I’m a white man in my 30s. Thanks to preferences formed in my youth, I’ve been sleeping almost exclusively with black guys for the past 15 years. And though I had a pretty good guess what the term meant, I’d never heard it before. Given its taboo nature, I wanted to be very certain I knew what it meant for him specifically. Did he want me to call him the N-word? Hard “r” or the softer “a” ending? Was roleplay involved? A master/slave narrative, or perhaps a hood-thug/white-savior storyline? 

For Jacob, the answer was all the above. This was my first encounter with a fetish that seems to have appeared out of nowhere and has now become common among black gay men. I’d say that half of my hookups now request it. Proponents believe race play is a form of liberation. Or, they say, it’s an insouciant response to the political pieties of Black Lives Matter and DEI. For the white counterpart, it has its own unique complications. 

I’m not judgmental of anyone’s kink, and I’ve come across a litany of fetishes over the years, so I was willing to entertain Jacob’s request. At the time, I thought it was a one-off. I also believe that the bedroom is probably the best place to experiment with breaking social norms and defying societal expectations. Moreover, the past half decade’s media overload on race has had a chilling effect on black-white relations. BLM and DEI produce a cold dynamic of bureaucracy and activism. But in bed, relations are ineluctably individual and even spiritual, not political. If Jacob wanted it, it made sense to me to give this a try.  

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When Jacob finally came over, I did the best I could with his request, but I felt a ringing disassociation when the words started coming out of my mouth. Nothing is really off-limits in the sex-positive world, but this felt taboo. I was a vile character out of To Kill a Mockingbird, and yet when I looked at Jacob, he was turned on and elated. It was disorienting. It also did nothing for me, sexually, and I let the attempt slowly dissolve, moving Jacob and I back into our normal routine.

It wasn’t a one-off, though. Jacob started demanding this vituperation every time. And I went along with it. It made me feel less like myself in bed, but my belief in the transformative power of kink suggested to me that I should push my own boundaries, too.  

Almost immediately after Jacob made the request, I found more and more men wanting it. I recognize the pattern by this point. Guys I converse with on Sniffies, a gay-hookup site, usually start by telling me they’re very kinky and asking if I am, too. Then they mention race play and assure me that I can call them, you know, whatever I want. 

If I were truly a racist, none of these men would be sleeping with me. So on one level, we both know that the suggestion that I want to racially degrade them is a fantasy — they want it. On a deeper level, what we’re both doing is not degradation, but exploration of a dangerous part of the human psyche, in an environment of mutual openness and generosity. 

Other black men I spoke with — friends, co-workers, and lovers or former lovers — mentioned an array of reasons for the trend, from sex positivity and the increasing acceptability of fetishes, to the influence of porn, with its tendency to become more extreme in order to elicit the same sexual response. People find whatever is forbidden to be a turn-on. According to the progressive script, women aren’t supposed to want to be dominated by men (but sometimes they do). Likewise, according to more traditional scripts, men aren’t supposed to want to be dominated by women (but, again, many do). Blacks aren’t supposed to want to be called racist slurs by whites in 2026. But they do. And while everyone may performatively police their thoughts in public, in the privacy of the bedroom, the thought-policing gives way to desire. 

There was the dancer I met on a Princess cruise who kept referring to my whiteness. I got the hint. After the ship was all in bed, we’d find a corner to have sexual banter, with race integrated, at his request. He wanted me to call him my little N-word (hard r). Next, an artist in my neighborhood also asked for it. We’d been hooking up for a while before he dared to tell me. We were at his place, and when I moaned, “Damn boy,” he told me that he liked the slight Southern flare in my voice. Go further, he told me. 

In one sense, playing the abusive cracker is downright creepy, and not something I ever wanted to do. I’m attracted to black men because I find them masculine and beautiful, but also because I feel safe with them. As a gay kid in the South, I got bullied for being effeminate, and it was often blacks who stuck up for me when my white peers were being cruel. Also, maybe because blacks saw my race first, they seemed to see the gayness less and treated me more like everyone else. Now, decades later, I disliked pretending to be the kind of white person I’d always despised. 

But since it was hot for my partners, I tried to play along. Also, I realized that black guys have enjoyed a milder form of race play for years, considering the many cases of those who self-brand on fetish and dating apps as a “BBC,” a controversial reframing of the lore of the well-endowed black man. Race play has even made it into the mainstream, notably in the Broadway production Slave Play, by Jeremy O. Harris, a gay black man. 

In Slave Play, three multiracial couples engage in race play as therapy for lack of sexual desire caused by racial trauma in the black partner. Harris has said his intention was metaphorical, and in an interview with the comedian Ziwe, he explained that the kind of sexual race fetish he was satirizing wasn’t something he’d personally done or considered particularly realistic. He thought it was “part of our imaginaries via Tumblr and Twitter more so than it was ever a part of anyone’s actual sexual lived experience.” Once the play came out, though, Harris encountered “a lot of black people who do race play and kink intersecting with race.” He found it “exhilarating” to have represented their stories, even if accidentally. 

I talked to some current and former sexual partners to try to understand more. 

Eric (also not his real name), a 38-year-old actor who was once a sexual partner of mine but is now a friend, tells me that he has also noticed race play becoming more prominent, especially on the internet. He believes that the liberal ideal, previously pushed for by all races, is to transform race into a kind of politically correct equality, a process that was turbo-charged in recent years by BLM and DEI. This, he thinks, can feel coercive in its own right. “I think people are moving away from a rigid sense of that identity,” he says, “and have become more like, You cannot police my blackness. I can do what I want, especially with my blackness.” 

Eric told me he’d been tempted to try it himself but hadn’t, because of concerns about how it might impact him afterward. His preference is for nerdy white guys, but he’s not sure he wants to know what imagined racial features make him their preference. “Am I black enough, or am I the kind of black guy they seek?” It’s his relationship to his own blackness that he’s trying to protect, he says. 

When I asked Jacob what he thought about the trend, he got angry. He hadn’t known that his fetish was common, and at first tried to convince me that other guys were “copying” him. Upon deeper reflection, he thought that perhaps the fetish is popping up now because blacks and whites are mingling more. Born and raised in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, Jacob had until recently experienced New York as a very segregated city. As the neighborhood has integrated, there has been more opportunity for him — and everyone else — to meet and explore race through sexual encounters. Jacob questioned his own desires, however, when he learned how common they were. “I think gay black boys have a higher chance of having low self-esteem, racially,” he said. “Is this who I want to be or be validated by?” 

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He wasn’t the only person who took this view. Brian, a 28-year-old black chef, told me, “We’ve all grown up with the same white-savior public heartthrobs.” His implication was that if you see white men as the saviors, it would make sense why you would want them, and you might want to reject your own blackness, too. My friend Ashley, a straight black woman in her 30s, said something similar. When I told her I was hooking up with a guy who insisted on race play, she viscerally responded that “he definitely has some problems.” She went on to say that she could understand why a white man would only be into black men, “because they’re beautiful,” but if a black man was only into white men, it would be “suspect.”

My thinking on the matter clarified thanks to some experiences online. The internet has also in some ways decreased segregation. If race is what gets you going, all you need is a keyboard. X (formerly Twitter) is flooded with porn accounts linking to OnlyFans, where blacks and whites who otherwise wouldn’t meet in person can form parasocial dynamics. One day, I came across a video of a black OnlyFans creator I followed, in which a white boy was calling him the N-word.

It shocked me to be honest — and I hated seeing it. 

I value race play as a terrain where whiteness collides with blackness offline, between people and free of ideology. But once it starts being reproduced and witnessed, the fantasy enters the real world and feels uncontrollable, dangerous, and possibly formative of realities I wouldn’t want to be a part of. 

Brian and I had a tryst with Jacob last summer, and when Jacob tried to integrate race into our play, I disengaged. I didn’t want friends involved. “I didn’t really care,” Brian said afterwards. “That has everything to do with him.” 

I agreed, but it had to do with me, too. I’m not moralizing about anyone’s desires, and I haven’t come to any permanent conclusions, but I don’t engage in race play any more with guys from the past, and I have no plans for the future. I might try it again if I met the right person, but I don’t like feeling like I have to do it, and I don’t want to be tethered to that disassociation. While reporting this story, I asked a prominent gay, black male artist who sometimes shares sexual exploits on social media what he thought of race play. His reply: “Is this your sly way of asking me for race play? be honest [heart emoji].” No, I told him, it was merely an honest inquiry. I’m done for now. 

But Jane really wanted Lily to get some qualifications. She was 13, the age at which persistent absence starts to increase in secondary schools. And in a year’s time, her peers would be choosing their GCSE subjects. But Lily didn’t feel able to go to school. She wanted to be home educated. Unfortunately,  while Jane’s job as a web designer allowed her to work from home, and therefore keep an eye on her daughter, it kept her too busy to teach her. They needed the school to make more of an effort to include her.

The problem was, the school imposed expectations that Lily couldn’t meet. They wanted her in class with her peers, but Lily was terrified of being picked on by a teacher. Her fear gave her stomach aches and headaches. At first, she’d take days off to recover, but those days off turned into weeks off, until she wasn’t coming in at all. School said she could come in part-time, but teachers still expected her to keep up with the work and sit in lessons.

The authority that Jane exercised over her daughter was quite different from that of the school. She had always given Lily the space to be autonomous, to act according to her needs. Her parenting style was “child-centred”. Informed by attachment theory, “gentle parenting”, as it is otherwise known, tells parents to be led by their child’s stated needs — and is increasingly popular in the West. The rationale is that a calm and reassured child will be able to make good choices, observe boundaries and thrive in the world. You don’t give orders; you allow them to make choices. Rules are negotiated on an equal basis rather than imposed from above. Problems with behaviour reflect a problem with the connection to the caregiver: a child acting out only does so if needs have not been met, and the way to address the behaviour is to address the relationship first.

This approach seems idyllic when it’s going well. If things go wrong, however, parents end up feeling helpless. Many end up in a double-bind, knowing their child’s behaviour needs to change while believing that their child must not be forced into doing anything against their will. For Jane, it was inconceivable that she would pressurise Lily to go back to school — but that meant that Lily would only return if she wanted to, and she didn’t want to.

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The school absenteeism crisis made the news last week, when Labour announced its plan to tackle a growing crisis. One in five pupils is persistently absent from school, a number that has doubled since before the pandemic, with many blaming lockdown for the spike. And while it was once linked to markers of poverty such as free school meals, to assume that this is simply a class problem would be misguided. Plenty of absent children come from middle-class homes. In fact, middle-class parenting philosophies seem to be contributing to the problem.

Taylor was also 13 when he stopped going to school. He became increasingly withdrawn at home, staying up all night on his phone or Xbox. He wouldn’t feel like coming downstairs for dinner, so his mother Luci took meals and snacks to his room. She knew it would be better for him to take part in family meals, but she worried that insisting would affect their relationship. She knew that he spent too much time on his screens, but she feared that taking his Xbox away would only make his mental health worse.

Taylor was starting to show signs of depression, and Luci was increasingly worried and frustrated — who was supposed to help him? Was it the school, or the local authority, or the NHS? In her view, setting rules at home was near-impossible, because she didn’t want to affect her relationship with her son — therefore, any change had to be facilitated from the outside.

It’s common to hear parents say that their absentee children can’t come to school. The relationship between “can’t” and “won’t” crops up a lot when we talk about school avoidance — and young people’s mental health issues more generally. And it has fundamental implications for the question Taylor’s mum often came back to: whose responsibility is this? If a child won’t do something that they are supposed to do, like go to school, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed with discipline. The responsibility is the child’s, and by extension their caregiver’s. If someone can’t do something they’re supposed to do, it’s not their fault. The system has to accommodate them: school needs to be more flexible, or homeschooling needs to be provided.

Many parents frame their child’s difficulties in terms of mental health: she is avoiding school because she feels anxious — and if I challenge her, her anxiety will only increase, and her behaviour will only get worse. Here, the lines between won’t and can’t blur. Anxiety thrives on avoidance; if a child doesn’t confront the challenges that school poses, they are likely to fear school even more, having been deprived of the opportunity to find out that it isn’t so bad.

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School pastoral officers are endlessly infuriated with the effect of parenting on attendance. One tells me how pupils text their mums from the loos to say they are having a bad day, and some parents will drop everything to come and pick them up. There are options for struggling children, though: they can use their time-out card, or make an appointment to see the counsellor. But parents who get immediately involved undermine the work her school is doing to help kids settle. It’s understandable for them to find their child’s distress distressing — but sheltering them from the challenges will not serve them well in the long run.

When she tells them this, the parents will agree, and then they’ll do it all over again. Each of them, Kim says, knows on some level that their behaviour is causing problems — not just for their child, but for the school more generally. But they also see their child as vulnerable, as being an exception. This is the influence of attachment theory, which sees all children as fragile, and all discipline as traumatic.

And yet, attachment-based theories are starting to leak into schools. “Connection before correction” is now the most fashionable approach to discipline; it preaches that bad behaviour is an expression of unmet needs and staff need to make pupils feel emotionally safe before introducing any sanctions. Proponents of more traditional approaches, such as government school behaviour adviser Tom Bennett, are sceptical, expressing concern about the increasingly widespread belief that poorly-behaved pupils can’t help themselves — which stops teachers from using sanctions that work.

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Indeed, replacing no-excuses behaviour policies with a theory that is its own tailor-made excuse for poor behaviour has not led to great outcomes. In Scotland, where this approach has been taken to its logical conclusion — a restorative approach that focuses on helping the offender process their emotions — a rise in violence against staff in schools has led to a near-doubling in payouts due to workplace injuries over the last year. Bad behaviour is not only contributing to Britain’s teaching retention crisis but also having deleterious effects on the nation’s most vulnerable pupils. Firm rules tend to make children with profound special educational needs feel safer, because they minimise the risk of other kids behaving noisily or aggressively. And each child who isn’t in school needs to be chased, checked up on, even visited at home — time-consuming tasks that can draw attention away from pupils who may need it more.

That’s not to say that all schools are pleasant, or that all children can manage mainstream education. Plenty have needs or disabilities that mean they simply can’t cope with environments or demands that others can adapt to. Increasingly, though, this category is expanding to include children who are avoiding school because it is uncomfortable or difficult — rather than impossible. Children depend on boundaries; under-18s aren’t legally responsible for themselves for a reason. Their capacity for decision-making, emotional regulation and self-control is still developing.

The official concern about children missing school is the effect it will have on their life choices, narrowing their options without formal qualifications. But arguably more important is what school teaches them about to get on in the world. And if we believe that making youngsters do things they don’t want to is going to harm them, they aren’t going to learn that. They need rules to be upheld and expectations to be consistent. It’s down to the adults to help the children grow up.