Under the Bus—Black Women and Girls in America

As Black women and girls, it seems like we can’t heal fast enough before we find ourselves under the wheels of the bus of a society seemingly determined to crush our collective spirit. And what’s especially hurtful is when the driver of the bus is someone who should be pulling us out of harm’s way instead of trying to run us over!

The thing about media and Black folk is that we are not held to the same standard as other folk. There is microscopic scrutiny of our action. Beyoncé singing sexy music to her husband is responsible for an increase in teen pregnancy among African-American girls who look at her as a role model according to Bill O’Riley. Donald Sterling, on the other hand is looked upon as an anomaly of sorts. Black people are always being judged and held accountable collectively rather we like it or not.

Black men share Black women’s struggle for justice and fair representation; Black men know our story, so the last place we want to see them is behind the wheel of a bus barreling toward us. The tire tracks on our backs were still fresh from the Mimi Faust fall-out, when I saw this bus coming at us full speed just as we were about to step off the curb at we-can-move-past-this latest-episode Avenue.

The driver, Columbus Short, from the highly popular ABC drama Scandal  was fired from the series when he was caught in his own real life scandal of domestic violence. There had been a number of altercations between the two dating back to February according to reports, but after an incident on April 7, Tanee McCall, Short’s wife filed a restraining order against her husband.

So, what does Short do? He shows up at the house he shared with his wife accompanied by another woman to help him collect his belongings. McCall is said to have attacked the woman after McCall asked the woman to leave and she refused. Short released a video of McCall attacking the other woman. Why didn’t Short try to stop the fight or call the police? Because he was too busy trying to run his wife down.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, Comedian DL Hughley jumped on the bus with Short and took it for a spin. When news of the alleged abuse charges broke, Hughley went on a wild rant on his radio show about it.  He called McCall-Short a “thirsty bitch” and went on to say, “I think that broad shouldn’t be telling all his business if she gone take him to court.” Hughley pumped his breaks, promptly removed the audio and issued an apology when the public responded negatively to his comments. 

But this wasn't the first time Hughley has been behind the wheel. When Don Imus comments  "nappy-headed hoes" comments caused a ruckus,” Hughley co-signed on that foolishness remarking that Imus hadn’t lied because they were “nappy-headed hoes.” Hughley apologized for his dismissal of the abuse allegations, but he doesn’t seem to find anything wrong with continuously calling us out of our name. Too bad we can’t revoke his license.

Before long, I could hear the rumbling of another bus coming. This time it was Floyd Mayweather behind the wheel driving full speed ahead. After pictures of his ex, Shantel Jackson and Rapper Nelly all cuddled up surfaced, a revenge seeking Mayweather posted a sonogram picture on his Instagram account of the twins that Jackson allegedly aborted. The backlash was furious and swift, and Mayweather removed the picture, but it was too late. Jackson’s body had already been tossed into oncoming traffic.

While these are individual stories, they do help drive public opinion and push the rest of us off the curb. Once something personal becomes public, and the public feeds off pre-conceived notions of a marginalized group, the personal becomes political for us all. Beep, beep! Get out of the way!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

The Collision of Race and Gender at the Intersection of Sexual Assault

Image courtesy of race-class-gender-resourceguides.weebly.com

Sexual assault is a crime against humanity. But not all victims of sexual abuse elicit the same level of compassion and support from the media and society. Some victims’ stories are little more than whispers on the voice of public consciousness while other stories scream for our attention; we take notice. We are horrified and disgusted, but our horror and disgust has limitations because even in a crime as horrific as rape we still discriminate. 

Since the beginning of the year the media have saturated us with rape stories. We learned of a woman who was gang raped on a bus in New Delhi, India and died from her injuries. Numerous other rapes in India put the spotlight on sexual assault in India, but India was not alone as we learned of rape cases in the United States and Canada. There were the members of the U. S. Armed Forces who worked in sexual prevention and were charged with sexual misconduct. 

A string of stories involving rape and social media in America and Canada in which the acts of violation were recorded and posted online seemed to happen one after another. Two of the victims committed suicide, and the rape conviction of two football players divided the small town of Steubenville in Ohio. New stories kept coming. I was wondering if there actually more rapes, or were we just paying more attention? I was hopeful that the constant attention would force us to address these crimes against women and girls. 

 Then in May, we learned of the Cleveland, Ohio kidnapping case that continues to dominate the headlines as the captives speak out. Ariel Castro lured three young women into his home and held them hostage for 10 years. He recently pleaded guilty to 937 felony accounts including, rape, assault and kidnapping. The repeated rapes resulted in pregnancy for one of the victims. Castro was sentenced to life without parole plus 1000 years. This story has been everywhere, as it should have been, but there was another sordid story of rape and torture unfolding in another courtroom, and if it had not popped up in a news feed on my Face book page, I would have missed it. As I read the details, I couldn’t help but wonder where was the coverage? And where was the outrage? 

Aswad Ayinde whose real name is Charles McGill was sentenced to 50 years in prison for raping and impregnating his daughters. This was the second of five such trials. He received a 40-year sentence in the first trial totaling 90 years in prison. Ayinde raped five of his daughters, and fathered six children with three of them. He was said to have a God-complex and was trying to create a “pure” bloodline. Ayinde was the director for the Fugees “Killing Me Softly” video.

This story reeks of sadness and anger. The rapes were happening with the mother’s knowledge, and on the child welfare agency’s watch. It was reported that the rapes took place in various homes and even in a funeral home. It has all the makings of a titillating tale to entice public attention, but it was a widely under reported story. A Google search yielded 34,000,000 hits including such notable sites as Fox, CNN, and the Huffington Post for the Cleveland kidnapping case, but a Google search yielded a mere 208,000 hits on less prominent news sites and blogs for Ayinde. Why wasn’t this story just as newsworthy as the others? Why was there such a huge disparity in the coverage?

I’m in this place again. and  it’s hard to stomach the silence around stories of sexual assault and Black women and girls. Unless it involves a big-time celebrity (R. Kelly and Mike Tyson) or the story has some lurid angle (the rape and murder of Ryan Harris in which two young boys were brought in for questioning), we don’t give too much time or attention to these stories. Why? I remember feeling the same sense of rage and despair when I read about the woman in Dunbar Village back in 2007.  She was raped, sodomized and forced to perform oral sex on her own son!  I felt the same way when I read that James Bevel, a former top adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was convicted of incest. Neither of these stories was widely reported, and if I had not been surfing the internet, I would have missed them.

There’s a part of me that understands that the Cleveland case is one of hope for families with missing children. I recognize how rare it is that after such a traumatic event that there could possibly be a happy ending. The young women are united with their families and moving forward with their lives. That’s wonderful. They deserve that. But all girls and women who survive sexual assault deserve our sympathy. How can we pick and choose?

Ayinde’s story bothers me on so many levels. This man raped and tortured his daughters. He delivered the babies at home, and when two of the babies died, he buried them. He home-schooled his children and threw up his middle finger at authorities, and he got away with it for 30 years. I am standing in the gap of race and gender, and the two have collided wrecking the lives of five young women and their children. The daughters of Ayinde and Bevel, the woman in Dunbar Village represent the lifeless, human carnage at the intersection of race, gender and sexual assault.  When will we recognize that sexual assault really is a crime against all of humanity—and not just those of a lighter hue?