Are you selling sex or are you selling race?
Were selling a fantasy.
At this moment in history, a moment marked by the premature deaths of black people, talk of selling sexual race fantasies feels in very poor taste. But that is whats being sold by the Chocolate Men, an all-black male strip group who are the focus of Channel 4s new observational documentary The Black Full Monty.Co-directors of the group Dante Aaron-Williams, and Louis Legacy Francois, are cashing in on a sexual economy which makes profitable that colonial-era trope of the wanton, insatiable, big-dicked, thuggish black man, stretching their enterprise from the strobe lights of the strip club, to calendars and other merchandise.
Although there are women of all ethnicities in the audience, the documentary looks most closely at the unblushing white women who attend. We meet 71-year-old Norma who knits willy warmers for the Chocolate Men, having left her white husband between the 1960s and 70s in pursuit of a black man. Some demographics will find this cheeky and amusing, others will not.
Forty-nine-year-old Kelly attends the Chocolate Mens shows with her daughter Mel, praising them as eye candy, recounting her time on the hip-hop scene and thanking black men for gifting her with a beautiful mixed-race daughter. This mixed-race daughter positioned solely as the product of an apparently benevolent relationship between white women and black men is one of the most uncomfortable aspects of the show.
The mixed-race rapper Akala has previously written on how his white mother was labelled an N-word lover, had been disowned by her own father, and often felt embarrassed by her whiteness. But the documentary is not here to examine such complex dynamics, or question the racial awareness Kelly or her daughter have. Instead, without challenge, Kelly is simply left to express her love for black men, even going so far as to say there will always be black in me, as her daughter sits alongside her.
One unnamed white woman in Dublin justifies her attendance at the shows and pleasure at the vulgarity as subversive, apparently as a kind of revenge against years of sexual objectification against (white) women, presumably by black men. Her ignorance at the history of racial injustice is not amusing, or even pitiful, its just angering.
And that is the problem: the documentary is clearly aiming for a light and jocular tone, but who, given the political climate around racial injustice, is in the mood for that? Maybe its makers can be forgiven for its somewhat tone deaf content: it was completed in 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic began to disproportionately claim black lives and before the Black Lives Matter movement again reached fever pitch. But that does not absolve Channel 4 of responsibility when it has chosen to put it in the schedules now.
Do not mistake what I am saying, this show is not tone deaf because it looks at black strippers. In fact, a thoughtful examination of that could be fascinating and valuable. Black strippers and other workers within the sex industry are often marginalised within public discourse about the harsh conditions that shape black lives, and it is right that their stories are heard and that the social stigmas that face black workers in the sex industry are addressed. Some of the more intimate aspects of the documentary touch quite successfully on the concerns of young, insecure workers in Britain: childcare costs, career stability, and finding work after encountering trouble with the law. But it is clear the interest of those who made this documentary arent in these more material concerns. Rather, it lasers in on the controversy the entertainment service has frequently attracted for making money from racist stereotypes about black masculinity.
Louis Francois is quick to dismiss such ideas as rubbish; he makes clear that the performers are earning money and living good. And the point of the documentary itself is, as its executive producer Andy Mundy-Castle comments, to open dialogue and offer different perspectives about black men who decided to take ownership of the stereotypes that beset them.
But that empowerment angle falls flat, and focus on the controversy the show attracts feels belated. We have had these arguments before. It was three years ago, when the Chocolate City tour commenced, that Chanté Joseph wrote in gal-dem that it was yet another example of how black men are consistently aware and happy to give white women a gateway to blackness through being passive in the degrading way theyre seen.
In any case, there is no use laying the blame at the door of the managers or individual dancers who appear content to lean into this fetishisation. I dont care to put these men on trial, and if they feel empowered by being reduced to big black willies then so be it. As one of the performers, Django, claims: Here in Britain we [black men] are at the bottom of the food chain this is me taking my power back.
The film-makers never show much interest in a robust interrogation of these claims of empowerment. Perhaps they are right not to. Litigating empowerment feels like a tedious and irrelevant dead end. But the lack of any other investigation leaves an emptiness at the heart of the documentary. There are other, more urgent questions that could have been asked about the lives of strippers in Britain namely their rights as workers. Hiring and firing decisions appear so casual. The core narrative arc anchoring the show focuses on the increasingly poor performances of the long-serving stripper Black Magic, and the question of his place on the tour hangs above him like the sword of Damocles.
The Nigerian-born performer Django, who was specifically scouted for his African identity, breaks the fourth wall sundering fantasy and reality, engaging in oral sex with an audience member and therefore violating licensing laws. He is suspended for four weeks without pay. The capacity for the managers to be able to make snap judgments around the place of the strippers on the tour seems a genuine cause for concern. Djangos suspension means that he will struggle to feed his daughter.
So what a missed opportunity this is, when the employment rights of strippers could do with proper exploration, particularly in light of how strippers and sex workers are beginning to unionise. The trade union United Voices of the World, alongside sex worker advocacy group Decrim Now, recently celebrated a ruling that classed dancers at London strip clubs as workers, as opposed to independent contractors with no access to employment rights. It may have been a far more pertinent angle to consider the employment rights of black men within the sex industry, rather than to repeatedly flog the empowerment or fetishisation dead horse.
Perhaps it is time to retire that particular debate, and start to ask more challenging questions. The Chocolate Mens co-directors, Louis and Dante, may be well versed in racial empowerment discourse, but I would be more interested to know how they would hold up in a tribunal hearing.
The Black Full Monty is on Channel 4, Thursday 10 September at 10pmread more
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