Straight Outta Rape Culture

By Sikivu Hutchinson

When N.W.A.’s mega-hyped biopic Straight Outta Compton opens next Friday, the brutalized bodies of black women will be lost in the predictable stampede of media accolades.  While early reviews have lauded the “prescience” of the group’s fierce critique of anti-black state violence and criminalization—epitomized by its de facto theme song “F-- Tha Police”—they fail to highlight how the group’s multi-million dollar empire was built on black women’s backs.

Yet, as national outrage over state violence grows, the release of the film should prompt fresh reconsideration of how institutionalized sexual and intimate partner violence against black women continues to be all but invisible in mainstream discourse about black self-determination.  As gangsta rap pioneers and beneficiaries of the corporatization of rap/hip hop in the 1990s, N.W.A. played a key role in yoking rape culture and rap misogyny. Throughout their career they’ve been hailed as street poets and raw truth tellers mining the psychic space of young urban black masculinity. In song after song, gang rape, statutory rape, the coercion of women into prostitution and the terroristic murder of prostitutes are chronicled, glorified and paid homage to as just part of the spoils of “ghetto” life.  The 1988 song “Straight Outta Compton” trivializes the murder of a neighborhood girl (“So what about the bitch that got shot, fuck her, you think I give a damn about a bitch, I’m not a sucker”) while its outlaw male protagonists go on an AK-47 and testosterone fueled killing spree. “Straight Outta Compton” was an early salvo for such popular fare as “To Kill a Hooker,” “Findum, Fuckum & Flee” and the rape epic “One Less Bitch” in which N.W.A. co-founder Dr. Dre lets his boys gang rape a prostitute then notes, “the bitch tried to ‘gank’ me so I had to kill her”.

In a recent L.A. Times profile on the group, writer Lorraine Ali extols Dr. Dre’s role as a businessman and entrepreneur while conspicuously omitting his history of vicious misogyny and violence against black women. Sidestepping the importance of misogynoir to the group’s body of work, Ali argues that “it’s the film’s depiction of police brutality, and the tense dynamic between law enforcement and the urban neighborhoods they patrol, that makes it so topical”. Ali’s near reverent profile of the group is yet another example of white America’s double standards when it comes to the brutalization of white women versus that of black women. 

In 1991 Dre brutally beat and trashed Dee Barnes, the young African American host of the forerunning rap show Pump It Up, at a record release party in Hollywood. Allegedly spurred by negative comments made about the group on the show, the beating was co-signed by N.W.A. members Eazy E and MC Ren. Pump It Up was one of the first grassroots showcases to capture the hip hop juggernaut in its infancy. Barnes’ assault by Dre all but ended her rap career,  underscoring black women’s perilous status in the rap/hip hop world as well as the obscene rates of intimate partner violence in the African American community overall (it is worth noting that Barnes was not the only black woman to suffer a brutal attack at Dre’s hands. Dre’s ex-girlfriend, rapper Michel’le, also alleged that she needed plastic surgery after she was beaten by him).

Every year thousands of black women are shot, stabbed, stalked, brutalized and sexually assaulted 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  According to the Department of Justice nearly 40% of young black women have experienced sexual assault by the age of 18.  Further, in Los Angeles County black girls have the highest rates of domestic sex trafficking victimization and are more likely to be locked up for prostitution than non-black women.

And although intimate partner violence is a leading cause of death for black women, they are seldom viewed as proper victims and are rarely cast as innocents. Far too often, intimate partner violence (such as that committed by former NFL player Ray Rice against wife Janae Rice) and/or sexual assault against black women are only propelled to national attention by a perfect storm of graphic videotape and feminist of color outrage. Yet black female survivors suffer on the margins in a culture that still essentially deems them “unrapeable”. 

As an educator and mentor I work daily with young black girls who silently cope with the trauma and PTSD of sexual and physical violence in the very same South Los Angeles communities “immortalized” in N.W.A.’s hyper-masculinist terroristically sexist oeuvre.  Inundated with multi-platinum misogynist hip hop and rap, these girls have grown up with the pervasive message that violence against black women and girls is normal, natural, and justifiable. Coming full circle, the “Straight Outta Compton” narrative sacrifices their bodies on the altar of black masculine triumph and American dream-style redemption, signifying that the only occupying violence black America should really be concerned about is that perpetrated by the police.

Where are the White Feminists? MIA on Racist Misogynist Police Violence

By Sikivu Hutchinson

The Oklahoma NAACP recently called on the Department of Justice to investigate accused rapist and Oklahoma City Police officer Daniel Holtzclaw for federal hate crime violations against his black women victims. On September 5th, Holtzclaw was released on bail after being charged with sixteen counts of rape, sexual assault, stalking and sodomy. Judge Tim Henderson (who is running for reelection unopposed) reduced Holtzclaw’s bail from $5 million to $500,000 and required him to wear an ankle bracelet while on paid leave. With this unconscionable decision Henderson simply made clear the historical legacy of the law when it comes to black women and their moral character—namely that black women are sexually promiscuous "hos" with no rights that a white supremacist criminal justice system is bound to respect. Actress Daniele Watts discovered this last week when she was pulled over, interrogated and handcuffed by LAPD officers after kissing her white partner while they were parked in the lot of a CBS station in Studio City, California. Watts had the temerity to display affection in an affluent area where a black woman with a white man could never be anything other than a prostitute.

The murder of Michael Brown and uprisings in Ferguson refocused national attention on institutionalized police violence in African American communities. Yet police violence and terrorism against women of color are rarely on the agendas of mainstream white feminist organizations. Because white women of all classes enjoy the privilege of protection from criminalization and systemic brutality by law enforcement, state-sanctioned violence doesn’t register as a “feminist” priority. Living in neighborhoods that are on average more wealthy than communities of color, white women can rely on the police as a thin blue line insulating them from the visceral threat of the dark other.
Historically, the police have been critical to preserving the purity of white womanhood by not only promoting the image of the insatiable black rapist but that of the out of control black bitch. The pervasiveness of sexual assault, often by law enforcement, was a major catalyst for black women’s civil rights activism. In 1955, teenage civil rights activist Claudette Colvin was sexually harassed by white police officers in jail after she was arrested for refusing to give her seat to a white person on a Jim Crow bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Black women of all ages, classes and sexual orientations routinely endured beatings, sexual harassment, sexual assault, intimidation, verbal abuse, stalking and other forms of terrorism by law enforcement. Police violence against black women was merely an extension of the brutal policing of black women’s bodies under slavery. Like the “disreputable” primarily working class black women Holtzclaw is accused of stalking and sexually assaulting, Colvin was not deemed to be suitably respectable by whites or even some in the black civil rights establishment. As a dark-skinned, pregnant teen from a poor family, her lower caste status made her a less desirable candidate to launch a citywide bus boycott around than well-respected longtime NAACP activist Rosa Parks. This was a bitter irony and disappointment for Colvin, who felt marginalized by the very movement she helped advance. The politics of class, respectability and colorism were also an affront to Parks’ early activism. In 1944, Parks spearheaded the investigation into the gang rape of Recy Taylor, a young African American woman whose white assailants were never convicted.

Sexual violence by law enforcement doesn’t compel mainstream women’s groups precisely because of law enforcement’s role in safeguarding white families and white communities. After raping one of his victims Holtzclaw allegedly said that it (the rape) was “better than the county”; sadistically implying that it was better for her to be raped than to go to jail. According to Jessica Testa of BuzzFeed, Holtzclaw’s victims were initially afraid to report their assaults to the police because they feared no one would believe a black woman. Some were fearful because they had criminal records for drug possession or prostitution. Criminal record or no, all black women are criminal in a society that sets up racial hierarchies of femininity. Given the history of racist sexual violence against black women they are never viewed as proper victims.

After the Holtzclaw assaults were disclosed NAACP head Anthony Douglas rightly wondered, “Where’s my media and where’s my women’s groups?” Yet Douglas also made the problematic statement that he didn’t “look at this gentleman as a sex offender or a rapist” but as a “racist, because he racially profiled and targeted African American women.” To be crystal clear, Holtzclaw—as beneficiary of a criminal justice system that sanctions police violence against black women—is both. The historic failure of both the civil rights movement and women’s movement to grasp these intersections keeps black women criminalized.

Holtzclaw goes back to court on September 18th. Help ensure that he is given the maximum sentence and terminated from the Oklahoma City PD.

Oklahoma Governor: Mary Fallin, (405) 521-2342
Oklahoma City D.A.: David Prater (405) 713-1600

White Nights, Black Paradise: A Novel on Peoples Temple & the Jonestown Massacre

By Sikivu Hutchinson

“Ain’t no white sky daddy gonna save you. Are we Black, proud and socialist? What are we?”

Why did a powerful white man utter these words and why did hundreds of black people, the majority of them black women, follow him to their deaths?

In 1978, People’s Temple, a multiracial church once at the forefront of progressive San Francisco politics, self-destructed in a Guyana jungle settlement named after its leader, the Reverend Jim Jones.

Fatally bonded by fear of racist annihilation, the community’s greatest symbol of crisis was the “White Night”; a rehearsal of revolutionary mass suicide that eventually led to the deaths of over 900 church members of all ages, genders and sexual orientations.

75% of those who died in Jonestown, and the majority of those in the Peoples Temple movement, were African American. But most of the literary portrayals of Jonestown have been by white people



Due in the summer of 2015, White Nights, Black Paradise focuses on three fictional black women characters who were part of the Peoples Temple movement but took radically different paths: Hy, a drifter and a spiritual seeker, her sister Taryn, an atheist with an inside line on the church’s money trail and Ida Lassiter, an activist whose watchdog journalism exposes the rot of corruption, sexual abuse, racism and violence in the church, fueling its exodus to Guyana.

White Nights, Black Paradise is a riveting story of complicity and resistance; loyalty and betrayal; black struggle and black sacrifice. It locates Peoples Temple and Jonestown in the shadow of the civil rights movement, Black Power, Second Wave feminism and the Great Migration. Recapturing black women’s voices, White Nights, Black Paradise explores their elusive quest for social justice, home and utopia. In so doing, the novel provides a complex window onto the epic flameout of a social movement that was not only an indictment of religious faith but of American democracy.

Planned Parenthood and the Rape of American Women

By Sikivu Hutchinson

Lately, the sound of galloping hooves and rustling white sheets has risen in a deafening squall from the Capitol. Like their Klan ancestors, elite white males in Congress’ political lynch mob are once again savaging communities of color. The House’s vote to gut Planned Parenthood is a criminal act against poor and working class women and their families. In many rural and urban neighborhoods there are few affordable alternatives to the health care provided by Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights service providers. These clinics are the frontline of preventive care in poor working class white communities and communities of color, providing pregnancy and STD testing, contraception, pap smears, abortions, and counseling for families with little to no health coverage.

Ever since its midterm elections’ sweep, the far right has ramped up its unrelenting drive to theocracy, using reproductive rights as its battleground. Drawing on the sabotage of ACORN, Speaker John Boehner and a host of other GOP and so-called Blue Dog Democrat fascists are bound and determined to take down Planned Parenthood. Extending Hyde Amendment restrictions on federal funding for abortions to private providers is central to their agenda. Too spineless to criminalize women who seek abortions outright, Religious Right politicians instead choose to pillage health care provisions that keep women from falling deeper into poverty, illness, and economic dependence. Hiding behind Orwellian claims of being pro-life, far right politicians exercise draconian control over the bodies of poor women and their families in the name of God, guns, and bloody fetuses. Why not just jail ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out?

It should be no revelation that when poor women are denied access to decent affordable reproductive care—including access to safe abortions—families and communities suffer. While federal and state governments dismantle education and health care funding, the American military regime goes untouched. Because black and Latino communities are on the frontlines of imperialist military recruitment and educational inequity, few people of color would argue that government handouts to the military industrial complex should trump education funding. However, reproductive justice just doesn’t have the same political cache or urgency amongst progressives of color. Consequently, conservative reactionary forces within the African American community have successfully allied with the Religious Right in a revived anti-abortion billboard campaign targeting black women. This propaganda has cropped up recently in black and Latino Southern California neighborhoods. By implying that aborting black babies makes them an “endangered species,” these billboards evoke plantation era regimes of social control.

In essence, bad “genocidal” black women don’t know their place, don’t know that they were put here to be God’s sacrificial vessels and don’t seem to grasp that only evil promiscuous misguided Jezebels get knocked up. They also haven’t gotten Sarah Palin’s “telegram” that women who are forced to have unwanted children will earn more, achieve higher education levels, and have a markedly better quality of life than women who aren’t. These ignorant bad black women destroy black communities with their arrogant self-absorption and unchecked sexual license. After all, black women who exercise control over their own bodies and destinies commit race betrayal and gender sacrilege.

How do we know these gospel truths? Powerful white male legislators, black preachers, and Christian soldiers like MLK’s anti-abortion activist niece Alveda King tell us so. They tell us that abortion is the greatest civil rights threat of our era. Like their Islamic fundamentalist comrades in the Middle East, these pro-death marauders know all too well that female sexuality is a dangerous commodity which only the jackboot of big government can control. Complicit with black hyper-religiosity and black nationalist delusions, silent progressives of color give them this license.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (Infidel Books).

"Out of the Closet:" Black Atheists

By Sikivu Hutchinson

In some black communities it’s akin to donning a white sheet and a Confederate Flag. In others it’s ostensibly tolerated yet whispered about, branded culturally incorrect and bad form if not outright sacrilege. For black atheists like myself, proclaiming one’s non-belief amidst genial wishes to “have a blessed day” is never easy in the seemingly innocuous context of casual chit chat between black folk. Yet, according to the New York Times, a small but growing segment of the American population, galvanized by the hyper-evangelical climate of the Republican Pleistocene, have begun organizing nationwide and becoming more vocal about their atheism. Although African Americans are not visible in the “movement” some are easing away from religion. For black atheists, actively breaking with religious tradition is an even graver rejection than that of white intellectuals electrified by the “pew-storming” rhetoric of atheist gurus like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. This is partly due to the fact that the history of African American civil and human rights resistance is heavily steeped in Judeo-Christian religious dogma. Despite the White Anglo Saxon Protestant religious justification for slavery and domestic terrorism, African Americans converted to Christianity and utilized it as a source of succor, community and spiritual redemption. No matter one’s actual deeds, life path or personal mores, to be unquestioningly religious in some quarters is to be inoculated from criticism. Noting this historical irony in his blog “The Black Atheist,” Wrath James White states, “In these (black) communities you find more tolerance towards gangbangers, drug addicts, and prostitutes, who pray to God for forgiveness than for honest productive citizens who deny the existence of God.” For Wright, this “is one of the most embarrassing elements of Black culture, our zealous embrace of the God of our kidnappers, murderers, slave masters and oppressors.”

While there have been critical appraisals of African American adoption of Christianity within the context of European conquest and racial slavery, few propose atheism as a corrective. Indeed, atheism would seem to fly in the face of a cultural ethos that frames earthly pain and suffering as a crucible for achieving rewards in the afterlife. In the midst of extreme brutality religious faith can either be seen as a means to mental health, or, as Karl Marx put it more bluntly, an opiate.

In this sense contemporary black religiosity is the legacy of a culturally specific survival strategy. Many black secular community-based organizations still look to the black church as a coalition partner and resource. Disturbingly, the church is often uncritically perceived as the “backbone” of the black community. However, as the debate over California’s Proposition 8 demonstrated, the notion that there is a monolithic “marching in lockstep” black community is terminally outdated. On issues of gender and sexual orientation, the overwhelming opposition of many prominent black churches to granting civil rights to partnered African American gays and lesbians is morally indefensible. When it comes to attitudes about traditional gender roles, gender-based assumptions about black female religiosity are double-edged. While black male non-believers are given more leeway to be heretics, black women who openly profess atheist views are deemed especially traitorous, having abandoned their family role as purveyors of cultural and religious tradition. Images of black women faithfully shuttling their children to church and socializing them into Christianity are a prominent part of mainstream black culture. If being black and being Christian are synonymous, then being black, female and religious (whatever the denomination) is practically compulsory. Black women with children who don’t fall in line, who raise their children as atheists, may find their race credentials revoked.

On the national level the contradictions between American secularism and religion have produced a schizoid tension in the U.S., whereby religious fundamentalism and intolerance for secular thought have become the norm. When it’s practiced in the non-Western world Americans routinely brand this kind of propaganda as backward and extremist. Yet, in this, the most swaggeringly “liberal humanist” of all nations, “coming out” as an atheist in a culture that parades religious dogma as a substitute for true morality may be one of the final ideological frontiers for African Americans.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM.

www.blackfemlens.blogspot.com
www.womenofcolormediajustice.com