Whiteness has always been hungry…
Its appetite is insatiable, a hunger that stretches from the plantation to the porn site, from the auction block to the algorithm. What it hungers for is Blackness itself. It is the appetite of a system that reduces people to objects, devours them, and yet is never satisfied.
From the earliest encounters of European imperialism, the colonial imagination developed a voyeuristic fascination with Black bodies. Blackness was constructed as simultaneously exotic, uncivilised, and animalistic. This narrative not only justified enslavement and exploitation, but also paved the way for the systemic sexual violence that Black people endured.
Captives being brought on board a slave ship on the west coast of Africa. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Images
On slave ships, Africans were chained, branded, and catalogued as cargo. On the auction block, Black men were stripped, examined, and displayed naked for purchase. Their teeth, muscles, and genitals were evaluated with the same cold calculations used for livestock.
Men were sold at higher prices based on the racist assumption that larger genitalia promised not only sexual potency, but greater reproductive capacity, thus increasing the enslaver’s profit.
Photograph of Renty Taylor, taken by Joseph T. Zealy under the supervision of Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz in March 1850.
Enslavers turned to reproduction as a mechanism of labour supply. Auctioneers highlighted the supposed potency of Black men, reinforcing a grotesque economy where Black sexuality was not only surveilled but instrumentalised for white wealth. The flesh of Black men was consumed both by physical labour and by the voyeuristic gaze of white society.
Yet the white gaze has never been merely economic; it has been erotic. From the colonial imagination onward, The Black man was imagined as beast, a figure of brute force and uncontrollable desire, and yet it was precisely this construction that whiteness fetishised.
Jack was photographed along with other enslaved people for Louis Agassiz who used the images to advance his pro-slavery arguments and theories of racial hierarchy.
The obsession with penis size reduced the Black man to a set of reproductive organs, stripped of individuality or subjectivity.
In pornography, this legacy thrives. Terms like “BBC” (Big Black Cock) “Black Bull” and the cuckhold fantasy sustain a racialised sexual economy rooted in slavery.
The reduction of Black men to animal status exposes the fragility of the human as a category. The “human,” as whiteness constructs it, requires the dehumanised Black other in order to stabilise itself. Thus, the endless hunger: without Black flesh to devour, whiteness confronts its own void.
Whiteness cannot sustain itself from within, it reaches outward. It builds its identity by consuming others—by extracting labour, by appropriating culture, by fetishising bodies. Its survival is predicated on the consumption of what is alive, generative, and rich with meaning.
Negrophilia—white society’s fascination with Blackness—extends beyond the erotic into every cultural register. White hunger devours Black culture, Black style, Black vitality. From jazz to hip-hop, from the spectacle of Black athletes to the commodification of Black fashion. White society craves the rhythm, fire, and radiance of Black life.
Comme des Garçons menswear FW’20
The Black body becomes the screen onto which whiteness projects its own emptiness, the vessel through which it seeks to secure its sense of life.
Unlike cultures rooted in shared histories, languages, or traditions, whiteness defines itself negatively — not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is constructed through opposition: not Black, not Indigenous, not immigrant, not Other. This lack produces hunger.
At its core, whiteness is a void that cannot be filled. It devours culture after culture, body after body, yet remains unsatisfied. Because the act of consumption never resolves the lack — it only deepens it.