The truth about polyamory in the Black community

Family is everything for Chaneé Jackson Kendall. But her family doesn’t look like what society has told us it should. That’s because she’s Black and polyamorous; the influencer space and mass media might make you think most polyamorous people – like families – look the same. White.
Many BIPOC polyamory advocates are fed up with what they say is a lack of acknowledgment from the wider nonmonogamy community.
“We’ve been polyamorous for a while,” says Ebony Hagans, a polyamory expert and creator of the @marjanilane Instagram account. “It’s not something that we just started doing two days ago.” They saw a “huge gap of education between the Black community and just a general nonmonogamous community.”
Kendall adds: “My family consists of four adults who are raising a child together,” she says, “and we have decided that we are going to do life together, irrespective of the many ways that our romantic and sexual relationships … have changed and fluctuated throughout the past nine-plus years since our child was born.” Plus, their support system consists all four of their respective biological families, not to mention their chosen family.
The polyamory community – like any group – isn’t a monolith. Everyone’s experiences are different. Many people of color who are nonmonogamous say they face some unique challenges. They’re fetishized. Objectified. Judged. And, in their eyes, at times it feels more pronounced than what their white counterparts face. Polyamory experts say the antidote is awareness and education.
“There’s not a whole lot of conversation about how queer BIPOC polyamory communities are actually pretty big,” says Flo Oliveira, another educator. “Not a lot of us are influencers, so it’s hard to find us around the world, but we’re actually there, and there’s people practicing and really devoted to this, and we don’t get a whole lot of coverage, or people just assume that it’s, mainly white folks in polyamory, and that’s just not true.”
According to a 2016 study that sampled U.S. Census data from single adults, 20% of participants reported engaging in consensual nonmonogamy at some point in their lifetime. More specifically, Kinsey Institute researchers in 2021 found that 1 in 6 people in the U.S. would like to be in polyamorous relationships. Plus: “Polyamorists were as likely to be Republican or Democrat, poor or wealthy, white or Black, on the coasts or in the middle of the country,” according to a Kinsey Institute blog post in 2022.
This shouldn’t come as too big a shock. “The cultural context of African-American families has always been communal,” Kendall says.
Some argue “as polyamory gains interest and becomes more accessible, Black, queer femme and nonbinary individuals should be centered,” says a recent research paper by polyamorous psychologist Manijeh Badiee and personal coach Evita Sawyers; “they are enhancing polyamory discourse by discussing marginalization beyond queerness and providing strategies for survival and resistance.” Another study in 2014 found that people of color have to navigate a world where their sexualities are seen “as deviant and excessive, and this unsettling reality may impact public declarations of unconventional sexual practices.” Meaning they may be afraid to be as forthcoming for fear of retribution.
“The consequences are much worse for Black people when it comes to work life, being nonmonogamous, polyamorous as a whole,” Hagans says.
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The word “fetishization” popped up again and again among polyamorous people of color who spoke with USA TODAY.
“I personally do not date white folks in the polyamory community, because my experience has not been too great,” Oliveira says. “There’s definitely an aspect of being fetishized that is really wild to me.”
Sawyers adds: “We tend to think of racism as looking a particular way but fetishization is a form of racism. And so I may not experience going to a polyamorous event and someone calling me something (derogatory) or saying some kind of microaggression, although that has occurred, but what I will experience is people fetishizing me.”
Of course, not everyone has negative experiences. “In general, I’ve definitely seen pretty much all the white folks that I’ve interacted with in whatever capacity, in the poly community that I’ve been part of in whichever city, I’ve definitely seen most of the white people have been really understanding, and they they want to learn,” adds Abhijith Asok, who is polyamorous. “They really want to learn more. So they do ask questions and those things like that. But at the end of the day, the job of teaching them also falls on you.”
This also isn’t something that only happens to polyamorous people. “The kind of issues that polyamorous people of color face in the dating world are probably not too dissimilar from monogamous people in the dating world in terms of being fetishized for your race, or disrespected, dehumanized, people being racist, that kind of stuff,” adds Leanne Yau of @polyphiliablog. “But then there’s the extra layer of being polyamorous, which is like another marginalized identity, and with that a lot of assumptions that intersect with other parts of your identity.”
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Hagans has a clear ask. To be heard: “I want people to understand whether they’re monogamous or nonmonogamous, why I’m saying Black polyamory … because we don’t have a space. And then when we do get those spaces, they minimize our background.”
If you have another polyamory story you’d like to share, email [email protected].