Black women and love.

Those four words have produced countless think pieces, social media debates and real life lengthy conversations, thanks to shows like Love Island and our own dating experiences as black women. The dating experience, the experience of finding love for black women can be complicated when it shouldn’t be and when we see black women looking for love on a public stage, it often reflects society’s hypocrisy when it comes to the beauty of black women. It reopens the very tired and often very triggering topic of desirability politics, as it pertains to the Western world and highlights how black women are unfairly (a heavy emphasis on unfairly) at the bottom of the desirability pecking order because of… (insert drumroll…) you guessed it, misogynoir.