I am so looking forward to my upcoming vacation because I need a break from my TV, which has stressed me out this whole week. If the Don Imus controversy has enraged me, reminding me that, as a black woman, I will always be viewed as a "ho," then it just got worse when, yesterday, learning that NBC has dropped the radio DJ from their line-up, I would also learn that all charges were dropped in the Duke Lacrosse case, when just last year, Rush Limbaugh called the accuser a "ho."
Black strippers...black college basketball players ... all "hoes," according to our hate-speech pundits.
And, yet, what I've been detecting in much of mainstream news coverage is how "good" and how "innocent" the white men involved in these cases really are.
Consider the main headliner on CNN's screen yesterday concerning the Duke case: "They're Innocent!"
Before I continue, let me just say right now that I'm not going to come down on one side or another on whether I believe the accuser in this case is lying. All I, or anyone who was not at the infamous party last year, really know is that a charge of rape had been issued, it immediately ignited the racial flames of both the local and national community, and that DNA and other evidence were not sufficient for the charges to hold. That's all we know.
We do not know that the accuser was lying - only that her testimony could not be backed up. Moreover, we do not know if the three Lacrosse players who were accused of sexual assault are "innocent." We only know that there wasn't enough evidence to bring them to trial, let alone to convict them. And, as anyone who knows our court of law, no one is ever proven "innocent," just proven "not guilty." Semantics? Hardly!
How "innocent" are the Lacrosse players? I don't know about the three particular guys who were charged, but they were part of a larger group of guys who hired two black women to strip at their party, and anyone who knows the way escort and other sex work services work, you have to specify the kind of women you want sent to your place: blonde, red-head, Latin, Asian, and BLACK. So, we know that they specifically hired two black women to strip at their party. Hmmm, were they hoping to recreate the hypersexual "video ho" broadcast all over Viacom-owned TV right in their living room? We also know that at least one instance of violence occurred - the hurling of the racial epithet "nigger," for which a 911 call was made and a next-door neighbor verified hearing.
None of these occurrences prove "rape" or "sexual assualt," but they do prove that the party guests are not "innocent," that they're not "good people." They were racists who were interested in demeaning a racial category of womanhood, and when they felt they didn't get their money's worth, so to speak, they sought to berate them verbally. It was not a stretch of the imagination to think that such verbal violence could escalate physically or sexually.
But, according to CNN, ABC (which decided now was the time to reveal the face of the accuser - thanks for letting the Ku Klux Klan know who to look for!) , NBC, and CBS, we must now look upon the accused as poor innocent "victims" whose good name and honor was dragged through the mud. And, forget about the accuser - who at the least, if she had made up the story (for she has reported being gang-raped before), is in dire need of mental and clinical help - the concern is these "innocent" white boys who didn't deserve all this bad publicity, let alone that they did a very bad thing (remember that awful movie of the same name in which, incidentally, a group of white boys killed an Asian stripper who came to their house? Something makes me think that our nation knows that our "good" and "innocent" white boys are capable of such racial misogyny, but the lesson, as our mainstream news reporting indicates, is that it's okay - after all, isn't this what white male privilege is all about? Getting away with rape and murder, which they've been doing since the founding of this country?)
The crime apparently is holding them accountable. As soon as NBC announced that they would drop Don Imus' show (and they only came to this conclusion once Proctor and Gamble, General Motors, and Staples - where I will be doing all of my computer hardware and software shopping from now on, thank you! - decided to pull their advertising), we soon had those usual white male talking heads on the air bewailing that our "political correctness" culture has "gone too far."
After all, we shouldn't be caught up in defending the "virtue" of a bunch of black female college athletes, even though all of yesterday evening, the news saw nothing wrong in coming to the defense of the "virtue" of the white men in the Duke case. Don Imus still insists that he's a "good person who said a terrible thing," clearly indicating how morally obtuse he has become in not realizing the damaging effects of these words. He can help all the little black kids in the world, what good is his aid if they merely grow up to be "hoes" in his eyes?
As Please Professor Black Woman suggests, we've put too much emphasis on "good people," and white people in particular have become unbelievably - maniacally even - obsessed with stressing what "good people" they are, how "innocent" they are, when charges of racism are brought against them, even when their racism takes on such heinous acts as shooting black men 41 times, burning down churches, stringing up gay men on fences, or calling strippers the N-word. At this rate, the next big racial crime will be a lynching (mark my words, white male anger is escalating in this country, and they will not stop until someone is hanging from a tree!), and the news casters will still try and convince all of us what "good boys" (or girls, let me not gender-discriminate the haters) these misguided souls really are.
Lest I be accused of targetting white boys only in my tirade, let me also lay the blame at the popular young black men spearheading the sexist AND racist culture of rap music, for I recognize how that distorted representation of black culture has become so pervasive that it has influenced others. Where else did Don Imus learn that dreadful word? Where else did the Duke Lacrosse players learn to commodify black female sexuality? As black women, we have to call both black and white men on their misogynistic actions and to address how this brand of misogyny is also racialized (whether the racism is internalized on the part of black men who are willing to sell out their sisters for the mighty dollar or historically passed down from one white male generation to the next, who have always learned about the commodity of black women's bodies - since slavery - but can hide behind black male sexism to get off on these images).
It's a shame that, in an era of black female secretary of states and billionaire powerhouses like Condi and Oprah, that we're still being judged by the lowest common denominator.
Not to beat up on the video vixens and strippers, who I tip my hat to for daring to assert a black female sexuality in a climate that has always encouraged "respectable" black women to deny our very libidos, but if we're to recognize any erotic power, we have to advocate our rights to sexual agency, which also requires that we advocate our rights to defend ourselves from sexual violence.
Too bad, we'll never get that right in a court of law.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
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