WIFEY MATERIAL™
“ASIAN GIRLS WHO GO TO NOTTING HILL CARNIVAL & AFRO NATION ARE NOT READY TO BE WIFED” read the social media post, in enlarged black letters against white blocks.
The latest entry in what has become its own content genre: Black × Brown antagonism for clicks.
The post did exactly what posts like this are designed to do. It travelled. The men behind it took to their soapboxes (aka TikTok Lives), insisting that “they said what they said,” while maintaining there was nothing racial about what they’d said. Others defended it as preference. Typical.
Somewhere in all the arguing over whether the post was racist, though, another assumption was being allowed to pass without much examination: that these men were in a position to decide which women were fit to be wives in the first place.
Not who they personally wanted to marry. That would be preference. This was a public verdict on a category of women. Go here, do this, associate with these people, and you move from marriageable to not. Wifey material. Not wifey material.
All the while, I kept looking at the cornrows worn by one of the men behind these posts. Difficult to ignore, given the circumstances.
Then someone in our comments asked an even more obvious question:
“Also, Indo-Caribbean women exist?”
For all the conversation generated about these women, we knew remarkably little about them.
We knew nothing about what any of these women actually did at Carnival or Afro Nation that could be considered scandalous. A woman could have gone with friends, cousins, a partner or alone. She didn’t need to kiss anyone, sleep with anyone or even speak to anyone.
She went somewhere.
Apparently that was enough for the classification to begin.
Which made me wonder what exactly was being classified. These women’s behaviour, or at least an imagined version of it? Their sexuality? Their proximity? And these weren’t just any festivals. Afro Nation and Notting Hill Carnival are understood as Black cultural spaces. Simply being there seemed to carry its own set of assumptions about what these women might do, who they might meet and who they might desire.
People drink, dance, flirt, hook up, lose their friends, find their friends and make questionable decisions at festivals of every description. Yet nobody had produced a corresponding category of South Asian women rendered unsuitable for marriage by a weekend at Glastonbury.
So perhaps the issue wasn’t simply that these women went somewhere.
It was where they went, and who they might get close to there.
Wifey.
For those of us who came of age around the turn of the millennium, the word takes me somewhere else. In 2000, the American R&B group Next released Wifey. More than twenty-five years later, I went back and listened again this morning.
What struck me this time was the exchange at the centre of the refrain:
“Will you be my wifey?”
“Yes, I’ll be your wifey.”
A question. And a response.
For all the talk about who is and isn’t “wifey material,” the original formulation at least contains another person. Someone who has to answer.
I’ve been thinking about questions like these for much longer than this week’s argument. I met the woman who would become my wife twenty-five years ago. I’m Ugandan-American. She’s South Indian. We’ve since raised two children together. Questions about who gets to love whom, who gets to marry whom and what families and communities make of those choices have never been entirely abstract for me.
Nor are the categories in this conversation as straightforward as they first appear. When someone in our comments asked, “Also, Indo-Caribbean women exist?”, others quickly followed. One woman pointed out that for Indo-Caribbean people, Carnival isn’t somebody else’s culture.
“This is our culture,” she wrote.
For many women of Indian descent from the Caribbean, Carnival isn’t simply a Black cultural space they have chosen to enter. It is part of their own cultural inheritance. Proximity to Black people isn’t some exceptional crossing of a racial boundary. It is ordinary life.
Dougla people exist. Afro/Indo-Caribbean people exist. People who are both Black and Indian exist. Generations of families have already been formed across the boundary this conversation was busy reconstructing.
Which is why something in a paper we’ve been reading in our current Reconstruction Lab stopped me.
Historian Carissa Chew’s Remembering Interracial Intimacies: South Asian Perspectives on Black/Brown Sex and Romance in Colonial East Africa takes us somewhere else entirely: colonial East Africa. Chew examines relationships between Africans and South Asians, but also the racial and communal boundaries constructed around those relationships and the ways those intimacies have subsequently been remembered, obscured or denied.
I don’t want to draw a straight line between colonial East Africa and an argument unfolding on social media in 2026. They’re not the same thing. But reading Chew made me wonder whether we’re living among the afterlives of something much more insidious.
Chew writes about what colonial East Africa called the “Black Peril”: the construction of African men as a sexual threat to non-African women. But the anxiety wasn’t confined to white colonial society. Chew finds versions of the same fear within South Asian communities, where the possibility of intimacy between African men and South Asian women could become something to guard against. In one account, fathers were reluctant to let their daughters work as secretaries or nurses because those professions might bring them into contact with Black men.
The rules were not applied equally. South Asian men had considerably greater freedom to form relationships across the racial boundary. It was women’s sexuality that carried a different burden: family honour, respectability and the maintenance of the community’s racial boundaries. Chew describes relationships between South Asian women and African men as occupying the most prohibited end of this interracial spectrum.
Contact.
Not marriage. Not sex. Not even necessarily romance.
The possibility of proximity was already enough to produce anxiety.
I kept thinking about the women at Afro Nation and Carnival.
She went somewhere.
Which brought me back, once again, to the cornrows.
Black culture was never absent from this conversation. It was everywhere. In the hairstyle worn by one of the men making the argument. In the festivals being discussed. Even in the language being used to decide who qualified as “wifey.”
Perhaps that’s why the contradiction is more interesting than simply calling it hypocrisy. Black culture can be consumed, borrowed, celebrated and desired while intimacy with Black people is treated very differently. You can wear Blackness remarkably close to the body while still wanting to police who gets close to Black people.
The boundary isn’t always between embracing and rejecting Blackness. Sometimes it sits between consumption and intimacy.
And somewhere underneath all of this is still that question from a twenty-six-year-old R&B song:
“Will you be my wifey?”
A question.
There is still another person in the room.
She gets to answer.