By Sikivu Hutchinson
In the 1990s, The O.J. Simpson murder
trial polarized America and highlighted domestic violence as a national cause célèbre. At the center of the storm was Simpson’s
wife, the blond Orange County-bred Nicole Brown Simpson, who’d suffered years
of domestic abuse by an NFL legend deified as a pop culture god. After O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murdering
Brown Simpson white America wanted his scalp. Nicole was the perfect victim,
the beautiful tragic heroine who died too young at the hands of a savage. The trial of the century hinged on redeeming
a white woman’s honor and bringing her Negro killer to justice. Brown Simpson was grieved globally,
transformed into a symbol of the deadliness of intimate partner violence and martyr
of a legal system—signified by the “dumb” "biased" black female jury that
acquitted Simpson—run amok.
The underside of the verdict and the
relentless valorization of Nicole Brown Simpson was the disreputable black
female abuse victim. Each year thousands
of black women are shot, stabbed, stalked, and brutalized in crimes that never
make it on the national radar. Black
women experience intimate partner violence at a rate of 35% higher than do white women. Intimate partner violence is a leading cause
of death for black women, yet they are seldom viewed as proper victims and are
rarely cast as total innocents. This is
the backdrop to the tale of a group of white high school students in New York who
thought it would be cool to don blackface and reenact
the 2009 beating of pop star Rihanna by Chris Brown at a pep rally. Like the gleefully bloodthirsty white
audiences that gathered to view 20th century lynchings, there has
always been a robust market for white consumption of black pain. A big part of the white audience’s glee came
from not seeing Rihanna as a proper victim.
For white Middle America, intimate partner violence is only funny as
spectator sport if the person being beat is viewed as other. From the right wing’s Moynihan-esque propaganda
on black welfare queen matriarchs to recent abortion-as-black-genocide
messaging, black women’s bodies are fair game for institutionalized acts of
violence, terrorism, and control. So for
a lily white school to find the brutal beating of a black woman hilarious is
par for the course in a misogynist white supremacist culture that deems black
women less than human.
There is a deep connection
between the current backlash against human rights for women and the white kids’
pep rally. During the recent
presidential debate, gender justice issues were reduced to hollow rhetoric
about equal pay. Mitt Romney prattled on
about having “binders full of women” while President Obama tried to link the provisions
of the Affordable Care Act with improving employment opportunities and equal
pay for working women. Although Obama rattled
off a few vital health and family planning services provided by Planned
Parenthood, the GOP assault on abortion rights went unmentioned. Violence against women comes in many forms,
and by ramming through law after law of draconian anti-abortion, fetal
homicide, and “personhood” policies through state legislatures nationwide the
GOP has become the foremost lynch mob of civil rights. As the poorest, least compensated women in the
workforce, women of color suffer disproportionately from the dismantling of reproductive
health care. But they are also brutalized
by both parties’ promotion of corporate handouts, tax cuts for the wealthy, and
denigration of social welfare programs that specifically target poor and low
income families.
Yet, violence against women of
color is so far outside of the radar of social justice organizations, much less
the context of mainstream politics, that it even elicits
little outrage amongst many young women of color. Over the past few years, whenever I have
classroom discussions about the Chris Brown/Rihanna incident students roll
their eyes and snort in exasperation.
Some girls dismiss the issue as an endless rehash. More insidiously, others express the view
that Rihanna was somehow complicit in her own beating. She must have done something, she must have
hit him first, she must have provoked it in some way with her mouth, attitude,
body—is the typical blame-the-victim refrain.
Not seeing themselves portrayed
as worthy of human dignity, respect, and value has inured them to the
unrelenting violence of explicitly anti-black anti-female media images. According to a Pitzer College study, girls who
are consistently exposed to “sexist violent rap videos were more accepting of
teen dating violence.” Training young women
of color to come to voice, to identify the normalized violence that they
experience on a daily basis, is one of the biggest challenges of feminist of
color organizing. Critiquing the pep
rally incident, my Women’s Leadership Project students all agreed that the
brutal beating of a Taylor Swift, a Britney Spears or even a Nicole Brown
Simpson wouldn’t fly as spectator sport at a black high school. The
tragedy is that they all believed that Chris Brown’s beating of Rihanna would.
