VICE: What I Learned as a Black Man Traveling Through the Terrifying Heart of America

Unfortunately, I was also disenchanted by the undercurrent of racial hate that I saw from coast to coast. As a sort of baptism by fire, one of our first stops was an interracial cuckold porn shoot, where I saw the age-old stereotypes of black men as savage, sex-crazed beasts turned into XXX entertainment. As I watched a white actress and two hulking brothers dripping in baby oil get it on, the white director told me the film's target audience was mainly white southerners, a demographic whom he said actually begged his studio for more degradation and sexual minstrelsy. There's a kind of terrible logic to that: You'd only find those sorts of scenes sexy if you were fearful of and repulsed by black men, if you saw them not as people but as some kind of fierce, untamed taboo.

What was fascinating to me was how that piece of pornography was so steeped in plantation-era raceplay. The stereotype of black men as a sexual aggressors against white women was often used as one of the main excuses to subjugate blacks—it also obscures the actual history of rape in America slavery, once a routine practice in this country. How did we get so far from truth in our ideas about each other?

I thought a lot about the real and imagined history of slavery on my trip across the country. Time and time again, I came across distorted takes on its practice and ramifications, which have lead me to feel that even though more than 150 years have elapsed since the Civil War, the rot at the core of the American experiment remains. What distraught me the most was this sort of hate-filled nostalgia people I met seemed to have. They fetishized bygone eras that were defined by the brutalization and subjugation of my ancestors. [...]

I'm reminded of a quote from Don DeLillo's classic novel White Noise: "Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence." I'm also reminded of Beenie Man, who said basically the same thing but shorter: "When yuh live in the past, yuh lost."

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