Before I even get into Lena Dunham, Odell Beckham Jr., and how her latest foolishness ties into white women’s entitlement to black men, I need to set the foundation of this argument by brushing up on misogynior.
White supremacy has taught us since the beginning of the slave trade that anything white was right. Even centuries after the abolition of slavery, this mindset has seeped into every crevis of our society, especially our beauty standards. While white people are chilling at the top of this standard, people of color have a hierarchy, black people at the bottom of the pecking order. The more Euro-centric features you had, the better. In the black community, this is no different. While dark skinned women are too dark to be appealing, brown skin women could be cuter if they were just a little bit lighter, and light skin women are the most conventionally beautiful of them all (and that depended on how much melanin they had), it was endless. Black women’s beauty depends on how slim our noses are, the texture of our hair, or how big our lips are. There are multi-million dollar companies that cater to fixing these “problems,” to make us as closer to white as we can get. Coming from a community as mine, I knew this like the back of my hand.
It’s no surprise when white women feel they’re above black women. When our society uses white women as a standard for black women to aspire to, the entitlement isn’t all too shocking. They witness everyone, even black men, bash on us. They witness black women try to fit into these standards or reject it, only to be ridiculed for it regardless. They can get away with wearing certain things, doing certain things, acting a certain way, but if a black women were to ever do it or wear it, it’s a no. Many white women, whether they realize it or not, develop a certain arrogance towards black women. “Not even your own men want you,” a white girl told a black woman in an argument. “Drop that Keisha and get you a Janice!” If I told you how many times I’ve come across a meme or a tweet of a white woman expecting her thick thighs and cornrows to have a black woman clutching her pearls, I’d be rich.
So how does this all tie into Lena Dunham and Odell Beckham Jr.?
In no way am I saying Beckham Jr. has the mentality of those men who bash black woman. Dunham, however, is another story. While this has a lot to do with society’s expectations of black men being these aggressively sexual men, it also has a lot to do with her mentality that almost every white woman has when they come across a black man. “I expect him to be attracted to me.”
To Lena, why wouldn’t he be? Black men love white women! That’s all they ever talk about! “After all, [she’s] not a black woman.” But when a black man had the nerve to not even pay attention to her, she immediately slipped into that white feminist mindset and quickly blamed the problem on her unconventional body type. Her entitlement to his attention was so bizarre that this woman sat there and tried to piece together why this black man wasn’t paying attention to her. It blew her mind. But not so surprisingly, this isn’t the first time she’s been shocked that a black man couldn’t give her the time of day. In an interview, she spoke on how Canadian rapper Drake wasn’t interested in her sexually or romantically.
This isn’t the only time white women have been gassed up on the praise black men generally show straight white women and expect that when they come in contact with a black man, she’s the coming of Christ. In many cases their white entitlement puts black men in mild to deadly situation just because they can’t cope with the rejection of someone they expected to praise them. This happens so often that it’s impossible to think this wasn’t what Lena expected, whether she realized the white entitlement or not. Not only does this show how low self-proclaimed feminist Dunham’s white entitlement runs, but how many white women, such as herself, have self-esteem that’s built on misogynoir.
