Living in My Skin - Part 1

As a Black woman in a racist, sexist environment living in my skin has been burdensome this lately. It feels heavy and hot like I am walking around on a 90 degree day wearing a fur coat; I am suffocating. The mistreatment of us disturbs me. In light of things happening recently, I had to contemplate what it means to live in my skin. I went back into my archives and found pieces I had written about sexual abuse in the Black community.  The articles go back to 2009 but the issues are constant. Much of what I’ve written has remained the same. I only updated where I thought necessary. It is my goal to disrupt the dominant narrative that exists in our society around the devaluation of Black women and girls. We are not promiscuous gold diggers using our bodies as currency to get ahead. We are not “fast” “hot” “sassy” “thots” “hoes “or any of the other derogative terms used to dismiss us as sexual beings and make us sexual objects. We are not perfect. Like everyone else, we make mistakes.  And like everyone else, we deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. We deserve to be valued. We are, after all worthy human beings, too. This a three-part essay series. I will publish a new essay every day for the next three days. Please feel free to comment on any of the essays that resonate with you. Thank you for reading and sharing your most valuable commodity—time—with me.

ESSAY #1, sometime in 2009

 In 6^th grade, I was a kindergarten monitor who took great pride in my job. One day during the students’ nap time two boys entered the room, and as they walked toward me, the one in the front said, “it’s time to f****!” When he flicked off the lights my heart moved into my throat and silenced my voice at the same time that I noticed he was the cute boy I had seen on the playground. There we stood frozen in time, and then the two of them walked out of the room. They didn’t touch me, and I didn’t tell. Why? At the tender age of 11 had I already internalized the cultural mandate not to tell on a Black male who threatened to cause me harm?

 Historically there has been very little attention paid to sexual assault of Black women and girls, largely because there is a common misconception that it does not exist, and if it does, it doesn’t matter. “The deeply held belief that Black women are less valuable than women of other races/cultural groups—a legacy of slavery—pervades all aspects of American culture,” said Johnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Shetfall in their book Gender Talk.

When R & B superstar R. Kelly faced charges of child pornography and child endangerment, I prayed he would go to jail and send a message that there are consequences for crimes against Black women and girls. I was hoping that if convicted it might miraculously open up the conversation around the sexual violence against Black women and girls just as Rihanna and Chris Brown spotlighted domestic violence. Even though Kelly has a long, troubled and documented history involving underage girls, his support from males and females is unwavering.

 “When the verdict was announced, dozens of Black women (and some Black men) cheered outside the courtroom as the singer made his way past them to his waiting tour bus,” Allison Samuels wrote in her article Sexism on Trial on newsweek.com. VH1 featured two Kelly supporters who left their children in the care of babysitters while they went to court every day to support Kelly during his trial. Kelly is back in the news again this time for accusations of keeping young women in a cult. They are not under aged, but there are allegations that the young women are being held against their will. And nothing has changed. His supporters are even more vocal now. His personal life is none of our business. These young women are grown and Hugh Hefner does the same thing at the Playboy Mansion. I have no desire or energy to argue these ridiculous points. I don’t care about Kelly’s personal life, but I do care about the well being of young Black women. The idea that a magic number makes us grown is stupid. We can’t even agree on the number—17 for consensual sex (in Illinois), 18 to vote and 21 to drink. So when exactly is one an adult? And if what Hugh Hefner does sets the bar for our expectations, we are aiming the bar so low that we risk tripping over it.

Even though Kelly is a celebrity which in high profile cases most often vilifies the victims, the sordid story around Kelly’s fetish for under-aged girls and young women is indicative of how sexual assault and abuse is viewed by society in general, and the African-American community in particular, if the victim is Black and female.

 Growing up, I remember any adult could reprimand a child caught doing wrong, but I learned early that even though children had to be accountable to adults, the reverse was not always true. The same people, who told my mother if I stepped out of line, were the same people in collusion with the two men on my block who repeatedly sexually abused their stepdaughters over the years. There was a hedge of protection around my niece and me that no one dared penetrate, and to this day I’m thankful for that, because it allowed me to remain a child. But as I look back, I wonder why no one protected those two girls on the block and all of the other Black women and girls who’ve been led to slaughter by the men who were supposed to protect them?

 Some years ago, I read former Washington Post reporter Patricia Gaines' autobiography, Laughing in the Dark, and the book resonated with me because Gaines story is the story of so many African-American women and girls who share a twisted sense of solidarity around the issue of intra racial sexual violence. I understood her confusion, her shame and her sense of blame that she brought those things on herself because I had heard the same song sung by many Black females. I also understood her sense of helplessness. “Being a Black girl-child meant I had about as much influence in the world as there was in my itty-bitty finger. . .”

  Gaines remembers how the change in her body brought about a change in men—particularly her father’s friends who “liked to touch me intimately when no one was watching,” she says in the book. Gaines did not tell her parents because their friends “were like relatives and I didn’t want my parents to be disappointed in their friends,” she said in a phone interview. Growing up in the south Gaines said that everything around her affirmed that she was a powerless person—she was a first a child, then a girl child, then a colored girl child so she was “low on the hierarchy of power”—a pattern of powerlessness that would follow her into her adult life and lead to more abuse.

Some women, like Gaines, are breaking their silence. No!, is a documentary about intra racial sexual abuse in the African-American community by filmmaker, Aishah Shadidah who is also “a survivor of sexual violence,” she said in a phone interview. The film debunks rape myths, and explores the why behind the silence. Each of the women featured tells a horrifying story of being raped by a man or boy she knew, and for various reasons decides not to speak out against her attacker. As is most often the case, many of the women in the film, are single at the time of the sexual abuse—a time of increased vulnerability as we navigate our way into adulthood.

According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) 1 in 6 women will be assaulted in her lifetime, and college-aged women are 4 times more likely to be assaulted. The majority of rape victims (73%) know their assailants and rape often happens within the race so it stands to reason that young Black women will more than likely be raped by a Black male, and yet in most cases, the victims will not come forward. Victims of sexual violence often blame themselves, and Black women and girls are no different except we also shoulder the responsibility of race loyalty.

Fast forward. . . It’s 2017 and we are still strangely silent dialogue around sexual violence in the African-American community.  Even with a Black woman and two Black girls occupying the White House for eight years, our lips remain sealed on the issue of intra racial sexual violence. What will it take for us to speak up?

Election Reflections – Part 1: Thoughts from a Black Woman in the Trump Age

It’s Tuesday night of Election Day 2016. America is voting for its next President. I’m antsy. Do I really think the American people will vote for Donald Trump? I do. In the back of my mind, I think it’s possible. But I push it way down in my subconscious. I try to bury it, but I know it’s there.

 I have an application to complete, so I don’t bother to watch the returns, but my nieces are texting back and forth like crazy. So, I turn on the TV. It’s not looking good for Hillary. I talk to a friend on the phone for over an hour before deciding to go to bed. I’ll find out in the morning. Maybe she can do what the Cubs did and bring home a victory in the 11^th hour.

I wake up at 5:00 am. I check my phone. Donald Trump is the president-elect. I think to myself, This is not real. I must be asleep. The American citizens did not vote this man in as leader of the free world. It’s a late work day. I don’t have to be there until 11:30. I try to go back to sleep, but sleep evades me. I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what it says about the country I live in.

I call my mother. She doesn’t answer. She lives in the apartment upstairs from me, so I take my keys and left myself in. She is tiptoeing from the kitchen carrying a bowl of cottage cheese and peaches. Pooch, the dog my nephew left behind is by her side.

Image courtesy of Getty

“You know Trump won,” I say.

“Yea, I been up all night. I ain’t been to sleep yet.”

“What we gone do?”

“I don’t know,” says the woman who always has an answer. My mother is an elder, and she is one of the wisest women I know. She has lived through some stuff. Surely she can give me some direction and guidance. 

She sits on the bed. I sit next to her. Neither of us has answers, but I have my mother, and she has me.  We are each others’ comfort in this storm that is raging. The sun is not up and she has already spoken to two of my siblings. Family is where we seek refuge. My brother (who rarely texts) sends a group text about the future of uncertainty. My sister (who rarely texts) sends a Bible scripture to help us make sense of what doesn’t make sense. We are all stunned. But we know we have each other. And we know that though this battle may be hard, it is not impossible. 

I take Pooch out. It’s still dark. I stand on the porch. And nothing is changed—on the surface. But it feels like everything has changed. The silence of the early morning leaves me alone with my thoughts. I was never afraid of Trump, but of his supporters. I knew that he could not be a hate monger by himself. That fear is now my reality. There is a strong aversion to “Other” in this country, and in some ways I am that Other. I am a Black woman, and for the first time in my life I am afraid—really scared about what going’s to happen next. 

I’m hoping and praying that over time, these feelings subside. But for now I will sit with them and learn from them, but I will not be consumed by them. I have always loved the activism of the 1960s and believed that I grew up in the wrong decade. I wanted to be an activist. Be careful what you wish for; it just might come true. Perhaps the election of Donald Trump is the call to action that so many of us need to truly Make America Great once and for all. But for that to happen, we have work to do. So much work to do. I’m ready to work? Are you?

The Sad Truths of Straight Out of Compton

I left the movie theater heavy-hearted after viewing Straight Out of Compton. I allowed the positive buzz around the movie to suck me into seeing it even though I’ve never been a fan of NWA. While I loved Public Enemy, NWA was a bit over the top for me. I didn’t then and still don’t like music with explicitly sexual and/or violent lyrics. Words are things. Words matter. So, I’m mindful of the words that fill my head. I detest music that refers to women as bitches and hoes, and NWA lyrics are full of such references. I cringed as I sat in the theater listening to some of their infamous songs about life in the hood.

So, why did I want to see Straight Out of Compton? I was curious: Who was NWA? I wanted to know their story. I wanted to get an inside look at the men behind the music. I’m not the same person I used to be, and I wanted to see if they were different than I thought them to be. I went seeking understanding; I went looking for redemption. I wanted to be sympathetic to their plight as young Black men in urban America; I wasn’t. 

There’s a scene in the movie Doubt where the nun, played by Meryl Streep speaks with the mother of a student at the school who the nun suspects is being molested by the priest. Streep’s character wants the mother to say something. But the mother, brilliantly played by Viola Davis, refuses. The mother wants to keep her son free from the wrath of her husband who rejects his son’s perceived sexuality. Never in my life did I think that I would be ok with not revealing the identity of a suspected child molester! But she made understand why she was willing to look the other way if her son was being molested if she thought it would save his life. 

In Nathan McCall’s book, Makes Me Wanna Holla, there is a chapter called Trains that is very difficult to read, but so insightful into the psyche of some young men. McCall explains how the young men in the hood looked up to the old heads, and how the old heads were disrespectful of women. The chapter explains how the boys would trick girls into compromising situations and gang rape (run a train) them. Later in the chapter, McCall goes into detail about having a girlfriend and taking her to a friend’s house for sex, but learns that his boys have set her up for a train. He ends up getting into a fight trying to defend her honor. But a couple of the guys take the girl to another apartment to finish what they started. McCall does an excellent job of demonstrating the warped view many men held of manhood and the roles of women and girls in their lives. He also shows a maturity that I found lacking in characters in Straight Out of Compton.

It has been said that members of NWA were revolutionaries, but there was nothing revolutionary about their music or about their movie. It was a bio pic—based on real life events, and they had the right to tell the story that they wanted to tell. And they did. The only one who was really “about that life” was Eazy-E. Both Ice Cube and Dr. Dre came from stable home environments. It was a well-cast film that left me cold. I couldn’t wrap my head around glorifying what I saw as a destructive force in the Black community. Every time a movie about slavery or the civil rights movement comes out, there’s a chorus of Black folk complaining that we keep telling the same stories of victimization. Well, we’ve seen this story a thousand times as well.  I didn’t find anything revelatory in the nearly 2 ½ hours that I sat and watched.  Here are five sad truths that I gleaned from Straight Out of Compton.

1.       We’re still oppressed—some of us more than others. I was disappointed in how easily Eazy-E fell for the okey-doke. He allowed their manager Jerry to swindle not only the group out of money, but Eazy was also taken advantage of because he trusted this White man that he didn’t know, to do right by him. Even after Ice-Cube and Dr. Dre tried to tell him, Eazy still believed in Jerry. Yea, even the so-called hard-core members of keeping-it-real, fuck-the-police NWA were still looking for a White Savior.

2.       Consumption and greed continues to be our downfall. As soon as the money started rolling in, so did the wild parties, the drugs and the excess of material goods. There was never any mention in the movie of them giving any money back to the community or doing any type of charity work. It was all about how much they could get and spend. Though Dr. Dre and Ice Cube managed to escape the downward spiral that so many of our athletes and entertainers succumb to, Eazy Ended up being a casualty of never having enough.

3.       Colorism is alive and well. Not only did the members of NWA end up with light-skinned women as partners in real life, there was a color caste system used to hire girls for the movie. When the casting call went out, the request was for girls who were classified as A’s B’s, C’s and D’s with the brighter complexions and straighter hair being A’s and B’s, brown girls with weaves were C’s, and dark skinned, poor girls were D’s. I can’t make this up! Here’s a link to the story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/17/straight-out-of-compton-casting-call_n_5597010.html And this is what we saw play out on the screen. Most of the women in the movie were light skinned. Early in the film, Eazy E was the only one who had a brown-skinned woman, but she was also “upgraded” for a lighter model. Some of the “blackest” men we know adhered to a Eurocentric model of beauty. Kathleen Cleaver, member of the Black Panther Party and wife of fellow Panther, Eldridge Cleaver spoke of being told to go inside during times of conflict so as not to mess up her pretty light face.

4.       Misogyny was and still is an issue. NWA objectified women. They were boys with toys to be discarded at will. Though they come off as decent guys in the movie, their lyrics and their lifestyles show their disdain for women. Ice Cube married his girl and they’re still together. It’s inferred that Dr. Dre’s desire to pursue a relationship with a woman who didn’t want drama was partly why he left Death Row Records. And Eazy-E was also married in the film, but their references to women as bitches as hoes seemed to also reflect how they felt about women. An abuser doesn’t call his woman honey or babe before he hits her; she’s probably a bitch, or a hoe. Maybe that explains Dr. Dre’s abusive past and Ice Cube’s recent interview with Rolling Out in which he reinerates why some women are bitches and hoes, and only women who fit into those categories should be concerned. When Dr. Dre brutally attacked journalist Dee Barnes, members of NWA thought she got what she deserved. It was only with the release of Straight Out of Compton that Dr. Dre saw the need to apologize for his past transgressions.

5.       Hypocrisy at its best. NWA may have made music that was raunchy and edgy, but at the end of the day, they were entertainers shuckin’ and jivin’ for the master. Their gangster rap wasn’t for the people in communities like Compton; it was for the masturbating voyeurs in the suburbs who played out the racist fantasies of hood life in their minds. NWA exploited what was happening in urban America for material gain. These are the sad truths straight out of the book of conformity and status quo.

Why I Hate Chris Brown’s Song “Loyal”

When a rich nigga want you

And your nigga can’t do nothing for ya

These hoes ain’t loyal

By Chris Brown

“These hoes ain’t loyal.” I wake up too many mornings with the hook playing in my head. Here’s the kicker: I hate this song! And yet I can’t get it out of my head right now because it’s stuck on repeat. This happens every time I’m somewhere the song plays. I like the beat and I don’t want to because I can’t stand songs with misogynistic lyrics. So, the fact that this song won’t leave me alone, means that I need to write about it. I need to explain why I detest this and similar songs that treat women as things. A hoe is a thing; it’s an object. It is a tool to be used. It is easily discarded and replaced. So, when we sing along to the catchy beat, we subconsciously accept that women and girls are things. We accept that they are disposable.  And we don’t recognize their humanity.

When we sing along, we can go along with Jamal Bryant, pastor of Empowerment Temple in Baltimore, MD who was speaking to his congregation back in June about cheating men, and talked about the other woman and said, “These hoes ain’t loyal.”I listened to the entire sermon so as not to be sucked into a sensationalized news story because I know how things can be taken out of context. But this was not the case. His sexist, homophobic, misogynistic sermon made references to “sanctified sissies” and “baby mamas”, too. So the song lyrics fit right in with the rest of the foolishness. 

When we sing along, we are not offended by the pastor’s remarks. We are members of the congregation clapping and standing up in agreement.  We are mostly African-American women being bamboozled and hoodwinked by the words of a charismatic preacher who is once again blaming women for the downfall of men. What’s even more interesting in this scenario is Bryant chose to use this particular song to chastise women for not being loyal when his marriage ended due to his infidelity in 2013. He was calling women out in the sermon when he was the one who stepped out on his wife. 

When we sing along, we can accept that three professional African-American women hanging out at a hotel in Manhattan couldn’t have been anything other than professional hookers. On August 28, three friends: Kanataki Washington, Cydney Madlock and J. Lyn Thomas were seated in a restaurant in the Standard Hotel in Manhattan when an African-American man introduced himself and offered to buy the women drinks. But before they could take him up on his offer, a security guard whispered in the man’s ear and ushered him away. Washington said the security guard told them, “Come on ladies. You can buy a drink, but you can’t be soliciting.” 

The security guard insisted that the women were soliciting sex. And when the women reported the security officer, they were met with indifference, and told that security personnel were hire through an outside agency. But a few weeks later, Washington says she received an email from a staff member of the hotel inviting Washington and her friends back for a dinner (valued at $400) and a bottle of champagne. None of the emails addressed the women’s prostitution claim, but the hotel was willing to pay them to come back which was a slap in the face. The hotel was okay with paying the women for being insulted, but wouldn’t acknowledge the insult. 

When we sing along, we accept two teens found dead and bound together along a road in Duval County, Florida as par for the course. Angela Mangum and Tjhisha Ball were best friends according to their family members, and both the girls had been working as strippers at the time of their deaths. Law enforcement officers in Jacksonville, Florida are looking for tips, but the story has gotten little media attention. In the few news outlets that I’ve seen the story reported, the pictures that are shown are mug shots of the women who were arrested but never convicted of any crime. 

When we sing along, we see these pictures as confirmation that “these hoes ain’t loyal” and deserved to die. We don’t see them as victims because we like our victims clean; we like them White; we like them right according to a strict code of conduct that says bad girls can’t do good, and good girls aren’t bad. So, that there is a killer(s) on the loose, does not hold our attention. We flip the page or scroll onto the next news story if we have even seen this news story at all.

When we sing along, we don’t raise an eyebrow when we learn that a police officer targeted African-American women and sexually assaulted them. Daniel Holtzclaw, a 27 year-old officer with the Oklahoma police department preyed on middle-aged Black women. Eight women have come forth since February of this year complaining that they were pulled over during traffic stops and fondled, ordered to perform oral sex and even one women accused Holtzclaw of rape. He was arrested August 20. His bond, originally set at $5 million dollars was reduced to $500,000 and Holtzclaw has been released from jail and placed under house arrest. Across the nation we are protesting police brutality and excessive force. And yet we are quiet around this decades old issue of police officers abusing their power and assaulting Black women. 

When we sing along, we are not outraged that a mother of three lost her life just this month for not responding to a man trying to get her phone number. Mary “Unique” Spears was leaving the repast of a family member, when a man started harassing her. He wanted to know if she was single, and if he could get her number. He was persistent, and when Spears’ boyfriend tried to intercede on her behalf, the man took out a gun and began shooting. He shot Spears once, and when she tried to run he shot her twice more.

When we sing along, the seeds of misogyny take root in our mind and become entangled with rational thought. So even when we clean up the lyrics and sing, “these girls ain’t loyal”, we know that the girls in this and songs like it are still tools of a trade designed to degrade and devalue females in general but  African-American women and girls in particular who society consistently classifies as hoes and treats as such.

So, think about that the next time you find yourself bobbing and singing to Loyal.