Why do so few books, cinema classes and film reviews acknowledge or discuss what appears to be Martin Scorsese's sexual obsession with African-American women?

In a cursory search of Google Scholar, I have not found an article specifically looking at Martin Scorsese's depictions of African-American women in his films. However, I only looked for half an hour and may not yet have found the best search terms to use (Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues is a significant spoiler in the results, though it is also a significant source of representations of African-American women in his work). The academic version of Rule 34 (if it exists, there is porn of it) is if it exists, there is a thesis on it. I imagine that pop culture studies will catch up and thoroughly cover the complete works of Martin Scorsese from every conceivable angle, including those of race, gender, and sexual themes. I am actually surprised that I didn't find at least one article or chapter of a book on this subject in the time I took to search. The Scorsese biographies that I saw in my search are written by white men, who may perhaps lack the interest or perspective to see race or gender issues in such relief. Scholars in the fields of African-American Studies and Women's Studies would have the perspective but maybe are not as interested in the work of Martin Scorsese as they are in other filmmakers. I don't think it is a deliberate avoidance of the subject as much as an area that has not yet been thoroughly looked at yet.

I think the most straight forward answer I can give you is that Martin Scorsese is not sexually obsessed with black women. Sure, there are black prostitutes in Taxi Driver, but all of the female characters in that movie are prostitutes save one campaign worker. I honestly think you, the person asking the question, are looking for things that simply aren't there. Plus, Scorsese didn't write the script to either Mean Streets or to Taxi Driver. Your question is almost offensive in how assumptive it is.

Martin Scorsese is a director, not a screenwriter.  Scorsese didn't write the screenplay to Taxi Driver, it's not his autobiography.  Paul Schrader, the screenwriter who came up with the story to Taxi Driver on his own, said that Taxi Driver was "his" (Paul Schrader's) movie, and that The Last Temptation of Christ was Scorsese's most personal film. In fact, some of the African American characters in Taxi Driver's script are toned down somewhat by Scorsese. So, no, I don't agree that something is there with Taxi Driver. With Mean Streets, however, Scorsese has more say in the writing.  The naming of characters could be to prevent a lawsuit, but you may be onto something.  Of the Scorsese films I've seen, there are very few African American women.  Age of Innocence, which he partly wrote, seems to have none.  I can't remember much in the way of non-Italian minorities in Goodfellas or Casino, two others he helped to pen.  The films he chose to direct from the pens of others, like Hugo, don't seem to show this obsession at all.

I am a resident Indian, and my understanding of American culture or society is no more than second hand. Yet, I believe that I understand the mind of an American man fairly well where sexuality is concerned. In part, this is due to my strong urge to explore and find out more, even in areas that are considered off limits in civil society. Among other things, I have explored the underbelly of the Internet - the shady chat rooms and the porn sites. Nothing offers a better understanding of male fantasies than those. Amendment:  But regardless of what someone's actual personal inclinations may be, these are normally left implied or to be inferred. They are seldom stated explicitly. One doesn't exactly advertise fantasies of that nature, especially when it is seen to be negative publicity from some prevalent socio-cultural angle. <End Amendment> Dark skinned women are considered exotic by white American men of any European origin. And by dark, I mean the ones with golden coffee colored skin, not the pure Afro black types. So is the tightly kinky Afro hair. All you need to do is to take a look at any of these so called Interracial sites and observe what they accentuate. And yet, some deeply embedded social bias about mixed couples probably still prevails, so they would not admit to such attractions very openly. In my view, it is seen as a taboo subject. The US is a melting pot and largely free of obvious racial bias in the contemporary world. Yet, a free and frank discussion of all the uncomfortable issues it involves is still not quite on the cards. Even what I say here has an element of uncomfortable directness about it, and I wouldn't be very surprised if this answer gets downvoted. But if you think I have tried to give an honest answer which addresses even a part of this question, I would have done my job. Uncomfortable issues have never bothered me. But bias sure does.

(Disclaimer: I am not American and everything I talk about here is based on my readings, not first hand experience.)My first step would be to state that although Scorsese provocatively visually aligns himself with Travis in promotional photos and has also placed himself prominently within the narrative as a jealous, racist husband, he and Travis cannot be equated – Travis’s actions and thoughts cannot be taken to represent Scorsese’s, especially when examined on a superficial level.I have made the argument before that many of Scorsese’s movies visualize an American unconscious in which the tensions brought on by immigration and nativism are acted out. Prominent and noted examples are his treatments on the Italian and Irish Americans, which I would posit as the in-group that Scorsese either belongs to or strongly identifies with. On the other hand, there are the „others“, seen either as exotic temptresses or hostile competitors. I would argue that Scorsese takes on an uncomfortable middle perspective, between his status as a descendant of Catholic Italian immigrants (themselves marginalized) and a white mainstream that his group has been more and more assimilated into, necessitating a detachment from groups less smoothly assimilable (due to, for example, skin color). „Taxi Driver“ has to be read in the context of its time: People were dealing with the aftermath of the Vietnam War (and the loss of belief in the rightness of military actions) and the Civil Rights Movement, women’s liberation and the subsequent erosion of the nuclear family and traditional gender roles, in addition to an improved integration of African Americans into civil society on the one hand (as exemplified by the black couples now admitted onto American Bandstand) while at the same time white flight led to a renewed segregation and clustering of African Americans in inner cities that were increasingly seen as dangerous.Scorsese points out how white femininity is fetishized (see Travis’s infatuation with Betsy and the way she is depicted/lighted within the film or the replica of the Venus of Milo that is juxtaposed with the porn cinema cashier, described in the script as „plain and dumpy-looking“), how the denigration of blackness is bigott in light of the obvious sexual attraction that exists because and in spite of bodily difference and senses of decorum (see the scene in the porn cinema in which Betsy flees from the depiction of mixed-race group sex that has, until now, been perfectly fine for Travis to consume – only after experiencing her white middle-class shock and revulsion does Travis understand that there’s something, ambiguously, „wrong“) and how white masculinity has been a dangerous force in the history of America, once glorified as the driving power behind American exceptionalism but in actuality the source of the many unnecessary military conflicts the US has been embroiled in.Basically, I would argue that all that fetishization you see has been done on purpose and with critical intent. While Scorsese may have tried to work out his own conflicting emotions (about the state of the country, New York City, race relations, his Catholicism,…), what he has produced is ultimately a critical work of art.(I have written a term paper about this and have also noticed the dearth of scholarly literature on Scorsese’s depictions of African Americans. At the time, I concluded that scholars must have thought that there is simply not enough to it and that the prominent sexual attraction can be sufficiently explained through Scorsese’s religion and the rigid social structure of Italian American communities. I would argue on the other hand that, even though they often only appear in a subtext, the African American experience lies at the core of many of his deliberations on immigration, especially due to the fact that they are the largest, involuntary immigration group.)