u/naijacuriosity

Omo 💔

Guy posted a video speaking on racism against ALL black women, some join in to further attack west Africans, I noticed it’s usually East African men doing this, it’s not like it’s true it’s it seems more like a way of elevating the women from their own community by creating a contrast: our women are exceptionally feminine and beautiful, while those women are masculine or undesirable. In other words, putting another group of women down becomes part of how they market and praise their own women.

Long read:

I’ve noticed a pattern online, especially from some Horn of Africa accounts, where they constantly uplift their own women while degrading other African women, particularly West African women. I’ve seen people call West African women masculine, say they “look like men,” or act like they’re somehow less feminine or attractive.

There’s obviously nothing wrong with praising women from your own community. What I don’t understand is why West African women so often have to be used as the negative comparison. I’ve even seen what look like burner or fake accounts whose entire purpose is praising Horn women while insulting West African women.

And this isn’t about whether East African men are attracted to West African women. Attraction is subjective, and West African women aren’t exactly campaigning to date them either. The issue is constantly bringing West African women into conversations that have nothing to do with them just to put them down.

The screenshots I’m attaching are from a video about the racism Black women face. Even there, people somehow turned it into “when people praise Black women, they really mean Horn,” basically separating certain East African women from other Black women. What’s even more interesting is that when other East African women try to include themselves in that praise, they’re sometimes told, “No, we mean Somali/Habesha/Horn women.”
That’s why it feels less like simple preference and more like an online hierarchy being created: one group is constantly presented as exceptionally beautiful and feminine, while another is repeatedly masculinized.

The part that concerns me is that repetition works. If enough people keep repeating the same narrative through posts, comments, memes, burner accounts, and comparisons, eventually other people start believing it. I’m already seeing more West African men repeat the same insults about West African women, which shows how these narratives can spread beyond the people who started them.
The “West African women look like men” stereotype is especially strange to me because African populations overlap so much physically. There are Nigerians who could easily be mistaken for people from the Horn and vice versa. So I don’t really believe this is just about appearance.
To me, a lot of it feels connected to anti-Blackness especially the idea that women with features seen as less stereotypically West/Central African are somehow more feminine, while more stereotypically Black features are masculinized.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with uplifting your own women. The question is why that uplift so often seems to require putting another group of Black women beneath them.