By Stephanie
Dunn |@DrStephaneDunn
| with thanks to NewBlackMan(in exile)
Kwanzaa Day, Tuesday, 26 December 2017.
A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay about campus rape and assault, about the
backlash that happens often when silence is broken, about how I was the girl in
a dorm room who just escaped having the story of my first sexual encounter turn
into a tragic narrative, how I still remember.
Shortly before that period, during the Ray Rice furor, I wrote for the first
time publicly about the violence against my aunts and mother when I was growing
up in Indiana. And before Harvey Weinstein collapsed the dam of quiet around
Hollywood’s long, long history of sexual predators, I’d begun writing this
little book I’m finishing, Beyond Mule & Bridge: Legacies of Rape. In this,
I am raw insides spilling out on the page.
I’ve been journeying towards it for a good twenty years, ever since my mother
unintentionally revealed that how I came to be had everything to do with rape
and the exploitation of a pretty young woman by an older man. It’s about the
rape of aunts and sisters woven into the larger fabric of a narrative about the
veil of invisibility surrounding Black women who have historically been raped
by white men at will and by Black men who’ve been strangers and family.
I cringe inwardly at memories turning like a kaleidoscope in my mind’s
eye. I’m maybe eleven and a young Black woman in my hometown is brutally
murdered by her husband with their young children there in the home. He
attempted to gut the woman literally and afterwards she lingered in a coma for
days I think then died. He went to prison but actually lived long enough to
know the children, be released, and have a life for some years before he passed.
I was
devastated thinking of the woman and the children, thinking of my mother. When
she was pregnant with me, she’d spent a few months married to this same man.
One day he hit her and after he went off to work, she left him at my
grandmother’s ‘You ain’t gotta stay’ and knowing he already hated me as I was
not his but the child of a man about town he was insanely jealous of, that
older man who had preyed on her.
I’m fourteen in the bathroom of a mall, this handsome twenty-something year old
I’d admired like a dashing prince from afar, clutches my breast. I elude his
grasp and flee, splinters of shame lodged in me to dog me even now at the
thought. I’m twenty in college, sitting in the office of the charming, funny,
middle aged Black male mentor and caretaker of us Black students on campus whom
I trust and like and he says some things, sexually suggestive things I don’t
see coming and don’t have a clue how to navigate as I sit there in the seat
across from his desk where I’d sat quite a few times, laughing and cheered up.
I leave and over the years I can’t recall the exact words just the feeling,
discomfort, shame, momentary brain freeze.
A kaleidoscope
turning and falling in uneven patterns and odd shapes like my wide-eyed, naïve
brother at seventeen who has sex with a girl at school and is then accused of
raping the girl, a white girl, the daughter of a lady on the school
board or city council I think it was. I’m left in school without my lifelong
best friend. Other white girls slip me notes, girls who hang with the accuser,
saying how my brother’s innocent they know for a fact and they’ll say what they
know aloud. But he’s accused, yanked out of school, arrested until my mother
begs and borrows to raise the bail money, and he’s released and sentenced to a
year of awaiting trial, going to a solitary night school to get his diploma,
before being acquitted by an all-white mixed gender jury.
At the words ‘not guilty’ My praying mother falls out on the floor praise
shouting to Jesus right there in front of the astounded judge and jury and
everybody. Years later, I cannot help but recall her there and think of all the
Black mamas and daddies who never got to live that moment and buried sons
instead.
My brother was never the same; his life was
rerouted on an unfamiliar track, the wide-eyed innocence gone, replaced by
something like terror and confusion and mixed in with alcoholic father pains.
His adolescent face melds with the young Black men at the historically Black
male college where I teach, their stories tumbling out bravely about how there
childhoods were stolen by a man or a woman, sometimes both, how in the here and
now some are verbally and physically assaulted by their peers on one hand and
the media on the other.
How do we respect justice so it gives voice and agency to the victimized
but does not become a weapon of destruction at mere will or public word --
something then that is not justice? The Hollywood fall out is a stark
representation of a fact that should not surprise as much as it has -- that
many, an untold many are guilty, but the right quest for justice and an end to
sexual terror and sexual misconduct must not begin to ride on the swift,
exclusive conclusion that everyone is guilty all of the time. This is something
increasingly unpopular to point out because no justice loving human being wants
to stem the long-denied tide of agency that so many preyed upon have not
gotten.
In a perfect world only the guilty would get publicly shamed. While we must
absolutely call out the truth strongly, we must also take seriously the power
and usefulness of the word as a sword for justice or the violation of it where
anyone and anybody can be figuratively and literally victimized by its abuse,
especially in this digitalized public sphere. The history of Black women's rape
and the lynching Black men over false accusations of rape is not something that
Black collective memory forgets.
To grapple or not with this uncomfortable reality is not a choice; the times
call for a just transparency and thorough interrogation of our gendered social
codes generally and sexual behavior and attitudes in the workplace and this
requires a process of education and transformation that cannot be encapsulated
or achieved in a hashtag or a tweet.
+++
main picture: Hughie Lee-Smith, "Untitled" (1951)
Stephane Dunn is a
writer and professor and the director of the Morehouse College Cinema,
Television, & Emerging Media Studies Program (CTEMS). Her publications include the 2008 book Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action
Films (U of Illinois) and a number of articles in mediums such as
Ebony.com, The Atlantic, The Root.com, Bright Lights Film journal, and others.
Follow her on Twitter at twitter @DrStephaneDunn and
www.stephanedunn.com