For a few years now, black American men have been attacking their fellow black women, calling them masculine, brutal, aggressive and mean to them. As the black American community is still being plagued by the issue of fatherless homes, and if black women still marry within their community despite the failure of the black American family structure, the future of US black manhood is rather risky.
Indeed, black men suffer from poor health, endure the stress of colonialism, police brutality, are massively incarcerated and will have a shorter life span.
So, when it comes to resolving the crisis of marriage and sexuality, black men have started a new movement known as that of the “Passport Brothers”. Their solution is to travel to African, Asian, Caribbean and South American countries in order to find a “feminine, traditional and submissive woman” who will satisfy their desires.
In reality, this practice, which is cheered by so many black men on social media, is nothing less than a neo-colonial phase of sexual tourism orchestrated, this time, by black people.
The Superiority of Black Americans and The Duality of the Political Manipulation
Since the beginning of the orchestrated Black Lives Matter protest which took place throughout Western Europe and the U.S against the murder of George Floyd, African-Americans have, once again become, the faces of black struggle worldwide.
Indeed, the black community has always been evolving between two important parallels, especially when it comes to the fight against colonialism and oppression.
First, they are the number one minority in the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth.
And second, they are oppressed there.
Recently, the question of reparation has been evoked for various reasons.
If some agreed on the fact that black Americans should receive some money following the slave trade, many Latino and Indigenous American groups voiced their anger.
It is important to recognise that the quest of justice in the United States is always motivated by two elements: the obsessive desire from the minorities to being wanted, embraced, recognised, and accepted within the dominating white elite, and capitalism.
There can be no real unity among the oppressed groups of the US since each and every community is trying to do what they can to have their safe spot in the white dominating realm. In that sense, black Americans have been targeted for decades due to their privileged situation.
Indeed, many other communities wished they had their place, wished they could become the number one minority living in the most powerful nation.
Consequently, some Latin groups such as the Mexican-Americans (different from the Mexicans from Mexico) can display signs of racism and hostily towards the black Americans as many want to have their place. The constant desire of Puerto-Ricans and Dominicans from the Bronx who want to rewrite hip-hop history by claiming a Latin origin, is also a proof of that.
The Latino and Asian categories from the U.S will always somehow feel a certain jealousy towards the black Americans as they never managed to create or develop anything on their own.
Indeed, despite the 400 years of slavery, the black Americans not only created new valid cultures which revolutionized the Western sphere until this day, but the majority of the most powerful political figures of the black Western movement were black American, too.
With or without the white institutions, black Americans have proven to be able to resist on their own, since American culture would never be the same without them. This reality can not be stated for the Latin and Asian groups at all.
Then, black Americans literally bled and built the United States through the horrific exploitation of their enslaved African ancestors. In that sense, the development of the US could have never been achieved without the physical power of the enslaved Africans.
Though the black Americans acquired this place through horror, mass murder, rape and constant attacks, the other minorities wished they were them.
African-Americans often expose this constant abuse they endure from both the white institutions and the other jealous US minorities. But after 400 years, and despite highlighting the argument of oppression which is totally valid, U.S Blacks also know how to play a double game when it comes to the treatment of these other minorities, whether in the US or outside of its borders.
First, in Western Europe, hence the home of white US colonizers, racism reigns but the black American community represents the only form of blackness that white European Westerners truly respect and appreciate.
The power of an African leader such as Patrice Lumumba, Thomas Sankara, Steve Biko or the work of an intellectual like Frantz Fanon would rather scare them, as the men mentioned prior have been intelligent enough to expose the system of racism, colonialism and thus oppression. They did so, without rejecting their pure African essence.
But even if the Black Panthers were as unapologetic as a Thomas Sankara, the white Western European intellectuals will still be passionate about their tale, movement and evolution.
In their colonial minds, the Western white European institutions see in the black Americans a perfect representation of the assimilated Black, and so, even when they rebel.
If the Panthers exposed their system, they remained black Americans, and their American origin set them apart from any other black African rebel deemed unimportant for being a member of the third world.
Indeed, how can one explain that the French institutions decided to honor Josephine Baker, while despising the numerous black French Caribbean authors who truly wrote about the reality of the West Indian life?
The black American man, though oppressed, is perceived as the ultimate prototype of perfect blackness to the eyes of the Western European oppressor, so that so that they no longer appear as black to the eyes of the racist European Whites.
They have been assimilated, speak English, believe in the power of elitism, social hierarchy, and they also possess a “black identity”.
The concept of blackness is never opposed to that of the White colonizers, since it is always American. Being black American is opposed to being African, and thus to being connected to the source.
If some remnants of African heritage can exist in South Carolina, North Carolina, in Louisiana where African spiritualities such as hoodoo, voodoo are still practiced by the local population, black American culture is the continuity of the colonial construction which were first initiated at the time of the Atlantic Creoles. Black Americans are a colonial creation and they have been perfectly assimilated within the West.
In that sense, the Western Europeans wish their black African immigrants they despise would be the same. They hope that their Blacks would strip themselves from their African essence in order to become perfectly French, Spaniards, Italians, Germans or Belgians, while still giving them scrumbs of recognition to silence them and prevent them from talking about slavery or colonialism.
Thus, this reality brings us back to another point. The Passport Brothers Movement reveals that black American men are totally aware of this privilege of treatment. Though they manipulate the public opinion by talking about the real oppression they have been going through, they also know about the dynamic of racism.
Out of pure disdain for the black race, the Whites, whether in the US or in Western Europe, have lumped their Negroes within the same group, without recognising their distinctions.
But there, the dynamic of exploitation was reproduced since the black Americans know they are, through their political position, American products.
They know about their influence among black and white Europeans, how white Europeans, even the most racist ones, would respect them more than any other African who arrived from the Third World.
The black American community, after 400 years, became something else. They are no longer African but are totally American. They are thus, though black, hierarchically white to the other black groups living in the South.
Because of their political position, the other black groups living in Western Europe and in South America made their fight a reference, when the dynamic of their coloniality differs greatly from the black American struggle. In the black Arab world, where no black Arab figure exists, black American legends of anti-colonialism such as Malcolm X have been used for representation, though the black experience is far from being the same, since the Arab and Ottoman colonizers never had the same Euro dynamic of attac towards the enslaved Africans there.
A black French has nothing to do with a black American. The only black Europeans who could claim a proximity to the black American experience are the Black Germans, the Black Belgians, the Black Brits, the Black Dutch and from Luxembourg, as their white institutions colonized the US sphere and both established the policy of apartheid.
The black Latins, whether from France, Spain, Italy or Portugal come from a total different structure in terms of colonialism.
If black Cubans, black Peruvians and Afro-Brazilians fight everyday against the consequences of slavery, their condition is not deemed as important as that of the Black Americans, since they come from the poor southern sphere.
In this internalized racism, many Afro-Cubans or black Latinos have accepted this difference in hierarchy. The latter wrongly believe that the black Americans have their interests at heart, not understanding that they only think about their own first, for being American, and so, though black.
So, by travelling to the Southern sphere in order to find new traditional and submissive wives, in countries such as Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Brazil or Venezuela, the black Americans try to maintain the same disdain they have been enduring but this time towards populations they deem inferior for belonging to the south.
This time, by behaving as such, they not only show how disingenuous they are, but also how they enjoy their new colonial status as black faces of white imperialism.
How Latino Men In The Us Have Betrayed Latin Caribbean Women
The Passport Bro movement reveals how little protected African, Latin Caribbean and South American women are by their own men.
Since times immemorial, though a situation aggravated during colonialism, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, before the 1960 independence, old single white Belgian men would travel on their own to the country in order to buy underrage girls, sometimes as young as twelve.
These men, in their late forties and early fifties, made agreements with the black parents of the child and bought the girls for a certain amount of money. These girls were often brought back to Belgium where they endured constant sexual abuse from their white abusers. Though a secret, many mixed-race Congolese grandmothers were either conceived through this form of colonial rape or simply endured this phenomenon on their own.
Today, in Italy where gangs of Nigerians formed in various cities of Naples such as Castel Volturno, Nigerian gangsters have no issue forcing their women into prostitution markets for the satisfaction of white consumers.
In areas of constant struggles, African women, though hard workers to the core, will always be exposed to a lack of protection, will often be oversexualized from a young age, and be imposed a great dose of pressure before they even end their childhood.
In order to survive economically, the body of these women will be sacrificed by their own family members, especially by other older women, too.
In colonized sphere, this same system of female sacrifice happens all the time.
Most Latinized American countries were destroyed by the culture of machism and female abuse. The total violence in countries such as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras is the direct consequence of colonial violence, hence a brutality which is turned against women first.
Mexico has a great problem with femicides. Domestic violence in El Salvador is extreme.
In African countries such as Cape-Verde or Angola, men often beat up their wives.
Despite it all, the violence of colonial history was such that it has been destroying the psyches of men for centuries.
The Passport Bro Movement also took place since US Latin men, who also share their own social and racial struggles, barely respect their women, since a minority only applies the system of protection.
There, in these US Latin societies, women have been sexualized from a very young age.
And this oversexualization is linked to the beauty of Latinas. A woman is desirable for being sexualized. If not, she is not a woman.
In hip-hop videos and in lyrics, the few Latin rappers, whether from the Latin Caribbean or Mexico, often disrespect their women in the songs, choose oversexualized Latinized American women to dance in lingerie in their videos, call them sexual names and mistreat them.
Rap legend Big Pun never had a good vision of a Latin woman. He often battered his wife Liza, a black Boricua herself, and sexualized Latin women in his songs. This constant disdain stems from machism, which is the direct consequence of Western colonialism, as the European genocide and invasion not only destroyed the natural Native structure when it comes to relationship between men and women, but it also reduced the status of the Native woman to that of a sexual object, hence a consequence orchestrated by the Western Europeans themselves.
Latin men in the US do not put an end to this trend. Though they praise Latinized women for being submissive to them, this submission is rather linked to female oppression which dates back to colonial times. This female submission is also tied to the legacy of the Catholic Church which, in its structures, always had little respect for the female group they always wanted to crush and demonize.
Since Latin men in the US contribute to the constant sexualization of their own women, how could they become strong allies in the perpetuation of the passport bro movement when they, themselves, apply the same theories against their own wives?
The Oversexualization of the Caribbean Body
Caribbean spaces were always spaces of rebellion and anti-colonialism. If the Haitian Revolution is one great example, as early as the first waves of European colonialism in the 15th century, Native Tainos organized to overthrow the Spaniards. Hatuey, the Cuban Native, was one of the first to warn the other Tainos about the plans of the European colonizers. Other figures such as Agueybana, among others, also stood up against the colonizers. Later, when the Africans were sold to the Americas, leagues of Maroons formed in secret to thwart the plans of the slave masters from Jamaica, Cuba, to Boriken.
Despite it all, the Caribbean was not only the first land of resistance, but this spectacular movement of anti-colonialism which began as early as the 15th century is still erased, as if the space was deprived of its essence to fit in another agenda which is not real.
The worst stigma attached to the Caribbean, despite its wonderful history of resistance, is the oversexualization of women’s bodies. Whether Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Indigenous, Euro-Indigenous, Caribbean women, from Jamaica, Borinken, Cuba, the Dominican Republic to Trinidad-and-Tobago, Venezuela, or Martinique, value their strength, beauty and power to sex and to their bodies.
Other parts of Africa which were colonized by the Portuguese such as Angola, Mozambique, Cape-Verde also were submitted to the sexualization of women.
The fetichism first began with the European colonizers of course, who often raped Native and African women. Most of the time, these women were used and exploited as concubines and when they behaved well, their reward was to be accepted as a form of official concubine by the slave master. This position could bring them some privilege, though they remained despised and enslaved.
The Western Europeans thus placed a sexual value upon the bodies of Caribbean women, when they had been, from times immemorial, a symbol of sacred, for being considered the bridge between the spiritual and the material world according to most Native traditions.
Then, since the Western Europeans have emphasized this idea of oversexualization, this colonial vision was spread throughout the West.
If one speaks against the consequences of colorism and racism in most Caribbean families regarding their disdain towards dark skin, family members are also responsible for the oversexualization of their own children as they tie femininity to oversexualization, thus, reproducing the colonial ideas put in place by the European colonizers. There, the beauty of a woman does not come from her heart, her mind, her spirit or her essence, but from what she can provide to the superior entity.
Consequently, since older Caribbean female figures nurture this oversexualization as a mechanism inherited from the slave trade and colonialism, millions of lost Caribbean girls perpetuate it, as they wrongly believe that femininity means sexuality.
Femininity is not tied to maternity but to what a woman can provide to the male gaze. Unfortunately, due to this oversexualization, Caribbean, African and South American girls are also greatly exposed to predators who are often family members.
A true opportunist, Jennifer Lopez was credited for having opened doors to Latinos in Hollywood. This “change” only happened as she accepted to be oversexualized. Lopez, though already known for stealing songs and voices, greatly contributed to the sexualization of Caribbean women. She never tried to distance herself from the male gaze and still focuses on this brutal colonial legacy to further her fading career. Without the reign of the body, Lopez can not hope to succeed anywhere.
The constant sexual abuse endured by colonized Caribbean women during the early days of colonialism led to an accepted dissociation between one’s body and mind.
Caribbeans have little to no modesty since colonizers wanted to make them carnal beings made to supply their twisted desires. This lack of modesty can be displayed by dances such as perreo, which simulates sexual acts, dembow lyrics or reggaeton.
The sexualization is such that foreigners can not believe that Caribbean activists still exist, that the region had a past rooted in anti-colonialism and that, like any other part of the world, resistance against evil was always there.
Because of colonialism, Caribbean identity is always tied to carnal things first, but never to the intellect. Though Jamaica, Cuba, Boriken, Haiti, Martinique provided thousand of writers, thinkers, authors, or philosophers, legendary musicians such as Bob Marley, though the region is home to deep ancient spiritual practices whether Native or African, the Caribbean has been reduced to sexuality by the colonizers, but he also seems to take great pleasure in sexualizing his body to advance his pawns.
Thus, this accepted colonization of the bodies greatly impacted the look of black American men towards Latin Caribbean women. Even in the US, the Latinized woman presents as the anti-thesis of the black American woman. When the latter is not mixed-race like Alicia Keys, Beyoncé (so whether biracial or Multi-generationally Mixed), the Latinized woman embodies the exotic desires of black men. She represents a fantasy since she opposes the concept of racial segregation to which black people in the US have been submitted to, the concept of unambiguous blackness and is synonymous with foreign, evasion and otherness.
Latinized women have black American attributed without the blackness.
Since a good portion of Caribbean women are mixed, they carry a certain percentage of African blood, without looking African. Most have natural long hair, big hips, a derrière and are either gold, light brown, brown or when dark-skin, they possess attributed such as natural long hair or colored eyes, which set them apart from the unambiguous black female group.
In hip-hop videos, the most famous video vixens were exoticals, and thus Latin Caribbean women.
If Latin Caribbean women are proud of the attraction of black men towards them, they fail to understand that these same black men do not respect them as human beings but rather perceive them as sexual objects which will satisfy them for a moment, before they choose to go back to their black wives.
If both black men and women often expose the fetichism of white women towards mixed-race children and black, and vice-versa, the same fetichism operates between Black men towards Latinized women.
In reality TV or in music, Latin Caribbean women such as Erica Mena, Cyn Santana, Danileigh or Jennifer Lopez prior, know about the disdain white people can have towards them. Danileigh, of Dominican roots, is a white woman with distant African ancestry.
Due to her exotic position, Danileigh often turns to the black American side where she mimicks the features of mixed women, through the accentuation of curly hair, the darkening of her make-up and the black aesthetics.
Jennifer Lopez exploited both the Latin and black American communities in the late 1990s to advance her career and give herself street credibility. Big Pun, Fat Joe and Diddy were the first to support her, though she never gave anything back to Pun in return.
The sexual dynamic and the complacency of Latin Caribbean women in dominating the unambiguous black group are nurtured by men first.
The colorism perpetuated between Latinized and black women stems from the race to being accepted and validated by the male gaze. In that sense, since white men do not pay attention to exotical Caribbean women, since they would rather turn to their white women, black men enjoy seeing these two categories of women fight for them.
The passport brothers are not looking for women outside of the US because they love their culture, but they need sexual objects which will satisfy simply serve them, as men. Though black American men are despised, they remain men, and they are the ones who give access to sex or not.
When it comes to Cyn Santana, Cardi B or Erica Mena, all three women are Caribbean, but they found their place in black spaces due to the black male gaze. Cardi B, of Afro-Indigenous descent, possesses the African body, but has natural attributes such as her long natural kinky hair, and a light skin. These attributes are treasures to the colorist Negroid man.
Erica Mena was abused throughout her childhood along with Cyn Santana, but the two women always had an ease to oversexualize their bodies from a very young age.
Santana hoped to start a family and get married to former rapper Joe Budden, a black American.
The latter simply used her as a sexual fetish, just like ignorant rapper DaBaby was initially attracted to Danileigh for being “high yellow”. (hence the origin of the song “Yellow Bone“).
The passport bro movement reveals thus that black Americans have become supremacists in believing in their domination over the other black groups in the southern sphere.
This reality was also emphasized by the case of the Libero-American returnees who held disdain towards the local Liberians, simply for being African-Americans, and thus, for having a connection to whiteness.
If Western European colonizers were responsible for the deconstruction of African and South American groups, in reality, black people themselves perpetuate these colonial rules instead of putting an end to it.
The passport bro movement should thus, be stopped and further education should be put in place regarding the importance of de-sexualizing minors in African, South America and in the Caribbean.
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