Race Play Interview – Part II

This is part Two of an interview in which I recently took part…best to read part I first, or you’ll be all “Huuh? Whaaaaa?”

Andrea Plaid: That’s what folks got tripped up about with the Ciara/JT vid.
Mo: Look, I have never lived in the South on a plantation and felt the terror of my life every moment at the hands and whims of an owner or of another slave with an agenda
Mo: HOWEVER! I can pretend.
Mo: and in a very real emotional sense, I have tasted what that is like.
Mo: and it is a screaming band of pain that still resonates in this country, on this fucking planet, you know.
Mo: But it is just under the radar.
Mo: I can hear it when I play there. I experience it. It is a terror that I can’t completely understand.
Mo: But one thing I learned in this play: resistance is harder than it looks.
Andrea Plaid: Then the question comes back: “But *why* would you want to do that? Can’t you just look at lynching pix and get the damn point?”
Andrea Plaid: (I’m being facetious…and to some folks, quite blasphemous. But I’m going there….)

Mo: Why is because I live viscerally.
Mo: I obtain a profound benefit to living the reality as deeply as I can emotionally.

Mo: In the race play scenes I have done that involved black / white dynamics, do you know what the scariest thing was? That I ultimately gave up.
Mo: I am NOT of the resistant blood.
Mo: I’m a quitter. I was afraid, I gave in.
Mo: That is a lot to have about your nature revealed.

Andrea Plaid: what did it reveal?
Mo: That I am, at heart, obedient.

Andrea Plaid: Hmmm…I think I’m getting to what you’re saying.
Mo: even in a scene where I had disassociated and genuinely feared for my life, I gave up.

Mo: I’m genuinely, at the core, submissive in a way I am CERTAIN does not translate to my present-day self!
Mo: I hoped it would be quick and over fast.
Andrea Plaid: Obedient…to whom?
Mo: Obedient to authority.
Andrea Plaid: I think I’m getting it…groking it.
Mo: *lol* win!

Mo: We all like to think we’d be Kunta fucking Kinte
Andrea Plaid: ‘Cause that’s the narrative we’re fed from yea-high.
Andrea Plaid: “We gotta be strong in the face of whitey, y’all”

Mo: Sure, go ahead and be strong in the face of whitey. But if you get hot because whitey has beaten your ass and taken you down…BUT YOU ENDURED….then you have a whole new lease on life, man.
Mo: In honesty, there were millions of us enslaved by a few hundred thousand people.

Mo: Jews were systematically destroyed by Nazis in camps where there were many, many more prisoners than guards.
Andrea Plaid: I remember someone saying the biggest damage the Nazis did to Jews was psychological.

Mo: It is true they had people walk to their own deaths.
Mo: Fucking horrific.
Mo: And yet if someone of Jewish descent wants to have a Nazi interrogation scene, to sip a bit of that bitter, bitter cup, who the fuck are you to say that is wrong?
Mo: Doing race play is HARD.
Mo: it isn’t some walk in the fucking park.
Mo: and finding people I trust enough to do it with is almost impossible.
Mo: because it is hard.
Mo: and THEY are at risk.
Andrea Plaid: it’s like we hold the painful history and a sacred mythology that is not to be blasphemized.
Andrea Plaid: *as a sacred mythology*
Mo: But it is not blasphemy to want to touch that wound.
Mo: you can’t heal something in your soul by letting it remain in its original state of pain.
Mo: it HAS to be touched. Otherwise it will never heal.
Andrea Plaid: and being as puritanical as we are about sex, we wield that history when it comes to our sex lives.
Andrea Plaid: the double bind.
Mo: I am not recommending that people run out and play aunt Jemima Uncle Tom games with any random cracka ass cracka, for the love of Ganesha. I’m saying that, if this intrigues you, think about why. And I am saying it if repulses you, think about why.
Mo: REALLY think
Mo: don’t do some knee-jerk bullshit.
Mo: And Black folks in the US are not known for being sexually liberated. Which is why the hypersexualization of our imagery over the years is a double helix of irony
Andrea Plaid: But that wound also gives us an identity. And, like I’ve said to folks before, we love self-mythologies, sacred stories we tell about ourselves.
Andrea Plaid: “and Black folks in the US are not known for being sexually liberated. Which is why the hypersexualization of our imagery over the years is a double helix of irony.” Can I get a witness.
Andrea Plaid: You said it right there.
Andrea Plaid: Next question: How did you get into the race play scene? Was has been the reaction you’ve received?
Mo: Huh. Well…the first conscious stirrings I had about being submissive were around some fantasies I shared with a former lover.
Mo: a very explosive short affair
Mo: Years later we were on the phone one day and having some nasty talk and he made some comment about how I’d be an awful slave
Mo: and I was totally insulted!!!
Mo: LOL!
Andrea Plaid: so what happened?
Mo: so I decided to write a politically incorrect bedtime story.
Mo: because when something trips me out, I gotta get elbow deep in it.
Mo: SO, I wrote this little story set back in the day
Mo: white master, black slave, blah blah
Mo: and I kept adding to it.
Mo: and it was, I thought, possibly the Worst Thing Anyone had Ever Written.
Mo: so, of course I started showing it to people, so that someone would have me committed.
Mo: no one did. People loved it.
Andrea Plaid: knew it!
Mo: Black people, white people, they thought it was intriguing and sexy.
Mo: and challenging.
Mo: I had a friend…VERY RADICAL black feminist.
Mo: I showed it to her because I was feeling like, OK, she would shred me apart.
Mo: and then I would be sufficiently punished.
Andrea Plaid: …and she *loved* it, didn’t she?
Mo: My girl read the shit and called me in the middle of the NIGHT talking about how I needed to get out of HER head!!!
Mo: I was like “Oh shit.”
Andrea Plaid: Whoa! Right the hell on!
Mo: SO the idea just lived there in my guts, waiting.
Mo: My 1st “Official Dominant” had no interest in race play: never wanted to go there. So, we didn’t.
Mo: And that was my 1st 2 years in the BDSM community right there.
Mo: he couldn’t bring himself to say “THE N WORD” even in conversation. Let alone in scene.
Andrea Plaid: Did you eventually find someone who’d race-play with you?
Mo: Oh yeah. Someone of Jewish descent, of course.
Mo: LULZ
Andrea Plaid: Oooooo…gurl, you’re gonna send me to hell.
Mo: I know.
Mo: I rule.

Mo: He was the 1st person who had no problem with it.
Mo: Subsequently, I’ve done racially boundaried scenes with one British person, 2 white Americans, and one Mexican.
Andrea Plaid: Indeed!
Andrea Plaid: and you’ve been the sub or have you switched.
Mo: I haven’t switched.
Mo: That is a rarity for me in play in general.
Mo: Though I do have a certain delightful revenge fantasy about fucking the shit outta some guy with a ginormous strap-on. But we don’t talk about that….I don’t have the time to answer all of the offers I’d get if I put THAT out there.
Mo: Seriously
Andrea Plaid: ’cause you know they’ll come…no pun intended.
Mo: You know?!?
Mo: I could make it a full time job.
Andrea Plaid: in this economy? I think folks may be a bit empathetic.

……to be continued……