Though the multiplicity of non-monogamous relationships is neither new nor a white-western invention, it seems non-monogamy is constantly framed in a way that centers whiteness.
Despite the number of black people, including myself, who either participate in non-monogamous arrangements or have no objection to them, there is often a fair amount of resistance to this framing of polyamory that is presented in more mainstream discussions. I envisioned these “enlightened” romantic practices as a means of avoiding so many of the uncomfortable raced and gendered dynamics that I had experienced in previous relationships. But the failure to decenter whiteness and the violent normativities therein meant that these spaces were yet another opportunity for my needs to go unmet as a black woman dating within the cisheteropatriarchy.
There are many different kinds of non-monogamy—open or casual relationships and marriages, cuckoldry, polyfidelity or polyamory or polygamy, and relationship anarchy. As I have both practiced and understood it, non-monogamy is intended to be a “queered” relationship that subverts the possessive nature of monogamy. I personally prefer it, though I can easily have relationships with a single partner; I envision loving relationships as divorced from capitalism, an economic system predicated on the idea of fierce competition over scarce and (at times artificially) finite resources. Love becomes that finite resource, and we often envision our capacity to love within this idea of resource scarcity.
As great as this undermining of capitalistic messaging about relationships may be, the mainstreaming and frequent practice of this “ethical non-monogamy,” i.e. the agreed upon and consensual ways in which one may explore love and sex with multiple people, remains problematic. In the way mainstream constructions fail to extract white supremacy, many white people “ethically” practice non-monogamy in ways that perpetuate the commodification of their non-white partners.
Throughout my life, not impossibly because of my own internalized aspirations for proximity to whiteness, I have almost solely dated and/or had sex with cisgender heterosexual white men. Despite these men’s purportedly progressive political dispositions, I felt sexualized and objectified in uncomfortable and violent ways. There was the classic more overt fetishization where men would talk about how much they loved my racialized body. It ranged from one partner telling me how much he loved the sight of black women in his bed, to another who told me how much he enjoyed having black feminist women submit to him—one Danish partner would continuously tell me how much he loved my “African thighs” or my “big African lips” (funny that he never told me how much he also loved my kinky, nappy “African hair”).
There was also a more subtle objectification: this type by radical and progressive men, men I felt were more interested in my political opinions than the entirety of my womanhood. These are the men who have to “learn” to date black women: men who turned me into their personal political education project, men who exhaustingly requested I explain my womanist politics as though to plug a gap in theirs, men who stayed curiously silent when racist remarks were made by their friends while I was the only black person in that space, men who would always mention “what their radical black girlfriend” thought about a given topic even (and unashamedly) in my presence.
I felt like one of two collectors’ items: a sexy fashionable jungle bunny Barbie for purely private pleasures or for parading about in public, or a sexy enigmatic Angela Davis Barbie dispensing knowledge on command. Sometimes I felt like both at the same time: like a fuckable encyclopedia, ready to be opened and consumed at will. I often felt like an accessory: a “treasured” one, but something nonetheless displayable and dispensable.
White people who practice so-called “ethical” non-monogamy but still treat black women like trading cards are merely taking advantage of the perceived freedom these relationships afford them. Rather than valuing black women as whole and complex beings, we are reduced to the perceived liberal social capital of proximity to blackness. We become a kind of superficial accomplishment to many, a status symbol that encourages our white partners to parade us around like prized poodles to show just how “open-minded” they are. Being in a non-monogamous relationship with a black woman is not the same as treating said partner with the care, honesty, and respect they deserve. A notch in the proverbial belt is not a partner. Neither capitalism nor conservative relationship conventions are undermined when blackness, racialized “otherness,” remains a commodity (there is something a bit troublesome about fucking your oppressor).
This invisibilized maintenance and perpetuation of white supremacy in standard monogamous relationships continues to marginalize non-white participants in non-monogamous ones. There is no playbook on how to open relationships to safely include and accommodate non-white ethnicities as well as transgender or genderqueer partners, neurodiverse or disabled partners, asexual partners, survivors of abuse or other partners bearing vulnerable identities in mainstream circles and discussions.
Rather, we see a mainstream framework of non-monogamy that very frequently recreates cisnormativity, ableism, and white supremacy and where we see both primary and non-primary partners treated in ways that mimic everyday discursive violences.
Decolonizing love - and this should be central to any kind of ethically non-monogamous relationship - involves not only the "queered" removing of love from the pedestal of finiteness, but also the extension of hierarchies of identity that reify hegemonies. This process of decolonizing our love and our relationships means recognizing the ways polyamorous relationships center whiteness in, for example, collecting partners of marginalized identities like diversity trading cards: of valuing partners for various ways they may boost perceived “radical/liberal” social and political capital.
This is not my authoritative declaration that I will never date a white man again, nor is it my saying that it is impossible for white men to be decent partners to partners of color (and I know how much I am catering to the incredibly fragile ego of white hegemonic masculinity in feeling the need to state this). But I am incredibly wary of embarking on romantic relationships with them – and warier still of how I might be treated in a non-monogamous relationship – because of my continued and consistent experiences dating white supremacy.
If we truly wish to decolonize our relationships and our beds, we must be cognizant of how we internalize the hierarchization and objectification of racialized and other marginalized identities in our personal lives. Only in this way can we really create these equitable and horizontal relationships that this framework espouses.