Sex And Race Play

Mollena Williams is gregarious, the kind of woman who makes a point of saying, "How are you today?" to the Walgreens cashier. She has a short afro and laughs easily. She works as an administrative assistant and at night, she pens her theater performances. She is also a masochist.

Williams is part of San Francisco's BDSM community (shorthand for "bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism"). By definition, a masochist receives pleasure from experiencing certain types of pain. By her own account, Williams loves pleasing her partners. That might mean a whipping. It might also mean obeying her partner's commands or being called a "slut." Her partners aren't strangers. Like non-BDSM people, she expects to feel a connection and develop trust – enough to submit to a partner for the hour or the day or the week that they agree to. And she, in turn, expects a lot. Her partners have to be comforting, quick thinking, and treat her like the princess she's always felt herself to be.

Contrary to popular notions, BDSM is not about abuse. It's consensual and trusting and people refer to it as "play" (as in "I want to play with you"). The point of BDSM is not sexual intercourse. In fact, when Williams recalls her first experience as a masochist seven years ago, she says she met her partner, a white man, at a bar and "fell in love at first sight." They made their way back to his hotel. "For the first time I felt someone could see who I really was." And that was someone who found it erotic to be a submissive to her partner.

In recent years, Williams has added another element to her repertoire as a masochist. She's begun to engage in what is called "race play" or "racial play" – that is getting aroused by intentionally using racial epithets like the word "nigger" or racist scenarios like a slave auction. Race play is being enjoyed in the privacy of bedrooms and publicly at BDSM parties, and it's far from just black and white. It also includes "playing out" Nazi interrogations of Jews or Latino-on-black racism, and the players can be of any racial background and paired up in a number of ways (including a black man calling his black girlfriend a "nigger bitch"). White master seeking black slave, however, seems the more popular of the combinations.

Race play is considered on the edge of edgy sex, but workshops on the subject are becoming standard fare at kinky conferences as people like Williams become comfortable with publicly speaking about it. Like any practice making its way into public conversations, the workshops include everything from personal testimonials to theories on why people of color are getting aroused by what some would see as just racism. Like any controversial sexual activity, race play has its critics. In May, the title of a workshop at a BDSM conference had to be changed after protest over the original name, "Nigger Play: Free at Last." Williams herself has been the subject of several e-mails from people of color who, while enjoying BDSM themselves, accuse her of self-hate and recommend she enter therapy.

But Williams doesn't seem self-hating. If she is, then she's pretty darn happy talking about her writing and desire to find a good man. If race play is not about hate, then what is it about? What does it mean for a person of color to be aroused by words like "nigger" or "spic"? For the people that I talked to, it's made them neither freaks nor Uncle Toms.

Teaching Race Play

There are about as many ways to engage in BDSM as there are theories for why it arouses. For some, BDSM is having your boyfriend yank your hair and mumble a naughty word like "whore" during sex. For others, it is whips, chains and hot wax – all done in public before an audience in a space that 's been converted to a dungeon.