By Sikivu Hutchinson
There’s a powerful sequence in black
feminist lesbian filmmaker Aishah
Shahidah Simmons’ 2006 documentary No! on sexual assault in the
African American community, that intercuts between Black Muslim leader Louis
Farrakhan and another male minister in the pulpit rallying a charged black audience
against rape victim Desiree Washington. In 1991, Washington was a Miss Black America
contestant who accused boxer Mike Tyson of raping her in his hotel room. Tyson served
three years in prison for the rape. In
the film, both “men of god” dismiss Washington’s charges as frivolous and call
on the Lord to protect Iron Mike.
“Ladies,” Farrakhan thunders, “You know full well the evil you do!”
The film’s image of black women as
Jezebel temptresses exposed by righteous patriarchs seeking to redeem the name
of a “good man” is a blistering and still timely example of the complicity of
organized religion in black women’s sexual victimization.
As youth and adults across the nation
observe Denim Day, the Peace Over
Violence organization’s annual campaign for sexual assault awareness month,
what often drops out of public discourse is how racist, sexist and hetero-normative
gender norms demonize black women and girls as improper sexual assault victims.
When black female sexual assault victims
make headlines it’s either because their abusers are “white” like Daniel
Holtzclaw or wealthy and powerful like Bill Cosby. The “ordinary” black female victim, and the
abuser who lives in her house, sits next to her in the classroom, stalks her
online, rents out her body or spews pious hypocritical shit about virtue from black
church pulpits while preying on women after hours, are seldom seen, heard or
acknowledged by our communities.
Whereas each week brings a tide of white
female victims/survivors accusing, and, sometimes, triumphing over their
abusers, black women and girls remain invisible, both as victims, survivors and
heroines fighting back against sexual assault. According
to noted psychologist Gail Wyatt, “African-American women are raped at a higher
rate than white women, and are less likely to report it.” Given the slave era legacy of institutionalized
rape and sexual assault of black women, her assertion is not revelatory but still
has the power to stop one cold. Amidst the overriding narrative of black man-as- über-victim-of-racial terrorism and state violence, why
would the stories, the pain, the rage of ordinary black women sexual assault
survivors be believed?
This
question was amplified for me during a discussion about the impact of
the school-to-prison pipeline at a community organizing meeting I attended recently. Brainstorming about solutions to criminalizing
school environments, there was little consideration among the group of how the experiences of
girls of color with
sexual abuse lead to their push-out and incarceration. The discussion illustrated how gaps in
intersectional organizing can be disenabling.
For, even as it has become more acceptable to talk about state violence
against black women and girls in school communities, it is still difficult to
broaden the narrative to consider how this relates to sexual violence committed
by men of color.
In its 2015
report on the sexual abuse to prison pipeline, the organization Human
Rights for Girls criticizes the arrest and incarceration of girls of color for
non-violent offenses that largely stem from “childhood
sexual abuse, (in which) a child that is being abused is trying to protect
herself.” Black girls are disproportionately arrested and incarcerated
for non-violent offenses committed as a result of the trauma of persistent
sexual abuse. Prior to Los Angeles
County’s introduction of a policy discouraging
the arrest of minors for prostitution (which is in actuality sex
trafficking), the majority of those arrested for child prostitution in the
County were black girls. This move was partly inspired by the Human Rights for
Girls’ “No Such Thing as a child prostitute” campaign,
which seeks to decriminalize underage trafficking victims who, if they are
girls of color—straight, queer and trans—are often prosecuted and jailed for
prostitution rather than treated as sexual assault survivors.
When we talk about the sex trafficking
and prostitution of black girls in my high school classes there is often harsh
judgment. “I don’t care if she’s a 'ho',”
one girl says, “It’s her business what she does”. Among this group of girls, some of whom are abuse
survivors themselves, there is little sympathy for young victims of sexual
assault. Turning their own trauma inward
into self-blame, some believe that black girls in particular “know what they’re
doing”. They are not fragile, indecisive
and malleable like white girls, they say.
They are in control, in charge, savvy entrepreneurs in league with the
much older men who rape and sell their bodies again and again.
The myth of the strong, indomitable
black woman is still a barrier to black girls being able to see themselves as
victims, be it of intimate partner violence or sexual assault. And because the movement to eradicate sexual
violence in communities of color—spearheaded by organizations like the Black Women’s Blueprint, Black Women for Wellness, the Black Women’s Health Imperative and Sister Song—often
has so little visibility, black girls internalize the toxic narratives that
white supremacy, black misogyny and organized religion have normalized. It is a bitter lesson that Desiree Washington,
and other black women survivors, struggling in communities that don’t recognize
their trauma and rage as legitimate, know all too well.
