prince charming, please don't pick the black girl.

on the perils of dating a white it boy.

you never really forget your first humbling.

we were stood about waiting for the bus to arrive when she said it. i didn’t know her, not well enough to warrant the comment anyway but i was good at drawing attention, even then. even from the boy i’d later find she’d been a little bit in love with for years. he’d laughed at something i’d said and for that, i had to be punished. adolescent rage; fear it with all your might.

i’d made the mistake of welcoming her into our little circle for the trip into town; friend of my friend and all that. little did i know she’d trigger an insecurity that would follow me around, phantom like, for years.

you know, you’d be really pretty if your lips fit your face. if they weren’t so big and dark...

she’d leaned forward conspiratorially as she said it, but she and i both knew everyone in the group had heard her. i used to replay that moment over and over, humiliated for months after it happened. the awkwardness that followed, the way he glanced down at my lips as if to confirm for himself if what she’d said had been true. my own bewildered silence. i wish i could go back and protect that girl. the bus pulled up a heartbeat later; i remember her walking off with him in tow.

it goes without saying that she- like the skinny skater boy she had disintegrated my self-confidence for- was white and lipless and all the things we’d been taught to covet in a eurocentric world. she taught me a valuable lesson about fragile egos and whiteness. she also taught me that there were people who were attracted enough to robert pattinson they’d willingly and unironically cover their phone case in stickers of his face.

fitting that the first twihard i ever met in person was also the first white woman who made me feel like crawling into myself for no other reason than my blackness.

wallahi this moment never ceases to make me cackle. that first film is a comedy; argue with the wall.

if you do not recognize the term twihard, i envy you. what a bright, uncluttered place your mind must be. there are few pieces of media more seminal in our generation’s time than the twilight saga. there is so much to say about the politics at play in that universe, about just how influential stephenie meyer’s horny bestial coming of age drama has been on YA media in general but today, i’m interested in dissecting one specific part of the twilight universe; the misogynoir that infects the fandom.

before robert pattinson cemented himself as an avant garde thespian renown for playing weird little freaks in critically acclaimed dramas, he was still the supposed property of an entire legion of teenage girls obsessed with his every move thanks to his portrayal of edward cullen, a pasty vampire with about as much charisma as a bag of flour. to say that he became a household name overnight would not be an exaggeration. there was something feverish and alarming about the level of public scrutiny and obsession that young cast was subjected to, heightened by online fan forums and the regular tabloid press.

fame is a peculiar burden to have to carry; i empathize with how consistently he- like the rest of that cast, kristen in particular- was flogged like horsemeat to appease the fandom. to walk around being mobbed by perfect strangers who feel they have a claim over you…it’s a brand of madness i wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. the worst part of that kind of crazed attention though is that it is never contained to just the person. anyone in their orbit becomes victimized alongside them, including their lovers.

the seminal r patz relationship remains in my eyes the years he and fka twigs dated.

i remember envying him (i think the closest i’ve ever come to bisexuality was seeing her perform water me live at glastonbury; megan thee stallion’s recent coachella set was a close second awakening). twigs to us brit teens was a little bit of an alternative icon, even back then. she’s always been weird (complimentary), a walking contradiction. you’ll see her small and almost timid in interviews but then watch her perform this theater of erotic power when she steps on stage. a fashion doll, a cuntress in every sense of the word. in short, i always thought she was far too interesting for him.

his fans (naturally) didn’t agree.

every fan post on places like reddit about the couple looked like they’d been written by klan members, they were so unhinged in their racism. it was slurs galore on twitter, the singer called everything except her name by strangers made bold by the internet’s anonymity. they would compare her to monkeys, pulling up images of gorillas sat in the same pose twigs was, or wearing the same colored clothing.

it became an almost macabre tradition by his fans, to the point that it started to take a toll on the singer psychologically.

‘it had this massive dysmorphic effect on me for about six months to a year…every time i saw my pictures and photographs i would think ‘gosh i look like a monkey. and people are going to say you look like a monkey. so in need to really try and hide this monkeyness that i have, because otherwise, people are going to come for me’

and all because she what? she dared to date their parasocial boyfriend?

when you have low self-esteem as a woman, you covet the attention of men to the detriment of all. the term ‘pick me’ has-like all cultural vernacular spread online- lost any of the original bite and discernment it once did. that woman the phrase once described though, the one who is willing to bend over backwards just to be accepted as desirable by a man operates out of a place of almost painful insecurity. add to that a racialised superiority complex that has taught her that her whiteness alone makes her better than the black girl she believes herself to be in competition with, and she becomes dangerous. venomous in her capacity to harm and abuse.

the xenophobic abuse twigs received in that relationship was so burdensome, it caused the implosion of the couple’s engagement and led to their subsequent break up. pattinson notably (as in noted by me, as in i will never let anyone forget his spinelessness until the day i die, no matter how many brilliant bong joon ho films he makes) never made any public statement defending his fiance nor denouncing the racism his fandom was responsible for. certifiably nauseating.

‘he was their white prince charming and i think they considered that he should be with someone white and blonde and not me’

it’s a line that hasn’t left my brain since i read it, probably because you can apply it to so many other women.

zendaya- sweet, unproblematic zendaya- must now contend with some of the vilest twitter posts you can imagine since it became clear that she and tom holland were dating. when tom hiddleston was photographed walking hand in hand with actress zawe ashton, she became victim to the same type of harassment. as was taylor russell thanks to harry styles’ fans. same thing happened to jaz sinclair when she and ross lynch started seeing one another.

these fans view these men and their love as prizes to be won. in their delusion, the most ideal thing would be for their favorite pop star or actor to end up with them, for that metaphorical glass slipper to be theirs. if though that isn’t possible, in their eyes the least these men could do is ‘cheat’ on them with someone they view as a worthy opponent. their lovers become villains to tear down; their black lovers become targets to unleash all that white feminine envy on.

they don’t mind losing to a white woman; it’s the beyonce/billie ellish thing. billie sat there in her little LL Cool J get-up (why she always looks like a backup dancer in an old Biggie video is beyond me) and watched several other artists win grammy’s she’d also been nominated for. but it’s the one she lost to the black woman people can’t stop talking about. it is all about what they think we are deserving of.

the most blatant example of all of this is, of course, meghan markle- our doomed cinderella.

a study in framing: meghan markle.

in order to explain ‘the meghan effect’, i first have to familiarize all my non-brits readers about the british public’s relationship to the royal family.

like with most (not all) conservative, ‘tradition’ based politics, it is the old lot who care about the monarchy. in this country, the closer you are to the grave, the more likely it is that you are a royalist. most of our generation had our interest culturally quipped with meghan’s entrance into the family after they got married, but the abuse she faced very quickly reminded everyone about why the royal family is such an absurd cultural construct to start with, a relic of britian’s colonial heyday, clutching at any and all attempts at relevancy. harry has always been the ‘cool’ brother. part of that comes from the fact that he has quite publicly rallied against his own family and the archaicness of the institution he was meant to serve.

to the royalists, he was as good as their adopted son. they watched as princess diana walked out with him in her arms mere hours after she gave birth to show him to the world’s media and then a decade and a bit later watched again as he walked sullen and traumatized behind her casket, his grief put on display by the same royal family that caused her to flee to begin with. every time i see that video of him doing the funeral walk, it want to strangle the lipless fuck he calls a father.

because his pain was so public, it was easy to empathize with him. nazi costume parties and drunk nights out were all brushed off as rebelliousness borne out of grief. when he brought home a freckled biracial actress, i think many were accepting of it to start with as yet another one of his cutesy little stunts. those early days before the tear down were joyous if not patronizingly sweet. meghan’s charm matched his own, their royal excursions together fun enough to almost make you forgot what imperial institution all the charisma was in service to.

what meghan wore, how she conducted herself and who she knew were all subject to criticism and coverage; it became quite common for an unrelenting hoard of photographers and journalists to be present at all hours, at all places that she and prince harry were present. the lack of privacy may have been easy to forgive for the couple if the coverage they’d received remained balanced though. it did not.

slowly the coverage started to take a turn.

by the time that meghan had left the royal family, gone was the narrative of a fairytale romance, of a nation excited to welcome this dynamic, modern woman into one of the world’s oldest institutions. suddenly there were articles everywhere debating whether or not she would be an appropriate fit for britain’s beloved prince.

one of the most infamous pieces that came out during this period was an article by the daily mail with a headline that read:

the eagerness to play on the alleged ‘criminality’ of meghan’s place of birth- a place that the writer of the piece describes as “plagued by crime and riddled with street gangs”- is a classic example of playing on racial stereotypes to frame the woman as a product of a threatening environment. by punning on the popular name of the film, to be “straight outta compton” is to be predisposed to an inherent criminality, plagued by the same ‘violent’ tendencies white people perceive working class black people to be born encoded with.

in the imagination of white royalists all over the country, meghan would pull out a glock at the dinner table if anyone dare not pass her the mushy peas come supper time.

the daily mail is quite frankly the toilet of british media, a paper good only for wiping your arse with after a vindaloo curry. the power it holds should be alarming. the closest comparison i can make for my yankee readers is fox news. think completely shameless in their misreporting, bolstered by the support of the wealthy political class. a girl i went to school with now writes for them; it must be nice to have a job where you can go a whole shift without having to use your brain.

everything exists in a context. britian has the last decade or so become a petridish of blatant political xenophobia, jolted to the right by a Brexit referendum that unleashed archaic anti-migrant sentiment. our prime minister at the time boris johnson was basically the shein donald trump, a man who once called black people “flag-waving picannies” with “watermelon smiles” in an article he wrote for the telegraph. if anyone had stopped even for just a minute and questioned what about a pilates princess with a lifestyle blog and wealthy white friends could possibly count as ‘ghetto’ or ‘dangerous’, things might have been different.

when it comes to “framing” a public figure like meghan markle, we must consider the motivations, conscious or habitual of the people who were tasked with presenting who she was to the public. her every move (and avocado purchase) was reported on and dissected first in the tabloids and then-because those papers are so powerful and thus dictate the news agenda- discussed again on TV and radio.

i wish i were making this up.

the tabloids here are like the american ones but on crack. think about how they hounded britney spears in the 00s and then add to that an audacity that comes from having the backing of a royal family who were signing off on this coverage in the hopes of distracting from other scandalous happenings. harry himself talked about the ‘one for you, one for me’ understanding his family have had for decades with country’s papers.

God only knows what it must have been like in that palace for her. she was suicidal, her mental health at such a low point that harry was forced to do the most unspeakable thing a royal can in their eyes and leave it all behind. again, it is hard to impress upon you all how radical an act it was for a man quite literally groomed to serve the crown first and foremost. prince andrew was busy bumping coochies with jeffrey epstein, paying 12 million pounds to virginia giuffre after his assault of her and yet somehow, it is meghan the british public can’t stomach. don’t piss me off.

we can’t talk about the misogynoir these women face without also pointing out that they all share a very blatant trait: these are all light skin, biracial women. it would take another ten thousand words to decipher how america’s perception of what counts as ‘black’ differs to how we in england do but the most important thing to note is that even if we communally do not view these women as black women, the fans who are abusing them most certainly do.

it's funny; their proximity to whiteness both culturally and aesthetically is likely part of what makes them covetable and attractive to start with. they are close enough to whiteness to not disturb these men’s eurocentric palates and yet they’re ‘exotic’ (the daily mail literally referred to meghan as harry’s ‘exotic lover’) enough in their eyes to count for intrigue. none of that, though, has been enough to save them from the racism being non-white brings with it. can you imagine if meghan had been a darker woman? if she had my mother’s nose, African and proud or my brother’s coarse curls? what kind of demented abuse would they have added to the vile racism she was already contending with?

beyond that infamous ‘where you silent or where you silenced?’ clip, i think we’ve all managed to forget the oprah interview meghan gave in which she conceded a member of the royal family asked her what color her baby would be when it was born (my bet’s on it being that balding demon william). it’s such vulgar, old-fashioned keep the bloodline ‘pure’ type racism; it never fails to knock the wind out of me. and she was asked that question whilst being lighter than any paper bag i’ve ever lain eyes on.

the thing about this ugly step sister syndrome i’m talking about here is that it has consequences for everyone involved in these swirl relationships. it is never comparable to what their partner’s face (because again: racism) but these fans also make sure their white it boys feels the full burn of their disapproval.

harry was punished for his refusal to cast meghan aside, his own reputation demolished by the media as they eagerly tore him down from the pedestal they placed him on. all that goodwill he once had is now nowhere to be seen. like in laws shaming him for bringing a black girl home, the royalists picked a side with vim and it was decidedly not the one with the black girl on it. a few of the other men i mentioned suffered a similar fate, namely tom holland who is also getting pushback through association.

others do as robert pattinson did and instead settle down with white girls like suki waterhouse who crop their black costars out of instagram pictures and fit perfectly into the white utopia their fans dream up for them. being a black girl who loves culture means carrying around a certain trauma. for instance if you are around my age, the name bonnie bennett will bring forth PTSD flashbacks of bad wigs and horrid fandom racism (if julie plec has no haters, i am dead. an islamophobic vampire diaries stan has killed me).

we have watched over and over as women who have committed no crimes are crucified for daring to have what these white fans crave for themselves. the message being perpetuated in these cultural spaces is clear; you do not belong here. having to contend with that dismissal over and over again is jarring.

even now, i’ll catch my hand creeping up to cover the bottom half of my face whenever i laugh, a habit incurred from that one catty comment by the bus stop. the irony here is that a few months ago, a friend of mine sent me an instagram story posted by none other than little miss your African lips are too much herself. beloved reader, the girl was selling lip plumper she told her dim-witted followers was ‘life changing’. i didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

i wonder how many black women are walking around with scars inflicted by white people with low racial self-esteem. i wonder when we’ll stop having to brace ourselves for hate trains designed to humble us in a world that also covets everything that makes us unique. they wear their nails like us and tan their skin and order silk bonnets to sleep in while calling us monkeys. i cannot think of a single living white man i’d willingly shoulder that kind of burden for (except maybe ethan hawke; you lot had better squash the urge to discourse about our age gap when you inevitably see us walking hand in hand like a fly hovering over your head in july).