The Black Woman: The Most Disregarded Human

Birth a nation. Set fire to trends and establish cultures. Be the force that the world needs and be resented for it. 

I think I get it now.

Black women are everything you need; yet black women mean nothing to you.

At no point in the history of this country has a black woman ever been worthy enough for your defense. Mock her hair in all its glory. Mock her hair when not at its best. Ignore her struggles and alienate her for her self-plight. Attempt to embarrass her for not being your beaten down backbone. Shame her for being vocal. Ridicule her when she’s silent. Scorn her for walking away from what no longer serves her.

Are there any rebuttals yet?

Tonight I’m watching “Surviving R. Kelly” on Lifetime. I’m disturbed to say the least. This musical genius, this innovator and rhythmic intellect is a sexual predator. He has used his fame, his money and his achievement of mass manipulation to take advantage of countless young girls and he’s done so publicly.

Fortunately enough for Robert Kelly, I was not a journalist in the early 90s – I was a child in Dallas, Texas unaware that the man behind the music was a studio demon. So many reporters, publications, adults and industry professionals enabled his sickness and helped him to conceal his perversions.

The community gave him a pass. Subconsciously many of us gave him a pass. His damn music is like a good meal, great sex and a perfect night. We ignored the metaphor of the Pied Piper. We didn’t even blink at the actual lyrics he wrote for “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.” He gave us good feels so we ignored the chills. 

When I was a child listening to Aaliyah, I saw a pretty woman embracing the “tomboy” that she was so perfectly. I didn’t realize that she was a girl, still figuring out who she was.

Tonight I look at the picture of Kelly and the late Aaliyah sitting countryside. 25 years ago I looked at that picture differently. Tonight I see blankness in her eyes. I see in her what I see in many of my students today – an ironic contentment with something that is blatantly and uncomfortably wrong.

Imagine the story that Aaliyah would still have on her heart today had she not perished in that plane crash. Aaliyah’s celebrity status involves her in this narrative even post- mortem, but what about the other women? The other victims?

Go to Twitter right now and people are blaming artist Sparkle for her niece being molested by R. Kelly. There is an abundance of tweets about those girls and their parents being at fault. And then I scroll my Facebook timeline for a few minutes:

A lot of ya’ll girls dated seniors when you were freshmen.

A bunch of ya’ll messed with coaches when we were in school.

Those girls just wanted money and fame.

Two years ago I wrote a book for my black teen girls. I received a lot of support, but in the back of my mind I’ve wondered consistently for two years if I was ever unfair about black men. I never went on the attack like I could, but I stated things that I wanted our young girls to really pay attention to.

As I continue to watch the world (many black men included) poke at black women and not even black men come to our defense - I realize that maybe I wasn’t explicit enough. Perhaps my approach wasn’t as much like an attack, as it needed to be.

The truth is you all couldn’t possibly give an authentic f**k about the black woman if every single time you hear a story of her misfortune – you attempt to make it her fault. “These girls just wanted fame,” one of the black “men” on my timeline just posted. How many 14 year olds don’t aspire to be something far-fetched at least a time or ten? I wanted to be a pilot, a geologist and the President of the United States all within the span of a week when I was 14.

Some of you males aspired to be in the NBA at 14, not realizing that an NBA team has 12 men. ONE NBA, 30 TEAMS, 12 ACTIVE PLAYERS and you couldn’t even dribble with your left.

Maybe those girls did want to be famous. Maybe they did want to be rich. R. Kelly took advantage of their naïveté. He was 27 marrying a 15-year-old Aaliyah.

“Robert likes younger women – you have people who have fantasies about different things,” says Kelly’s brother Bruce from a prison in the Lifetime DocuSeries. “That’s just a preference – everyone has preferences.”

R. Kelly was molested as a child, and according to him that peaked many of his sexual curiosities at a young age. He’s not the first to endure such. Many of our peers have endured the same unfortunate experiences. Not all of them revert their dismay and aspire to inflict the same pain on others.

Am I safe in assuming that the multitudes of men and women on my timeline, still in support of R. Kelly and men like him are also victims of rape, molestation and/or sexual trauma? Are you so numb to sex that you think everyone who gets it – wants it? Because you convinced yourself that it was your fault – are you now converted to the mental disability that all sexual victims in some way enticed their own fate?

Robert Kelly feels invincible. So many of the pastors, coaches, community leaders and relatives in our communities will continue to share that feeling of being invincible, so long as the masses continue to shame victims. There is no reason this man should not be locked away in prison.

I don’t know why I watched this tonight. It’s too early in the New Year to be full of such fume. The black woman/ minority women are already shortchanged by the court of public opinion. Again, why did I do this to myself?

Black girls are always presumed guilty and I’m sick of it.

It’s about 24 hours after I watched a video of a former McDonald’s employee fighting off a male customer who grabs her across the counter. Three days ago my elementary classmate, a black woman was killed – her paragraph is already archived in the larger news media. Michelle Obama’s book “Becoming” was the best selling book of 2018, and yet she is still called just about everything disgraceful under the sun.  

Stop calling yourself a devoted father to your little black girl if you have no respect and adoration for the woman who made you a parent. Stop calling yourself a supporter, if you only see the good in her when she obliges and strokes your ego. Stop minimizing someone else’s trauma because you haven’t dealt with your own.

A lot of you are R. Kelly and if you don’t watch what you post, your victims will soon have the courage to share their respective stories. Trust me, they haven’t forgotten.