Pat’s Polemics

An article appeared last week in the NYT magazine and a response to it came in this week in which the respondent said he’s Black and has been in the work force as a blue-collar worker for two decades. He says the number of comments made on the size of his penis by White men is “in the double digits.”
Once in a while I read the comments sections of various blogs and am appalled at the nature of the comments and I can imagine what will be said of this guy’s report. So let me back him up….. and I believe I’ve told this anecdote on my blog before.
I was invited out for TGIF by two males and two females, all fellow high school teachers except one male who was a vice-principal. As we talked, the guys began talking sports, as usual, and the topic went to one ball player, a Black man, who had played for the local university. The men zeroed in on the size of the athlete’s penis. And the talk went on and on as the ladies listened. I listened b/c if I had not, I would not have been able to relate this and thereby allowed others to claim the Black man’s comment in the NYT was phony or only his twisted perception.
Both of the women with us were attractive, so it may have been the men’s intention to talk about Black penis size to get the women worked up (it didn’t work). To use an ill-chosen phrase, it was the NYT commentator’s experience in spades, far more than just a passing reference to Black male penis size, it went on and on.
It would be fine if we just passed over this as one more horrible misunderstanding of sexuality, like the bigger the penis the more fertile the man or some such crazy notion, but the inherent racism has been a death sentence for countless Black men in this country. I doubt White men (or women) will get over their obsession with Black penises.