The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance

I joined Professor Sabrina Strings, Ph.D. and John Busbee, founder and host of The Culture Buzz, on his show to discuss Strings' new book

I’m back, after a break spent focusing on a book project! This week, I’m discussing The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance by Sabrina Strings, Ph.D.

I recently had the honor of co-hosting an episode of The Culture Buzz on KFMG 98.9 FM with John Busbee. John’s weekly program (every Wednesday, 11:00-1:00 CT) spotlights talented creatives, plus he produces an informative weekly newsletter listing practically everything that’s happening culturally in the Des Moines area. (Check out his past interviews here).

On the episode, we spoke with Sabrina Strings, Ph.D., professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, about her new book, The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance. Strings told us the impetus for her book began with the critical analysis of her own dating experiences in 2011, after which she realized there was a bigger issue: The dissolution of romance in the U.S.

Since Strings’ previous book, Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, is on my wish list, I jumped at the opportunity to read her new book, knowing nothing about it other than the title. After I received a review copy of The End of Love, I dug in.

In showing us how we got to where we are today, The End of Love takes the reader on a historical journey. From the origination of romance as a Western construct in the 17th century, to slavery, to Jim Crow, to the civil rights movement, along with the influence of feminism, U.S. presidents, and music, Strings shows us how this history has affected women in general, but Black women specifically.

The End of Love was a tough (but informative) read. Strings doesn’t sugar-coat her personal story nor the larger history—that is, the impact this history has had in keeping Black women at the bottom of the romantic-desirability and beauty scale, especially darker-skinned Black women and those deemed “insufficiently white.”

Unsurprisingly, it began with slavery

In past articles, I have mentioned how, in the 1800s, leading “scientists” like Samuel George Morton, Josiah Clark Nott, and Louis Agassiz proclaimed that Black people belonged to an entirely different species—unsurprisingly, an inferior one.

Strings shows that even before this, Black women were deemed contemptible. She writes:

By the mid-1700s, Black women were overwhelmingly described in racial science sourcebooks with derision and disgust. Their forms, once praised as peerless, where increasingly described as big bellied, a stand-in for grotesque.

Strings then adds that their sexuality was further degraded “as many argued that Black women would lie with anything on two legs, man or ape.”

Proclaiming Black people as subhuman was used to justify slavery; labeling Black women as lascivious was used to justify the enslaver’s (or any white man’s) right to breed them like cattle, rape them, or give them to others to rape. This placed Black women in what Strings calls The Commons—meaning, Black women were communal property of white men.

As Strings writes:

Scientific racists asserted that they (Black women) were ugly but/and hypersexual, undesirable yet DTF.

If we tie this back to romance, given that romantic suitability required the beauty and virtue inherent in white women, Black women were eliminated from being worthy of love, let alone romance.

W/horification of Black women still prevalent today

In our The Culture Buzz interview, Strings shared she’d been upset by the misrepresentation of Black women in mainstream hip hop for a long time. As she was working on her book, she realized, “Something’s going on here, people are undervaluing the role of music in the shaping of culture.”

During the civil rights era, messages of “Black love, community uplift, and solidarity” were present in music geared towards Black listeners and these messages, infused with resistance, spilled over into early hip hop when it arrived in the 70s. Strings states that during the golden age of hip hop—1980 to 1995—rap emerged, focusing on themes around poverty, police brutality, and failing schools experienced in lower-income Black communities.

Sabrina Strings, Ph.D., author of The End of Love: Racism, Sexism, and the Death of Romance. Courtesy of SabrinaSprings.com.

But by the late 80s, wealth, status and sexual conquests began to infiltrate rap, along with “guns, getting high, and fucking.” Black women became “bitches” and “hoes,” with some artists openly saying not to fall in love with Black women. Lines like “It ain’t no fun if the homies can’t have none” from Snoop Dogg’s aptly titled, “Ain’t No Fun,” puts Black women back in The Commons—now communal white male property.

But it’s not just Black men reveling in the denigration of Black women. It’s also the multinational corporations that control the hip hop and rap that gets released and promoted, as M.K. Asante Jr. discusses in his book, It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation.

Strings points out that:

White men have been rap’s primary consumers since its crossover during the early 1990s, during the golden age of rap, when playful and conscious hip-hop were still getting heavy play. But this period also marked the moment when hardcore rap—the kind about Black men killing one another and/or sexually exploiting Black women—began to dominate the genre through its sheer sales pitch alone.  

Beginning in the late 80s, Strings notes, “That Black women should be thingified, that we should be for ‘fucking,’ preferably collectively, instead of for loving, was only part of the appeal of hip-hop for young Black (and white) men.”

Enter another carryover from slavery that’s noticeable in hip hop and rap today—dividing Black people by skin tone, with Blacks with lighter skin tones getting “preferential” treatment. Some rap artists directly denigrated dark-skinned women, like Kodak Black, who stated in a 2017 interview that they’re “’too tough” and “too gutter.” Many others feature only light-skinned or “racially ambiguous” women in their videos. Among others, Strings cites Drake’s “Hotline Bling” as an example, but a quick perusal of rap videos on YouTube reveals countless others.

Just when it couldn’t get worse for Black women, enter “pimp-porn” rap

Rap started glamorizing the pimp life, with numerous rappers seemingly idolizing Hugh Hefner. (Side note: My sister just reminded me that Trump often appeared in rap, though not always idolized. This recent NBC article, “Trump courts rappers as surrogates for his campaign to win more voters of color,” is interesting, but that’s way too much to unpack in this column.)  

Strings points out what was going on historically around the time of Playboy’s heyday. The backlash of feminism resulted in the beginning of the fuckboys of today. Fuckboys, I learned, are men who are players—men who can’t commit. When (white) women started insisting on equality and careers, white men started encouraging men to avoid these women. As feminists continued to “ruin marriage,” Esquire, a leading men’s magazine, featured articles and editorials encouraging men to avoid these women and not to marry them.

Then Playboy came along and took anti-marriage and anti-commitment to a whole new level.

It continued the white standard of beauty, while objectifying women.

Hefner supported equal pay and birth control for women, two facets of feminism, but only because, Strings writes, “... these features of feminism fit comfortably inside Hef’s view that the new manhood should be about freewheeling fun with liberated chicks ... unplanned pregnancies and dependent partners were a real drag ... They conflicted with a suave public image and unencumbered shagging with single independent ‘girls.’” If men married, a wife wouldn’t be selected from these women.

String notes:

“The prototypical partner for the playboy was one willing to be sexy at work, without the expectation for any payment for what—for all intents and purposes—constituted sex work. She had to be a hot young (white) thing, swishing her tail for her male counterpart with absolutely no expectation for any compensation. Free sex-based labor. No possibility for promotion.”

Just like Playboy, pimp rap encouraged men to refuse women love and money. Instead, it promoted “Black men’s ability to make money off the real and metaphorical sale of Black and other insufficiently white women.” So instead of offering love to Black women, there’s the w/horification of them.

Strings summarizes the difference between Playboy and pimp rap in a mouth-dropping way:

Hef was selling the fantasy of access to sufficiently white women to all men, although it was clear from the outset that white men were his target audience. Rappers have been selling the exploitation and denigration of Black (and other insufficiently white) women to a largely white male audience at a profit. If Dave Chapelle’s analysis of his own experience is to be taken seriously, when Black men work as intermediaries to meet white male desires, they, too, are pimped.

By this, String is referring to Chapelle’s explanation of why he walked out of the middle of the filming of the third season of his show on Comedy Central—because he felt that the network had become the pimp, and he was the ho.

It’s not all about hip hop and rap but ...

Strings also discussed the influence that internet dating, porn, and more has had on the death of romance, plus the problems with the Romantic Ideal along with ideas for the path forward. But the sections on hip hop and rap and their depiction of Black women resonated with me the most. To use one’s voice to spread such hate and vitriol against Black women when one could use it to uplift and amplify and unify is unfathomable to me.

Because it hurts. Perhaps even more so, coming from Black men.

I’d like to say to them, like a co-worker who identified as gay that I’d inadvertently and mortifyingly offended decades ago said to me, “I expected you, of all people, to understand. I expected more of you.”

As a former romance author, I’m still thinking about this book. As someone who listens to hip hop, I’m still thinking about this book. As someone who has had periods of nightmarish dates, I’m still thinking about this book. I might have more to say about this next week. Or I might just share my review of The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nursed Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis by Maria Smilios. But I’ve also been traveling so I might just write about that, instead. At any rate, please check back next week!

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