You're Still Doing the Sorting
Colorism, Masculinity, and the Bodies We Make Conditional
“We have not yet arrived at a psychology of the homosexual. We have not yet arrived at a psychology of women. And I am not certain that, after more than four hundred years, we have yet arrived at a psychology of the Black man.”
— James Baldwin, No Name in the Street
Preface
They say it out loud now. I don’t do light skin. Too feminine for me. I want dark, masculine, over six feet. They announce their exclusions like it is transparency, like naming who does not qualify somehow makes the sorting less violent.
This is not about who you are attracted to. This is about why you need to announce who you have decided is disqualified. This is about how I only date dark skin became shorthand for wokeness while still practicing the same segregation it claims to resist. This is about how we have learned to turn human beings into taxonomies and call it preference.
Whether someone says no dark skin or no light skin, the problem is not which direction the exclusion points. The problem is that exclusion is the operating system. The problem is we have decided love is conditional on passing someone’s checklist. The problem is we are doing white supremacy’s work: sorting ourselves, fragmenting our community, making bodies disposable, and calling it honesty.
I am writing this because I keep hearing these announcements, brazen, unapologetic, performed as if they are just personal taste. And I keep thinking: who taught us to need categories this badly? What does it cost us when we make each other conditional? Why are we so committed to sorting each other that we have turned it into public policy?
This piece will cost me. It will make people defensive. It will get me called bitter, angry, too sensitive, someone who cannot handle rejection. I know this. I am writing it anyway.
Because the cost of not writing it, the cost of letting us keep sorting each other, keep fragmenting ourselves, keep practicing segregation while calling it dating, is higher.
The Brazen Announcement
But here is what I keep thinking about: why do you need to announce it?
When you say I don’t date light skin or I only want masculine energy, you are not describing your dating history. You are not reflecting on patterns you have noticed in who you have been drawn to over time. You are making a declaration. You are establishing policy. You are telling an entire category of human beings that they have been sorted out of consideration before they have said a single word to you.
That is not preference. That is segregation with a social justice gloss.
And the most insidious part? People think saying I only date dark skin somehow corrects for colorism. Like preferring darkness undoes centuries of the paper bag test, like choosing masculine presentation resists white supremacy’s feminization of Black men. But switching which bodies you exclude does not dismantle the exclusion mechanism. You are still sorting. You are still reducing human beings to checkboxes. You have just changed which boxes need to be checked.
The violence is not in the direction the preference points. The violence is in making people conditional at all.
I am writing this as someone who gets marked as acceptable by most of these sorting systems: dark-skinned, read as masculine enough, tall enough to pass the visual inspection. I am writing this implicated, not innocent. I have watched the sorting happen in real time. I have watched beautiful, brilliant, whole human beings get reduced to like a sista to me or just not my type in ways that echo every exclusion we have ever survived as Black people, as queer people, as human beings who have been told our entire lives that our bodies are up for public evaluation.
And I keep asking: who taught us to need categories this badly? What happens to us, to community, to collective survival, when we make each other conditional? When we decide that love, desire, visibility, and value only extend to bodies that meet specifications?
This is the conversation we are not having, about how we have absorbed white supremacy’s sorting mechanism so thoroughly that we perform it on each other and call it dating.
Both Directions Are Violence
Here is what people think they are doing when they say I only date dark skin: resisting. Choosing Blackness in a world that devalues it. Affirming what white supremacy taught us to hate. They think they are being progressive, maybe even radical, preferring the bodies the world calls too dark, too much, too Black.
But here is what they are actually doing: sorting.
You think reversing the hierarchy dismantles it. But you are still using the master’s tools. You have just changed which bodies you are hammering.
The paper bag test did not start with us. Our grandmothers knew it. Hold your arm against a brown paper bag; if you are darker, you do not get in. You do not get the job. You do not get chosen. You do not qualify. The comb test. The way light skin bought access, bought safety, bought proximity to whiteness while dark skin marked you as field-ready, as expendable, as the body that works but does not get seen.
We learned early that bodies get sorted. That skin tone determines value. That somewhere, someone decided certain shades of Black are acceptable and others are not. We learned that colorism is not just white people’s disease; it is the virus we caught from them and learned to spread among ourselves.
But here is the contemporary delusion: some people think preferring dark skin now corrects for that history. Like we can reverse-engineer liberation by inverting the hierarchy. Like choosing dark over light, masculine over feminine, somehow heals the wound of being sorted in the first place.
It does not. We have swapped out the ruler, but we are still measuring. And measuring human beings against predetermined specifications is always violence, regardless of which end of the spectrum you have decided is acceptable.
The same logic governs the masculinity hierarchy. White supremacy feminized Black men as a weapon, marked softness as failure, demanded hypermasculinity as proof we could be men at all. So we learned that feminine Black men are suspect, are weak, are the ones who make us all look bad. And now when someone says I only date masculine energy, they think they are just describing attraction. But they are repeating the lesson white supremacy taught us about which Black men get to be seen as whole and which ones get marked as less than, as other, as the ones we keep at arm’s length while calling them sis.
When you announce I don’t date light skin or I don’t do feminine, here is what you are actually doing:
You are reducing humans to categories. You have decided someone’s skin tone or gender presentation tells you everything you need to know about them before they have spoken. You have looked at their body and filed them under disqualified.
You are making love conditional. You have established prerequisites for being considered worthy of desire, worthy of visibility, worthy of being seen as fully human. And those prerequisites are not about connection or chemistry. They are about whether someone’s body meets your specifications.
You are performing exclusion as virtue. You announce these preferences publicly, boldly, as if transparency makes them ethical. As if saying I am just being honest about what I want absolves you of asking why you want what you want, who taught you to want it, what it costs the people you have decided do not qualify.
You are commodifying bodies. Whether you commodify light skin as aspiration or dark skin as authenticity, whether you fetishize masculinity or feminize softness into something you can love but never desire, you are treating bodies as objects that either meet specifications or do not.
And here is the distinction that matters: I have never dated a light-skinned man observes a pattern. I do not date light-skinned men enforces a policy. The first acknowledges what has been. The second determines what will be allowed. The first leaves room for surprise, for the person who disrupts your patterns, for chemistry that does not follow your predetermined rules. The second closes the door before anyone can knock.
When Black gay men spend our energy sorting each other by shade and gender presentation, who wins? Not us. We are too busy policing each other to build collective power. Too busy deciding who is Black enough, masculine enough, dark enough, acceptable enough to organize together, to show up for each other, to recognize that every body made disposable weakens the whole.
White supremacy does not need to destroy us anymore. We are doing the fragmentation work ourselves, efficiently, effectively, out loud. We are practicing segregation and calling it preference. We are replicating the exact hierarchies designed to break us and calling it honesty about what we are attracted to.
But here is what we are actually being honest about: we have internalized the sorting so thoroughly we cannot imagine desire outside of it. We have learned to love conditionally, to see bodies as categories, to practice violence as romance. We have absorbed the lesson that some bodies are disposable and decided we get to choose which ones, as if being the one doing the sorting instead of being sorted makes us free.
It does not. It makes us complicit.
So when you say I don’t do light skin or I only want masculine, you are not describing taste. You are describing which bodies you have learned to render invisible. You are describing who you have decided does not qualify for consideration. You are describing your participation in a sorting system designed to fragment us, to keep us policing each other instead of building together.
And whether you sort by shade or gender presentation, the violence is not in which direction your preference points.
The violence is in believing human beings should be sortable at all.
The Sista
I see you like a sista to me.
They say it with love. With warmth. Like it is a compliment, an affirmation of closeness. And in some way, it is. You are the one they call when things fall apart. The one who gets the real story, the messy feelings, the fears they will not show anyone else. You are trusted. You are cherished. You are close.
You are just never chosen.
Because like a sista is not actually about kinship. It is about categorization. It is the language we use to love someone while refusing to see them as sexually possible, romantically viable, desirable in the way that leads to being claimed. It is how we domesticate certain Black men, usually the ones marked as feminine, as soft, as too much feeling and not enough edge, into a role that serves everyone except them.
You get intimacy without desire. Closeness without possibility. You get to be the one who listens to him talk about the men he actually wants, the ones who look nothing like you, the ones whose masculinity reads as real where yours reads as performance or failure or something to be loved around rather than toward.
And here is the particular cruelty: you cannot refuse it without seeming bitter. You cannot say I do not want to be your sister, I want to be seen as someone you could desire without being accused of making the friendship conditional, of not valuing what you have, of being unable to accept love in the form it is offered. So you take it. You become the sounding board, the emotional labor, the safe space. You become infrastructure.
This is what the masculinity hierarchy does to feminine Black gay men. It does not just exclude them from desire. It conscripts them into service. It makes them useful in every way except the one that matters. They can be your therapist, your stylist, your confidant, your comic relief. They can be the ones who make you feel seen and held and understood. They just cannot be the ones you want. They cannot be the ones you introduce as your partner. They cannot be the ones whose bodies you claim in public the way you claim their emotional labor in private.
We can kiki, though.
As if performance of closeness, the jokes, the shared references, the way you finish each other’s sentences, makes up for being permanently disqualified from romance. As if being someone’s favorite person and their never-option simultaneously is something to be grateful for.
Feminine Black men are being loved in every way that does not threaten the hierarchy. They are being kept close enough to provide value, far enough away to never disrupt the sexual economy that privileges masculinity. They become the emotional infrastructure that masculine men rely on while pursuing other masculine men, the safety net that catches feelings without ever being the object of them.
And when they push back, when they name this as erasure, they get told they are overreacting. That friendship is valuable. That not everything is about sex. That they should be grateful for the intimacy they do have instead of demanding the intimacy they are denied.
But this is not about demanding anything. This is about naming what it means to be loved wrong. To be cherished and erased in the same breath. To watch the people who know you best, who have seen you whole, who have witnessed your brilliance and complexity and depth, look past you when it is time to choose someone.
Like a sista to me means: you are safe. You are neutered. You are the feminine Black man I have learned to love in ways that do not threaten my internalized hierarchy. I will confide in you, laugh with you, maybe even need you. But I will not want you. Because wanting you would mean admitting that femininity in Black men is desirable, is powerful, is something other than weakness I have learned to tolerate in small doses for entertainment.
It means: I have sorted you into a category that serves me. And I have done it with enough affection that you cannot name it as violence without sounding ungrateful.
The Shift
The requirements change at daylight.
The body that qualifies for a 2am text does not qualify for Sunday brunch. The person you will let into your bed will not get introduced to your friends. The one you will fuck in the dark becomes the one you pretend not to see when the sun comes up. And if you think I am exaggerating, ask yourself: who do you pursue in private versus who you would claim in public?
This is where hookup culture reveals what we actually value. Not who we say we want, but who we will be seen wanting. Not who we are attracted to, but who we are willing to be associated with. The difference between those two categories tells you everything about shame, about hierarchy, about which bodies we have learned are acceptable for consumption but not for commitment.
You will hook up with the feminine guy, the light-skinned one, the body that does not fit your stated preferences, but only in private. Only when no one is watching. Only when it does not count as a statement about who you are. You will take what his body offers when you need it, when you are lonely or horny or just want to feel something. But when it is time to date, time to be seen, time to build something that exists in daylight, the requirements change.
Suddenly you need masculine. You need dark. You need someone whose body will not make you explain yourself, will not require you to defend your choice, will not mark you as the kind of person who dates that kind of person. Suddenly the bodies you accessed in darkness become disqualifying in visibility.
That is not preference. That is shame determining who you will use versus who you will claim.
Hookup culture creates a loophole in the sorting system. It lets you access bodies you have publicly disqualified. It lets you want what you have said you do not want, fuck who you have said you will not date, touch the bodies you have announced do not meet your standards, as long as no one knows. As long as it stays contained in the hours between midnight and sunrise, in the space between private desire and public identity.
You get to have it both ways: maintain your stated preferences, your public sorting policies, while privately contradicting all of it. While privately revealing that you can desire these bodies, you just will not value them. You can want them in the dark, you just will not choose them in the light.
And the people on the receiving end? They learn fast. They learn they are good enough for sex but not for Saturdays. Good enough to touch but not to talk about. Good enough to need but not to choose. They learn that their bodies have use-value but not relationship-value, that they can provide pleasure but not partnership.
This is the violence we are not naming: we use people. We use their bodies, their time, their intimacy, their vulnerability, and then we discard them when it is time to be public. We take what we want in private and then enforce the sorting in public.
And we justify it by calling it honesty. I was clear about what this was. I never said this was going anywhere. As if being explicit about using someone makes the use ethical. As if transparency about your shame absolves you of having it.
But here is what you are actually being clear about: you are ashamed of wanting what you want. You have internalized the hierarchies so deeply that even your private desires feel like violations of the public sorting you have committed to. So you split yourself, private wanting and public claiming, bodies you will touch and bodies you will choose, people you will use and people you will value.
That split is the clearest evidence that these are not preferences. Preferences do not require secrecy. Preferences do not need to be hidden. If you truly were not attracted to light skin or femininity or whatever you claim does not do it for you, you would not be hooking up with people who have those qualities. You would not need the darkness to want them.
The fact that you do, the fact that the requirements change at daylight, reveals that what you are actually managing is not attraction. It is reputation. It is how you are seen. It is whether your choice of partner marks you as someone who has standards, or someone who does not.
The people you are using in the dark know. They know they are good enough for your bed but not your life. They know the requirements change at daylight, and they know exactly what that change means about their value, about their disposability, about how thoroughly you have learned to practice violence while calling it preference.
Who Benefits
When Black gay men spend our days deciding who is too light or too dark, too feminine or not masculine enough, when we spend our energy sorting each other into categories of acceptable and disposable, who wins?
Not us. Never us.
This is what systems of oppression do: they teach the oppressed to oppress each other. They train us to replicate hierarchies so efficiently that they do not have to maintain them anymore. They get us to do the work of ranking, sorting, excluding, disposing, and they get us to call it liberation, call it honesty, call it just knowing what we want.
But what we want has been shaped by what we have been taught to want. And what we have been taught to want serves power. It serves the fragmentation of Black communities. It serves the isolation of queer people. It serves the destruction of any collective that might organize itself into something powerful enough to threaten the hierarchies that keep some people on top and others underneath.
Every time you announce I do not date light skin or no fems, you are not just expressing preference. You are participating in a system designed to keep marginalized communities fighting each other instead of fighting the structures that marginalize us. You are practicing segregation on people who have already survived segregation.
When you perform those desires as preferences, when you announce them as requirements, when you let them determine who you will consider and who you have already disqualified, you are not expressing yourself. You are enforcing the system. You are making sure the hierarchies stay intact. You are guaranteeing that we stay fragmented, stay fighting each other, stay too busy sorting to ever build the kind of collective power that could actually threaten anything.
Because white supremacy does not care if you prefer dark skin. It does not care if you only date masculine men. It does not care about your carefully curated preferences. When violence comes, and it will come, it will not ask if you met the community’s beauty standards before it decides you are disposable. It will not check if you were masculine enough, dark enough, acceptable enough. It will see you as Black, as queer, as other, as target.
And the people you spent your time sorting out? They could have been the ones standing beside you. They could have been your people. They could have been the community that survives together because it refused to make anyone disposable.
But you sorted them out first. You decided they did not qualify. You practiced the fragmentation that makes all of us weaker. And you called it preference.
You did the system’s work for free. And the system thanks you for it.
The Mirror
I am not innocent here.
I need to say that clearly, before this piece positions me as someone standing outside the violence, diagnosing it from a distance. I am not. I am inside it. I have benefited from it. I have participated in it. And I am still learning how deeply the sorting runs, how much of what I call preference is actually inherited hierarchy I have not finished excavating.
I get marked as acceptable by most of these systems. Dark-skinned. Read as masculine enough, at least in the ways that count in these sorting rituals. Tall enough. I pass the visual inspection more often than not. And that passing has given me access, to desire, to visibility, to being chosen instead of being the one who gets told like a sista to me.
I have watched black men, beautiful, whole, brilliant, get sorted out while I stayed in consideration. And I did not always push back. I did not always ask why. I did not always recognize that my access came at the cost of someone else’s exclusion, that the hierarchies elevating me were the same ones crushing them.
I have been complicit in my silence. In the moments I did not challenge someone announcing their sorting policies. In the times I benefited from being the acceptable option, the one whose body did not require explanation or defense. In the ways I have let my own proximity to these hierarchies’ standards insulate me from examining them too closely.
And I have had my own preferences, noticed my own patterns in who I have dated, who I have been drawn to, who I have pursued. I am still asking myself: where does attraction end and conditioning begin? When I say I am usually drawn to someone, is that genuine chemistry or have I absorbed hierarchies so deeply I cannot separate them from desire anymore? Have I ever sorted someone out before giving them a chance? Have I ever let someone’s body speak for them before they opened their mouth?
I do not have clean answers. I have the discomfort of realizing that some of what I have called preference might be policy I did not know I was enforcing. I have the work of unlearning hierarchies that live so deep in me I mistake them for instinct. I have the ongoing practice of asking myself: who taught me to want what I want? Who benefits when I want it? What does it cost the people I have decided do not meet some standard I cannot even fully articulate?
Here is what I am learning: individual attraction is not the problem. The problem is when we turn individual attraction into collective policy. When we move from I have never dated someone who looks like this to I do not date people who look like this. When we announce our exclusions as if they are virtues. When we let our patterns become prescriptions we enforce on ourselves and perform for others.
I have done this. Maybe not with skin tone, but with other categories I have not examined closely enough. With body types or ages or presentations I have unconsciously sorted into possible and not possible before testing whether the categories hold up under scrutiny. With ways I have let what I think I want prevent me from discovering who I might want if I stopped sorting first and started seeing first.
The work is ongoing. It is uncomfortable. It requires recognizing that being on the acceptable side of a hierarchy does not mean I am free; it means I am complicit. It means the system has invested me with just enough proximity to acceptability that I might defend it instead of dismantling it.
And I catch myself defending it sometimes. I catch myself thinking but people cannot help who they are attracted to when what I should be asking is but why are we attracted to who we are attracted to, and what happens when those attractions perfectly mirror oppressive hierarchies?
I am writing this piece because I am implicating myself. Because I need to hear this as much as anyone reading it. Because the sorting does not stop with calling it out in others. It requires examining where it lives in me, where I have practiced it, where I have benefited from it, where I have let it shape me in ways I have not wanted to admit.
This is not about achieving some pure state of preference-free attraction. That is not possible and probably not the goal. The goal is awareness. The goal is asking questions. The goal is recognizing when what we call preference is actually policy, when attraction is actually hierarchy, when choice is actually complicity.
The goal is learning to see people before sorting them. Learning to stay curious about desire instead of codifying it into rules. Learning to notice our patterns without turning them into walls that disqualify entire categories of humans before we have given them, given ourselves, a chance to be surprised.
I am still learning. Still unlearning. Still working to close the gap between what I believe about human dignity and how I actually move through the world, through desire, through the choices that determine who I consider and who I have already decided does not qualify.
I do not have this solved. I have the discomfort of knowing I am part of what needs to change. I have the work of examining myself as ruthlessly as I am examining the systems. I have the understanding that writing this piece does not exempt me from what it is naming. It just means I am willing to be implicated, willing to be seen as someone still learning, willing to admit that the sorting lives in me too.
And maybe that is the only honest place to write from: not as someone who has figured it out, but as someone who is still figuring it out. Not as judge, but as participant. Not as exempt, but as complicit and trying, however imperfectly, to do better.
Let that be enough—for now.
Author’s Note
I wrote this knowing it would make me unpopular. Knowing people would say I am bitter, that I am overthinking it, that everyone has preferences and I am making something out of nothing.
I wrote it anyway.
Because I kept watching black men disappear. Not into violence from outside, but into the unmarked category of not my type. I kept hearing like a sista to me said with genuine love while it performed erasure. I kept seeing the requirements change between hookup apps and relationship profiles, between 2am and Sunday morning, between private wanting and public claiming. And I could not unsee what that meant.
This is not about forcing attraction. You cannot negotiate desire. But you can examine it. You can ask where it comes from, what shapes it, who benefits when it perfectly mirrors every hierarchy designed to fragment us. You can notice when your preferences are actually policies, when your attractions are actually hierarchies, when your choices are actually collaborations with systems meant to destroy us.
I am not asking anyone to date people they are not attracted to. I am asking us to interrogate why we are attracted to who we are attracted to, and why we need to announce who we have decided does not qualify. I am asking us to recognize the difference between observing patterns in our desire and enforcing policies on entire categories of people.
I wrote this knowing I am not innocent, not exempt, not outside the mechanisms I am naming. I wrote it because being complicit and trying to do better seemed more honest than pretending I have figured it out.
I wrote this because someone needed to say it. Because prophetic witness requires saying the thing that makes you unpopular, the thing people do not want to hear, the thing that implicates everyone including yourself.
If this makes you uncomfortable, sit with that discomfort. Ask yourself why. Ask yourself what it means that examining how we practice sorting feels like an attack on your right to desire. Ask yourself who benefits when we refuse to examine our preferences, when we protect them from scrutiny, when we treat them as sacred and unchallengeable.
I am not here to make you feel good. I am here to make you think. To make us all think. About what we have inherited, what we are replicating, what we are calling preference when it might be policy. About who we are making disposable and why. About what kind of community we are building when we let hierarchies determine who qualifies for love, for visibility, for being seen as fully human.
This piece will cost me. I am writing it anyway.
Because the cost of not writing it, the cost of letting us keep sorting each other, keep fragmenting ourselves, keep practicing segregation while calling it dating, is higher. The cost is community. The cost is collective power. The cost is each other.
And we cannot afford to keep paying it.
UNSPUN publishes longform essays, op-eds, and visual documents tracing the language of power in real time.
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This hits hard.
I love it... not because it's confrontational ( thought I love that too )... but because it's brutal honest about the violence we've observed and the violence we reproduce when we confuse hierarchies for 'just personal preference'.
That line " The requirements changing at daylight" ? God. That line is an entire anthropology of shame.
Thank you for writing what so many prefer to leave unspoken, Taylor.