these kinda takes always annoy me because they horribly undermine just how foundational Desire/ability is to colorism and the varying ways it impacts darkskin people.

should we be acknowledging how else colorism manifests? yes. but it’s not an “instead of...”

who you date and/or fuck matters because what you Desire manifests in every other way you navigate the world.

Wilderson calls it the libidinal economy. i call it desire capital. there are lots of names for it. but the reality is that the invisibilities of our Desires have a very visible effect on and shaping of the World in which we live.

colorism is not rendered an “illegitimate” system because a conversation centers who is and is not being fucked. it simply means we haven’t thought deeply enough around how who is always already unDesirable (to us) plays a role in who is and is not protected in the world.

i wrote a chapter in my book about this very thing a month or so ago as it relates to fat Black folks. the conversations are parallel in that way.

the ways that desire capital is distributed in dating and/or fucking matters, too. please stop pretending it doesn’t.