually obvious don't experience sexual violence: Eldridge Cleaver is one example of repeated violence against&violation of Black girls&women, "rehearsing" the sexual violence he was going to inflict on white women.

This violence is then denied by the perpetrators, who wouldn't be attracted by someone so ugly. But violent, violating sex is not only about pleasure: it's about power, and reifying the person you're assaulting.

Visuality becomes even more complex when it attaches itself to Black trans women. They're caught in the elaborate web of cishet male desire, and the conundrum that this desire engenders.