Race & Desirability Politics

Bei nicht-monogamen Beziehungsmodellen scheiden sich die Geister. Die einen sehen darin Freiheit, die anderen pure Bindungsangst. Eine Frage, die dabei kaum gestellt wird: Warum lieben wir eigentlich so, wie wir lieben? Warum gilt Monogamie als Standard, den man verteidigen oder verlassen kann, aber nie als Konstrukt mit eigener Geschichte? Und was hat die eigene Präferenz bei der Partner*innenwahl mit Rassismus zu tun? Millie Boella und Nick Piperno von @decolonizinglove stellen genau diese Fragen. Im Interview sprechen die beiden Beziehungscoaches darüber, wie tief koloniale Narrative in unser Liebesleben eingeschrieben sind, welche Verbindung es zwischen Polyamorie und Queerness gibt und warum Nicht-Monogamie unbedingt auch im Zusammenhang mit kritischer Männlichkeit gedacht werden muss. 🔗 Das vollständige Interview findest du jetzt im Magazin über den Link in unserem Profil. [🖼️: Bildbeschreibung im Alternativtext]

Also, now that it’s becoming clearer that figures connected to the Epstein network, like Les Wexner, who controlled major brands such as Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, played a role in shaping the extremely narrow and harmful beauty standards of the 1990s and 2000s, it’s worth paying attention to what’s happening culturally right now. We’re living through a moment of an Epstein regime, at the same time, we’re seeing the reappearance of similarly restrictive beauty ideals. When power consolidates in the hands of a small cultural elite, beauty standards often tighten in ways that discipline bodies. Everything is connected. stitch with MiaMariscano on Tiktok

Baloji, a Congolese rapper, has a line where he says he is going to become so big that he'll ensure the world knows who Patrice Lumumba is. That through his fame, a door would swing open to a man the world was deliberately taught to forget. That lyric is a mission statement. It understands something profound: that visibility is a form of justice, and that Black and African icons have been systematically erased. And there is an entire constellation of names that deserve that same moment of discovery. Winnie was more iconic for me growing up than Nelson. I want the world to know them not as footnotes or February features, but as the permanent, luminous fixtures they are. I want their names in the mouths of people who look nothing like them, because that is what it means to belong to human history rather than just to one corner of it. And that is exactly what made doing this trending challenge with Nick so meaningful. My work is not about exclusion but an invitation. Knowledge has to start: at home, with the people closest to us. So how many of these folks did you know? 💖 Use our Relationship Agreement Generator to set boundaries and agreements for your polycule! Also in bio.

This post was inspired by watching three racialized progressive women be slandered in my feed this week: Amanda Seales (who I think is brilliant), Stacey Patton being labeled “transphobic” as she releases a book on America’s history of lynching Black children, and a socialist federal candidate in Canada’s by-election being casually called “ableist” with little beyond assumption. I’ve experienced this too. As one of the few Black African educators bringing explicit decolonial politics into polyamory spaces at this scale, I know that when you occupy those intersections unapologetically, you become a target. What was most disorienting was watching the language of accountability and “calling in” used in ways that had nothing to do with transformative justice. Language meant for repair was being weaponized. When Black women and other radical women start connecting dots that threaten colonial and patriarchal structures, slander often follows. People dig up past statements, strip them of context, and redeploy them to bury the person in order to bury the work. Trigger words that mobilize the left: elitist, condescending, transphobic, Zionist, ableist etc carry real weight, which is why they’re effective when used strategically. Naming real harm matters. Weaponizing those labels to mobilize harassment does not. I’ve had people privately try to recruit me into campaigns to cancel other Black women creators. My response is always the same: absolutely not. We can do better.

This is the last week of Black History Month, February 28th. They gave us the shortest month of the year, but as always, we take what we’re given and create magic. Blackness is powerful, a thread that weaves together the world’s oldest cultures with those who have been made the fulcrum of empire, the central point upon which power and exploitation have been balanced. One of the greatest acts of defiance against empire has been the endurance of Black love, community-building, and kinship. Black women and queer folks, in particular, have been at the heart of this labor, crafting support networks, healing wounds inflicted by colonial violence, and reimagining futures outside of oppression. This is precisely why European patriarchy imposed restrictive laws against women and queerness— ecause these structures of care and fluidity threatened the rigid hierarchies of white supremacy. In many of our ancestral cultures, women held central political, spiritual, and economic roles, and queer people were not only accepted but often revered, serving as spiritual leaders, healers, or key figures in our most sacred celebrations. It is disheartening to see these puritanical and religious laws still upheld across the African continent and diaspora, yet many continue to challenge them, fighting to reclaim the traditions that have always been ours. Our histories have never known love as possession or care as conditional. Love, in its truest form, has always been abundant. Kinship has always been built on reciprocity, not restriction. And sexuality deeply intertwined with earth, spirit, and celebration has never carried the weight of Western shame. To decolonize is not just to resist, but to remember. To unearth what was buried, to speak what was silenced, to live in ways that feel true to who we have always been. Blackness is not just survival, it is creation, transformation, and boundless possibility. And as this month comes to a close, the work continues. Because our history is not confined to 28 days.

Control over who you’re allowed to love, desire, befriend, or build care is one of the oldest ways societies reproduce themselves. When power structures draw lines around race, class, body size, gender, religion, and “respectability,” they aren’t protecting people they’re protecting hierarchies. Those boundaries quietly decide who gets access to resources, legitimacy, safety, and generational stability. Interracial love threatened segregation. Cross-class intimacy threatened inheritance. Queer relationships threatened rigid gender labor roles. Fat bodies loving freely threaten beauty economies built on shame. Every time people connect across these lines, it destabilizes the social order that keeps wealth, power, and worth concentrated in a few hands. So we are disciplined on what kinds of relationships are acceptable and which are framed as risky, embarrassing, or wrong. This is how norms become self-policing. You don’t need constant laws when people internalize the rules and enforce them on each other. And when people start forming bonds that cross those boundaries whether through polyamory, queer kinship, chosen family with folks you're not supposed to like, or interracial community it’s not just seen as personal rebellion. It’s experienced by the system as a threat to the norms that keep inequality stable.

Attraction is subjective, and I’m not interested in reinforcing conventional beauty standards in the first place. Those standards are tied up with Eurocentric, patriarchal ideas about whose bodies are “valuable.” But it’s still worth naming what’s happening when anti-poly people push the trope that polyamorists are “unattractive.” It's a smear tactic. It’s meant to delegitimize polyamory by framing it as something only “undesirable” people would choose, and it leans on queerphobic logic that treats non-normative intimacy as inherently lesser. It also reveals how possessive monogamy culture often links worth to ownership. The subtext is: if someone is “high value,” they should be claimed, guarded, and competed for. So polyamory gets painted as a consolation prize rather than a valid relationship structure. The irony is that there plenty of poly people who fit conventional attractiveness norms. The trope persists anyway because it’s not about accuracy, it’s about discouraging curiosity about the competition. If polyamory looks appealing, more people might question compulsory monogamy, and that threatens a whole social story we’re trained to treat as the default. So no, we don’t need to validate beauty hierarchies. We do need to clock when “you’re ugly” is being used as propaganda to shame people out of relational freedom. And a little pettiness against poly hate every once in a while is okay. 🤝 Need polyamory support? Book a 1:1 coaching session or use our Relationship Agreement Generator to set boundaries for your polycule 🔗. Links in bio 👆✨

There has been considerable analysis of what it means for a president to carry civil liability for sexual abuse , but far less discussion about what it means to have an entire generation of leaders who have the same rapey mentality. Those in political and economic power are typically several decades older than much of the population, so they are often out of touch with the evolving values. That said, hasn't this always been the case in the West to some degree? Sexual assault was pervasive toward enslaved people, Indigenous children in residential schools, and women and girls around military bases in foreign countries. Stitch with @ pathsandcircles on Tiktok 🤝 Need polyamory support? Book a 1:1 coaching session or use our Relationship Agreement Generator to set boundaries for your polycule 🔗. Links in bio 👆✨

I’m African 🇰🇪 and queer (non-binary, pansexual, and demisexual) a relationship anarchist, and polyamorous. I make content on social media, coach on polyamory, offer relationship tools on our website, and you can read my writing on Substack. Other Black polyamory content creators I recommend: @lavitaloca34 @unapolygeticallyjoy @bygabriellesmith @gabalexa @sanuthepolyfairy @progressive_love_academy Book: An African-American Guide to Ethical Non-Monogamy: The How, Why, and With Whom to Explore Your Expanding Love Styles by Taylor Sparks Yes we’re out here. And there are nuances that often get missed by non-Black content creators. That’s why we approach this work through a decolonizing lens. Monogamy became the “default” due to colonialism, and the ways our nervous systems get conditioned into monogamy are worth talking therefore. And respectfully: the most colonized minds aren’t always able (or willing) to see all of that. Video by @oksolaris

Over a ten-year marriage, the divorce rate for lesbian couples is roughly ~30–35% (highest), compared to ~19–25% for heterosexual couples (middle), and ~10–15% for gay men (lowest). People have a lot of theories about why. Anecdotally, my queer friends and I used to think gay men might divorce less because openness (and clearer expectations around non-monogamy, when that’s the case) can reduce the kind of secrecy that blows things up. At the same time, many of us have also witnessed higher rates of cheating and intimate partner violence in some lesbian relationships, which complicated that story for us. But this theory by @theempressnyx on TT has me rethinking my framework. Thoughts?

Another African polyamorist speaking on Indigenous African relationship traditions! I love to see it. More of us bringing our histories back into the conversation. More voices reconnecting polyamory to the continent instead of pretending it was invented in America. Threads by @lovettejallow 💖 Want more clarity in your connections? Try our Relationship Agreement Generator, also in the bio.

Years ago, I went to the Black Panther premiere dressed in my own Dora Milaje look, complete with tribal face paint honoring my heritage. It was a Black community screening in downtown Toronto, and the energy was electric, everyone in Afrocentric clothing, the theatre alive with pride, ancestry, and imagination. My look got so much love that a photo of me was later used on a poster for an Afrofuturism event. Inside that space of Black joy and creativity, I felt powerful and seen. But stepping back into the city, the reaction shifted. Walking through Toronto, I received some of the most hostile stares I’d ever known. From certain white onlookers, the contempt was sharp as if my very existence in tribal aesthetics was a threat. I had known racism, but the intensity of that day revealed a side of the city I hadn’t fully witnessed before. Since then, I carried caution about wearing tribal aesthetics in public. For years I toned it down, blending into Western expectations of how I was “supposed” to look. But recently, I entered a kind of fuck-it era. Why hide parts of myself to fit a mold that was never made for me? I began experimenting again, sometimes even combining aesthetics from multiple tribes I descend from. That in itself feels radical, because even in Kenya I rarely saw people wear more than one tribe’s aesthetics at once. It’s been empowering to craft outfits that carry all my lineages together on my body. The reactions remain mixed. Most people respond with love, but the hate still appears. The other day, a middle-aged man glared at me with open anger. Thirty seconds later, a little Black girl in a stroller stared at me with wide-eyed wonder, like she was seeing a possibility she hadn’t imagined before. And that’s why I keep doing it. Because I remember how powerful it was as a kid in Nairobi to see traditionalists wear their clothes with pride and defiance. If one little girl glimpses that same strength in me, then every stare is worth it.

Black Indigenous people are among the most disrespected and erased, standing at the crossroads of Indigeneity and Blackness. The colonial pattern is consistent: in Australia, Aboriginal peoples are told they must have “come from Africa,” as if that strips them of sovereignty. Meanwhile in Africa, European settlers claimed Black Indigenous peoples aren’t “really” from there either. Different stories, same purpose: erase us from every land, sever us from every root, so colonizers can claim dominance wherever they go. That is why cross-Indigenous solidarity matters. These conversations disrupt manufactured isolation and make visible the power we share when we resist together. And when someone dismisses these connections as “simplistic,” they are not protecting truth, they are protecting the colonial story. Transparency is part of accountability. This video was already public. I have consent from South Africans in the comment to share their words. I don’t yet have direct consent from the Aboriginal Australian featured (though I reached out), hence why no tag. If they ever express discomfort, I will remove this post immediately.

Not sure who needs to hear this, but Indigenous peoples exist on every continent. Africa holds the greatest diversity of Indigenous peoples in the world. And yet, people with no Indigenous roots still try to tell those of us from African Indigenous backgrounds what decolonizing and Indigenizing mean. Why is African Indigeneity so often dismissed? Perhaps because it exists at the crossroads of anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and Afrophobia. We are the first humans. The origin point of humanity itself, and we are the only people who carry the Mitochondrial Eve gene, the genetic marker linking every living human back to African women. Photos of people from my tribes 💖 Want more clarity in your connections? Try our Relationship Agreement Generator, also in the bio.

One reason people often forget, or aren’t taught, that the Egyptian empire began in the Lower Nile and Nubia is because those regions were home to dark-skinned Black Africans. There’s been a long erasure of the fact that some of the most foundational elements of Egyptian civilization originated in what is now southern Egypt and northern Sudan. Nubia, Kush, and the broader Lower Nile were rich in culture, trade, technology, and spiritual traditions long before northern Egypt became the face of empire. But after conquests by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Ottomans, the narrative shifted north—and Blackness was written out. Many practices indigenous to East Africa spread across the Middle East, Persia, and South Asia through trade and conquest, but the story of origin rarely flows back to the continent. Henna is one example. Or okra. Often assumed to be Indian or Arab in origin, both have deep African roots. Henna was widely used in Nubia and Sudan long before it became popular in other regions. Okra is native to Africa and traveled globally through African migration, forced and free. As an African, it’s exhausting to be told I’m “copying” when I use henna or cook with okra. People don’t trace how these things got to the places they now associate them with. We need people to approach African history with the same reverence they give to Greece, Rome, or India. My grandmother on my dad’s side is Kalenjin, a people whose roots trace back to Sudan. My use of henna honors her lineage and the Muslim communities of Kenya, including my aunt, who once housed me. My henna was done by a Kenyan Swahili lady.

I'm not the creator of this video, but wow, I felt this. One of the everyday microaggressions of racism is how anything African that's seen as positive gets credited to whiteness. People have told me that my beauty and intelligence are because I'm mixed race. But I’m over 60% African and I grew up in Kenya. So why are we handing out credit to the sliver of my ancestry that’s European, and to the West, where I only moved as a teen? The truth is, East Africans do look incredibly diverse, and there’s indeed a scientific reason for that. The so-called "Eve gene" comes from Mitochondrial Eve, the common maternal ancestor of all humans alive today. She lived in East Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Scientists traced this by studying mitochondrial DNA (which is passed down through mothers), and the deepest, most diverse versions are found in East African populations. So no, our features aren’t borrowed from somewhere else. They're original. They're ancestral. They’re the original human mother. video by @nubia.the.creator 💕 Seeking support in your polyamory journey? Book a 1:1 coaching session or explore the offerings on our website 💖 Want more clarity connections? Try our Relationship Agreement Generator, also on our website

When you’re polyamorous and in an interracial relationship, you’re defying multiple social norms at once, and with that comes layered scrutiny. Polyamorous people are often dismissed as players and pathologized as deviant. Interracial couples, meanwhile, face a different kind of suspicion, shaped by centuries of desirability politics and colonial legacies. People assume BIPOC partners are motivated by internalized racism, the pursuit of money or citizenship when their partner is white, and that the white partner has a fetish. But those narratives fall apart under closer inspection. For example Millie already held Western citizenship, comes from an affluent background, and her father is half Italian, just like Nick. So no, it’s not about access or assimilation. It’s about connection, not conquest. Some of us are building love that isn’t transactional or rooted in dominance. Some of us are just building love outside the boxes we were told to live in. And that’s what makes people uncomfortable. Not because it’s harmful, but because it’s free. Because it doesn’t follow the scripts. Instead of confronting the internal barriers that keep them from loving freely—be it fear, conditioning, or control—some people choose to project that discomfort outward. But the truth is: we don’t need to shrink our lives to fit their limitations. Let them deal with their discomfort. We’re too busy building something expansive. 💖 Want more clarity connections? Try our Relationship Agreement Generator—also in the bio.

Colonizers have long framed their actions as enlightened or superior, even as they belatedly adopt, mimic, or outright steal practices Indigenous peoples have sustained for generations. Meanwhile, those same Indigenous communities are portrayed as primitive, backward, or in need of "civilizing," despite being custodians of vast relational, ecological, and spiritual knowledge. This double standard is especially stark when it comes to love, sexuality, and non-monogamy. As polyamory educators working from a decolonizing lens, it’s exhausting to continually push back against colonial misconceptions surrounding non-Western forms of non-monogamy. Non-Western sexualities are too often dismissed as inherently sexist or regressive, while Western monogamy, despite its roots in patriarchy, ownership, and state control, is still held up as the ideal. This bias is embedded in media, policy, and even academia. Most portrayals of polygamy reflect colonial stereotypes, erasing gender-equal, consensual, and empowering models that exist globally. For example, in some Himalayan cultures, polyandry exists where only women take multiple husbands. In parts of South India, both men and women may have multiple spouses. In many pre-colonial African societies, polygamy allowed women to act as “female husbands” or have lovers outside marriage—systems that often offered more autonomy and support than the nuclear family ever could. These practices are rarely centered in public polyamory discourse. Reclaiming these histories isn’t romanticizing the past, it’s restoring the dignity, diversity, and agency of cultures whose ways of loving were never broken, only misrepresented.

It always blows my mind when Westerners position themselves as the solution to problems they created, conveniently forgetting how we got here in the first place. Most literature on polyamory is written by white authors, yet it rarely, if ever, addresses how compulsory monogamy was deliberately constructed and why. It’s as if monogamy is treated as some ahistorical anomaly that emerged out of nowhere—while they present themselves as the enlightened saviors bringing ethical non-monogamy to the masses. Meanwhile, they completely erase BIPOC histories of non-monogamy and alternative kinship structures, treating them as if they never existed or were merely cultural curiosities rather than legitimate, time-honored ways of relating. The dominant narratives around polyamory center Western frameworks, ignoring the fact that many Indigenous, African, Asian, and other non-Western societies had—and in some cases, still have—deeply rooted traditions of non-monogamous and communal relationship structures. That’s exactly why we are so adamant about discussing the colonial history of compulsory monogamy and emphasizing that Decolonizing Love is not just a niche discussion—it’s a crucial part of the broader work of decolonization. Love and relationships have always been political, shaped by power structures that dictate whose ways of loving are considered legitimate. BIPOC non-monogamies deserve the same respect and recognition as modern polyamory, and it’s time we challenge the erasure that frames ethical non-monogamy as a progressive new idea rather than a reclamation of practices that colonialism sought to suppress. duet with @antimononormative 💖 Use our Relationship Agreement Generator to set boundaries and agreements for your polycule!

Someone posted that Serena Williams—and all Black women with white partners—are race traitors, insisting that you must be with a Black man to be proudly Black. So I quipped back, “Well, what about me? I have one white partner and one Black partner—where exactly do I fit into all this?” Dude was gobsmacked. Wait till he finds out I’m pansexual too. 😏 💖 Use our Relationship Agreement Generator to set boundaries and agreements for your polycule!