ok i promised myself up and down i wouldnât make posts like this anymore for my own mental health but iâve been seeing a lot of, uh, takes in regards to the potential of sarah and bucky dating and a lot of confusion to why these takes are racist, insulting and hurtful, especially to black people. and for me? well, i won't lie, it's personal.
what non-black people need to understand is that positive portrayals of interracial romantic relationships between dark-skinned black women (yes, dark skinned) and non-black men are extremely uncommon in media. for example, can you think about any recent fictional portrayals of relationships of this kind? maybe rick and michonne from the walking dead? or abbie and ichabod from sleepy hollow? great, because those are the only two that i can think of off the top of my head.
okay, now how many of those relationships ended happily?
as a next point, why do i highlight âdark-skinnedâ? because of colorism. youâve probably seen that word thrown around a lot more in the past year. colorism is the discrimination within ethnic groups between those with lighter colored skin (and more eurocentric features and hair texture, iâm folding in featurism and texturism for ease) and those with darker skin.
the way this plays out in visual media is that itâs much more common to see lighter skinned black women in roles than darker skinned black women. when i was growing up, this was evident in both white-produced AND black-produced media. thatâs so raven. sister sister. my wife and kids. the proud family, even. and to make it worse, it wasnât uncommon for dark skinned black women in shows like these to be portrayed as unattractive, uncultured, or straight up bullies.
this isnât me saying that we shouldnât see light skinned or biracial black women in media. i want to emphasize that their life experiences and the pressures they have are different from mine. but i know that, because of colorism, i grew up thinking that the absence of Eurocentric features and a non Eurocentric body meant i was not beautiful and not worthy to be seen. and these truths can coexist. this is not an uncommon wound of colorism.
i say all this to say that for bucky barnes, a white man, to flirt with sarah wilson, a dark skinned black woman, is not the same as âjust another het shipâ. it is positive representation in its own right.
now, iâve been in fandom for years. iâve encountered this before. and iâve encountered this enough to know that truthfully, these kind of ships make people truly uncomfortable and sometimes these people do a bad job of hiding it. what reason, i canât say. if you ask me, i suspect part of the discomfort comes non-black people realizing they canât project onto the black person in the ship in the same way theyâre used to. i could be wrong. but iâve been around enough to see a lot of pretzeling and back bending to discredit these sorts of relationships that donât seem to come up for similar pairings if that same black woman was now white. and iâm seeing it again here, so i wanted to break down the most common takes iâve either seen or i suspect iâll see soon and break them down to explain why exactly youâve been getting irritated replies and why theyâre hurtful.
âbuckyâs flirting with sarah to make sam jealous.â without thinking about it, this is actually a funny trope. sibling rivalry and all that. and youâre right, bucky doesnât have to be attracted to sarah, and maybe you ship sambucky instead. but what if he can still find her attractive? this take subtly discredits the idea that bucky could find sarah attractive in her own right - there has to be some ulterior motive in order to explain it, yeah?
âbucky repeated sarahâs name like that because sarah was steveâs momâs name.â we do know bucky knows steveâs momâs name! but again, this feels like a lot of reaching to again, rework buckyâs potential attraction to sarah in a different context so itâs not actually genuine. in this case, he doesnât like her, she just makes him think of his dead best friendâs mom, right?
âsarahâs so strong and badass, she doesnât need a man! she deserves better.â okay. what does âdeserving betterâ actually mean? why canât a potentially fulfilling relationship for sarah, a hardworking widow with two children, be deserving better? this also plays into the Strong Black Woman myth, in which black women are just So Strong and Self Sufficient and Powerful they donât need anything! not even social aid! or protection! or love! or mental health support! let me be clear, this trope is not fun for us, itâs not a positive, itâs a burden that allows society to justify not protecting black women.
âthis seems kind of forced/crowbarred in to me.â maybe, but also, in the episode, they really just said 'hi' to one another. now if sam had caught them making out on the boat two seconds after they met, that would have raised my eyebrows, but they just said 'hi'. some people are interpreting that as flirtatious - i'm one of them. but again, using words like 'crowbar' and 'force' or 'shove' make it seem like bucky's attraction to sarah is irrational.
now, hereâs what iâm not saying. iâm not threatening you to ship bucky and sarah Or Else. you don't have to. i do. i think itâs fun! but thatâs my choice. you donât have to make that choice. you could be shipping someone else with either sarah or bucky and you don't want something to get in the way of that, i get it. i'm also not saying that sarah needs bucky's validation to be considered beautiful, far from it. what iâm saying is itâs worth it to evaluate the ways that implicit racism is affecting and influencing your responses to interracial relationships with black people, and especially black women in the media. because even if you might not see it, there are those of us who can. why can't the prospect of a white man flirting with a dark skinned black women be taken at face value? maybe sit with that.
sources for further reading
the roots of colorism, or skin tone discrimination
the walking dead's new power couple: 'richonne' and fandom racism
fanlore breakdown of 'what shipping richonne taught me about racism'
black women and the thin line between strong and angry
post on black womanhood and feminism
what is featurism?
black hair and mental health: a tale of texturism
fandom and the intersection of feminism and race
"weak black women" by robin thede (for giggles)
the take's 'the strong black woman, explained' (yet to watch but the take hasn't failed me yet)
