For years, I've thought that it was white women who always cried rape whenever a black man was lynched during the 20th century. It wasn't. It was the white men who cried rape.
When Ida B. Wells (1862 - 1931) did one of the world's first sociological research studies while working as an investigative reporter, she found out that white women were not involved in lynchings at all approximately two-thirds of the time.There wasn't even a white woman on hand to tell the convenient lie when Ida B got to a town.
.
In fact, it was the white men who ran newspapers that cried rape repeatedly. White men were the ones who said rape was the reason for lynching in order to cover up the fact that they had lynched a black person for theft, profit, entertainment, revenge or all four.
One of the first cases Ida B investigated was the lynching of a good friend. A white grocery store owner down the road wanted the store run by his black competition gone so he could have his monopoly back. White entitlement at it's worse, this white store owner set circumstances in motion to have his competition lynched. I never had the impression that rape was used to cover up this particular lynching, but there was a cover. The cover story I've read about involved two children, one black and one white, getting into a fight over some game they were playing, then black men and white men coming in on both sides - which the white grocery store owner escalated into a lynching of his competition.
I imagine there was always a story to be told when there was a lynching because "We are superior and we want you to know your place" the truth, has no place in the newspaper written for people who want to see themselves as good, decent human beings.
Years before I read articles about investigative reporter Ida B Wells and her findings, I had read a book by Farai Chideya, Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African Americans
, that explained that it is the status of the victim that determines prison sentences and not so much the status, based on race and gender, of the perpetrator. Using UCR data she successfully proved that a white man can kill almost anybody except another white man and wind up not getting much jail time for so long as the case doesn't become a national sensation. I've used the internet to repeat some of her work a few times since this old book was written. It's easy with the internet
Black men who kill black men don't get that much time because black men don't have much status. Black men get even less time for killing a black woman.
Women, who are supposed to be more docile and obedient, according to their stereotype. get punished severely for killing men even if she killed him protecting herself from domestic violence. Actually, years ago I read articles that suggested women are punished especially harshly if they kill the men that beat them --as if they were being punished for not knowing their place, as if killing someone more powerful that's beating you isn't a reasonable response.
I thought I'd reviewed Chideya's work and believed her. But I didn't really believe her until white men of the NRA made white children's deaths at Sandy Hook mean almost nothing all. I was sure significant gun laws would be put into place to restrict weapons like the AR-15 and the ability to get tons of ammo almost anywhere. But virtually nothing changed -- just as Chideya essentially predicted decades before.
So, in hindsight, I now understand why O.J. Simpson walked away from murdering a white person. Yes, how much money he had to throw at the problem of his murder accusation had something to do with it. But the person he was accused of killing, Nicole Brown-Simpson, was a white woman. And her status as a white person was likely further reduced for having married a black man in the first place.
In other words, O.J. wouldn't have gone anywhere but directly to jail if he'd been accused of murdering a white man he had yelling match with in a parking lot once much less one he'd already punched in the face, having left the evidence of bruises. The judge, the prosecutor --hell the governor would have intervened-- in order to make sure there was a white jury to ensure O J went to jail the first time if O J's victim had been a white man instead of a white woman.
In hindsight, I also understand why the black Steubenville rapist got a comparable sentence to his white partner for raping a light girl or white girl.
By the time I re-heard and finally believe the accusations against Bill Cosby and understood that most of his victims were white women, I'd already read articles based on the writings of Paula J Giddings and Farai Chideya's book. So, I immediately began to deduce that Cosby got away with raping white and light women for decades because white women's status is much lower than I'd originally thought.
I deduced that Cosby was able to get away with rape because
(1) "rape" has been strictly defined by men as the male stranger, a bogey man jumping out of the shadows to drag a woman into the bushes and....
(2) Bill Cosby was making money hand over fist for white men in Hollywood-- which was many more times important to the white men making the rules --in Hollywood and in our legal system-- than the rape of any woman, white or not.
Steubenville Rapists Up Top, Carrying their victim below
The thing I've noticed lately is that Bill Cosby, the Steubenville rapists, and Nate Parker can't actually deny much of their actions -- if at all. What Cosby and the Steubenville rapists were mostly denying is that their behavior should have the label "rape."
EARLIER POSTS ON PARKER
http://thankherforsurviving.blogspot.com/2016/08/you-put-yourself-in-that-situation-nate.html
http://thankherforsurviving.blogspot.com/2016/08/you-put-yourself-in-that-situation-nate.html
And while my gut reaction is to believe the victim when she says she didn't give Nate Parker permission to have sex with her that particular night, I can see where some might not see it that way.
Yet one ought to be able to see that Jean Celestin, who was found guilty of rape, makes Nate Parker a rapist in the same way my hiring a hitman to kill grandma would make me a murderer.
If I hire somebody to kill someone else, if I initiate the action to have the crime occur then I am guilty of the crime, guilty of murder, for example, even if I wasn't there to pull the trigger. In fact, I am more like the murderer and the hitman more like the weapon to get the job done. The hitman is practically an extension of the gun he might use to the job done.
If a man brought two men into a home pointed at a woman sleeping in her bed and whispered, "Rape her. I want you to rape ex-girlfriend. Go to it," most of us would understand that the ringleader was part of the gang of rapists, part of the rape, even he didn't have sex with the woman himself in that moment. Even if some men recoil from calling that ringleader "a rapist" he's still a vile creature involved in an illegal sexual assault that resulted in the most personal violation that there is.
According to testimony of the third man there the night Parker's "date" was violated, Kangas said Parker invited him and Celestin to have sex with an unconscious woman. Celestin was found guilty at his first trial. That means Parker was guilty too.
Celestin only escaped one-tenth-justice because the victim refused to testify again. If it had been me they had raped and I knew they were only going to get 2 years or less, I wouldn't have ave testified the first time. But I'm glad she did. We wouldn't know what we were dealing with in Nate Parker otherwise.
Rumors that Parker's victim may have been white too appear to have been confirmed. At first I thought that three black men there would have been placed under the jail if this were true. However, now that I've thought about it more, I'm wondering if Cosby, Parker, and Celestin and a whole bunch of black atheletes and black greeks on campus didn't already know what I've recently learned:
White women aren't worth a thing if a black man is financially advantageous to a white man or a white institution.
Unlike Bill Cosby, Nate Parker wasn't earning money hand over fist for a white television exec or sports team owner so he wouldn't have had the same kind of protection from the accusation of a gang rape against a white woman.
However, I don't follow college sports or any other sport enough to know how important the college's wrestling team might be to a white run college. I was flabbergasted to see a white male college president be forced to resign because a predominantly(?) black college football team refused to play ball because the white male college president had not responded appropriately to racial attacks at the Univeristy of Missouri.
In any case, now we've seen two black men, Cosby and Parker, one of them famous and one just a an college athlete at the time, walk away from rape accusations by white women.
Whether one believes the accusations by white women or not, that these two men walked away from rape accusations means a white woman's word doesn't automatically trump a black man's word like many of us, as black people, have been taught to believe.
A white woman's status is low compared to a white man's and it gets lower if a white man's financial interests are involved. This is why likely why Brock Turner and Austin Wilkerson have barely been slapped on the wrist for raping two white women (assumed to be white because crime intraracial upwards of 85%)
Whether one believes the accusations by white women or not, that these two men walked away from rape accusations means a white woman's word doesn't automatically trump a black man's word like many of us, as black people, have been taught to believe.
A white woman's status is low compared to a white man's and it gets lower if a white man's financial interests are involved. This is why likely why Brock Turner and Austin Wilkerson have barely been slapped on the wrist for raping two white women (assumed to be white because crime intraracial upwards of 85%)
Let us also remember that black men's status beating out white women 's status is not the rare event some make it out.
Black men got the vote before all women, including white women in 1870. Sometime before that, Sojouirner Truth said women should not support black men the vote, getting anything without us, black women, because it would establish a pattern of disregard.
The most recent time I saw a black man beat out a white woman was when Senator Barack Obama. Beat Senator Hillary Clinton into the president's chair.
I was as glad as anyone else to see Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton. I did and still do think he was the better candidate. Hillary's ideas weren't as brave or as good and she simply had too much baggage to win then and maybe now too.
My last illusion about white women always winning over black men fell away when unknown Obama beat Hillary Clinton with relative ease.
I know his being a new senator
and therefore NOT being present for some of the political decisions that led us to
(1) the banksters nearly taking the economy down and
(2) still having troops in Iraq helped him win over Hillary.
His being an unknown quantity helped him.
But Barack Obama's being male assisted him a lot more
than his being black hindered him
in the moment when
white people were scared for themselves
in the face of a possible depression,
which might include foreclosure on their homes
If a white man --not identifying himself as a socialist ala Bernie Sanders-- was running on the democratic ticket right now, there wouldn't be a whisper about the possibility that Trump could win. If President Obama was able to run right now, I don't think there wouldn't be a question he'd beat Trump. Hillary's baggage, some of it racial, is a problem. But her biggest problem, when you compare her to Donald Trump, is that she is not a man.
Furthermore, it is probably white males that Hillary drives toward Trump most with her lack of penis having self.
A lot of black men have been tossing the rape victim's white race out into the ether as if this is a reason black people should either just take Nate Parker at his word. Some black men have even gone so far as to imply that Nate only did their reprehensible things he did because "white women are whores anyway" -- as if he hadn't married a white woman.
This argument, as nonsensical as it is, reminds me that black men, white men, all men, see the sexual abuse of women outside their own race or ethnicity as a way of scoring points against men of another race or ethnicity. There hasn't been a time in history on this planet where men didn't conquer another land and rape the women as a message to the men that live there, same race or not.
Sexual conquest as a way of proving manhood is a raceless event for men too.
This leads to many men, of all races, going to the bar with the intent of getting some woman drunk enough that her "No" will go away or so drunk that she doesn't say anything one way or the other, leaving him with plausible deniability. Getting a woman to say "yes" is one path to sexual conquest and putting notches in the bed post.
But getting a woman to the point where she cannot say "no" in a clear strong voice is the other standard path to sexual conquest. And a lot of men (and some women) are having a hard time connecting the eliberate attempt to circumnavigate consent as the precursor to rape.
The man who tries to get "consent" from women who look like the women below aren't just being ungentlemanly. They are opportunistic rapists trying to get plausible deniability.
If you believe Nate Parker's own account of what happened on the night of the rape, his date didn't look anything like this. And if she looked conscious then she was conscious. So, Parker's "date" was either lying or she was not.
Again, I do not believe being drunk makes men's judgement just bad enough so that they don't recognize consent while being drunk makes women insane.
But we don't have to look at the one-on-one sex between Parker's date to determine whether or not we believe in Parker's guilt. We don't even have to look at what the victim said about what happened that night. We can look at what the black men there that night said.
EXHIBIT A: KANGAS
Kangas testified that Parker was having sex with the woman. When Celestin and him looked into the room, Parker invited him and Celestin into the room with a wave of his hand and invited them to have sex with her. Kangas's testimony definitely indicates that the woman was unconscious - which is likely why Celestin was convicted.
EXHIBIT B: KAVAMAHANGA
Kavamahanga is the one who took Nate's "date" to where Nate was or would be after Nate (in her opinion) stood her up-- for hours.
"Kavamahanga, who had been drinking rum and cokes, admitted at trial he kept the drinks coming, buying multiple rounds of Sex on the Beach cocktails. “She said [some other] guy bought her like four or five drinks,” he testified. “I bought her like two drinks, I think.”
...A week or two after the night in question, Kavamahanga testified that he asked Parker what had really happened.
“[Nate] said that he and a friend ran a train on [the woman],” Kavamahanga told the court. While none of the attorneys asked for clarity, to “run a train” is parlance for multiple men waiting in line to have sex with the same woman.
Kavamahanga added that Parker believed [the woman] was “basically lying” and said, “she consented.”
Read More:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/16/inside-the-nate-parker-rape-case.html
* * * * * * *
LET'S STOP HERE TO EVALUATE
WHAT NATE'S DEFENDING FRIEND TESTIFIED
THAT NATE SAID
THE URBAN DICTIONARY ON
"RUNNING A TRAIN"
ON A WOMAN
DEFINITION 1:
"dumbass hoodrat" = dumb black whore
DEFINITION 2
* * * * * * *
Kavamahanga was careful to say that the sex was consensual after he said Nate told him they ran a train on her but the phrase "RAN A TRAIN ON HER" is decades old. And I've never heard it without "SHE WAS SOOO DRUNK" and/or "WHORE" being used in conjunction with it.
Remember: In rape culture, whores are worthless. Therefore they can't be raped.
On college campuses of yesteryear and maybe today, it is the greeks (frat boys of all colors) and the athletes (all colors) that are notorious for this "running a train" It never used to be called a "gang rape" by anybody but select groups of women. The technical consent of a "drunk whore" was always discussed as a defense against identifying this behavior as a "gang rape."
Sometimes, I used to hear the frat boys or greeks got her drunk. Other times they opportunistically took advantage of finding a drunk woman. But I fully understood then that this is a gang rape, and I understood this before I believed in rape culture.
I understood that these "men" were only seeking plausible deniability when they asked a half-passed-out woman if she wants to have sex and/or if she wants to have sex with his friends.
Keep in mind that the men who"get confused" about consent in such situations will not be so drunk as to be confused about not driving a car drunk or jamming their hand down an active garbage disposal or even think to ask if the woman thinks she's on Venus or Mars to establish whether or not she can give consent.
And when the woman used to cry foul the day after "a train has been run on her" the response from men was usually something like,
"She put herself in that situation"
I've heard this phrase thrown around regarding women that have been sexually abused too many times to count. And it's been said by men and by women because women are raised to believe that you act a certain way and you will not get raped. Respectability politics isn't just about racism. It's about sexism and misogyny too.
The only reason these words weren't used on me is because I was taught a 100 different strategies on how not to be raped by "nice guys" in boys-will-be-boys mode. And I was also just plain lucky and sometimes discerning in my choice of male friends. Now that I believe in rape culture I understand that the Celestins and Parkers on campuses all over the country are opportunistic rapists, not "nice guys" who fell off the decent-man-wagon for a night.
EXHIBIT C: NATE PARKER
"You put yourself in that situation" are the words Nate Parker used on a recorded phone call with this victim And these words always mean the same thing to the opportunistic rapist: "Gotcha. Don't be a sore loser."
I don't care what everybody understood to be rape 1000 years ago, 100 years ago or yesterday. Nate Parker and his boy Celestin, both whom felt so remorseless that they got together that they wrote a screenplay that has a rape scene in it together. Even if neither one of them can bring themselves to identify what they did as "rape" I find it almost impossible to believe that they did not know, in the moment, that they were putting their penises in somebody that would be unhappy about it the next day when sober. I've heard the same phrases surrounding rape and gang rape too many times to not hear what the testimony is telling us.
Whatever you want to call what Parker and Celestin did, white men helped them over it up. It was either the school and the justice system or both. Without white male help, four black men do not get a drunk white woman alone for the purposes of having sex with her after her consent is going or gone and not go to prison at all.
White women's status might be low and close to nothing, but it's not entirely nothing. Four black men were involved in moving this white woman from point A to point B which resulted in a gang rape. White men don't care about the rape of white women. Brock Turner, Austin Wilkerson and a third one whose name I haven't bothered to remember show this clearly. But 17 years ago, this rape accusation would have been a classic opportunity to white men to use a white woman to put a couple of n-words in their place.
The rape of women and rape accusations, to a lot of men, are simply pawns to be played in a game against one another And in this case it must have been advantageous for white men to leave these two black athletes where they were OR to not dirty the name of a white institution, Penn State, with a rape accusation.
- When men win wars they rape the women for fun but primarily as a message of domination to those they conquered.
- White men used rape to put black men in their place, six feet under, by linking it to rape for more than a 100 years after the end of the Civil War.
- The Eldridge Cleavers among black men use women of black women and white women alike to prove their manhood, ability to conquer, as a sort of revenge for racism. And frankly, the misogynistic black male internal racism sufferers? Whatever they will do to a white woman they will do worse to a black woman. Just because a black rapists chooses Becky to rape, that doesn't mean black women are safe from him. Don't ever think that.
Again, it is NOT the victim's testimony that convinces me that she was gang raped by a gang led by Parker. It is the words of black men have led me to conclude she was raped just as she said. Just like white people who do not recognize the words "racist" and "racism" as anything but epithets that have no substantive meaning, there large numbers men, including black men, have the same problem with the word "rape"
Some white people
only recognize racists and racism
if someone says the word "n*gger"
while hitting someone with a baseball bat
while hitting someone with a baseball bat
IF it's on video AND the video was going a full hour before the actual assault,
It is these people that do not recognize
what the rest of what racism is,
the ones who do not recognize racist behaviors
because
they perceive these behaviors as "normal"
and that means that it is more likely than not
that they are participating in racist behaviors,
at least passively.
at least passively.
And by the same token,
some men, including black men it galls me to say,
only recognize rape and rapists
only recognize rape and rapists
if someone snatches a strange woman off the street
IF it's on video AND the video was going a full hour before the actual assault.
It is these men that do not recognize what the rest of what rape is,
the ones who do not recognize rape culture
because
they perceive these behaviors as "normal"
and that means that it is more likely than not
that they are participating rape culture behavior
and enabling rapists
Some people are wondering how this rape magically came out just before his movie came out. Well, wonder no more. There was no magic involved. A gang of white racists didn't conspire to do the movie in. Parker's studio wanted to control how the rape story came out. So Parker gave interviews, one of which he took his six year old daughter to (-- in order to avoid answering any rape trial questions when he went there to talk about his rape trial?)
If I hadn't read one word the victim said, I'd know what this man is. I've seen him before. I've met him before. I've listened to him before. Girls at my college, white, black, asian, or latina, knew perfectly damn well she wasn't safe anywhere near the greeks or athletes if she was planning on getting drunk without a boyfriend like object guarding her.
The elites at college are the same as the elites out in the world. A fair percentage of them are predators. And that includes black men like Nate Parker and Jean Celestin. And they are usually fairly unrepentant.
Nate Parker's initial statement about the rape
“Seventeen years ago, I experienced a very painful moment in my life,” Parker told Variety. “It resulted in it being litigated. I was cleared of it. That’s that. Seventeen years later, I’m a filmmaker. I have a family. I have five beautiful daughters. I have a lovely wife. I get it. The reality is” — he took a long silence — “I can’t relive 17 years ago. All I can do is be the best man I can be now.”
That statement is all about him. And to hear him tell it a few days later, he didn't even know the victim was dead. At first, I thought this was an obvious lie. I thought the studio had decided to trickle the information out in order to lessen the blow.
It just didn't occur to me that the studio would not research what happened to his victim to protect their investment in his movie, "Birth Of A Nation" So now you have to ask yourself why wouldn't the studio send a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars to track her down? (If they didn't know all along) Now I'm wondering if the white men at the studio, Celestin, and Parker, and now Harry Belafonte too only see rape accusation as a pawn one plays in game.
“The fact that [the system] may have screwed up, the fact that it didn’t really take care of justice, the fact that he should have been punished or whatever, is history,” Belafonte continued. “The fact is that he was confronted and then he did go through the process. Why are you bringing this up now? What has he done that requires this kind of animus?” (I so wish Belafonte's statement wasn't completely consistent with other male civil rights leaders)
http://www.theroot.com/blog/the-grapevine/harry-belafonte-on-nate-parker-what-has-he-done-that-requires-this-kind-of-animus/
If the victim, the woman who is raped, is always an unimportant pawn in a game between men, then it makes sense that the studio and Parker didn't go find out what happened to her --if they weren't lying about not knowing she was dead.
The only thing that mattered, when Parker first made his tatement about the rape, was how unpleasant the rape accusation was for Parker and Celestin.
That's pathetic. But I don't think this deviates from men's standard operating procedures.
Roxane Gay wrote a really good piece on the "Nate Parker and The Limits of Empathy" I think she's a better person than I am even though she talks about committing to not seeing his movie. She seems sorry for him in a way that I'm not. Nearly all of my empathy is going toward his dead victim. However, as usual, the defenders are hardening my heart more than the racist or rapist I'm writing about.
I thought maybe I could do something like pay for an alternate movie, making sure he doesn't get my money, then go see "Birth Of A Nation," see Nat Turner's story told the way it should be told, from the view that black men died trying for something noble and heroic just like white people portray themselves in movies like "Saving Private Ryan"
But I don't think I can disconnect the art from the artist.
I'm trying. I want to. I wanted to see this movie desperately. But I doubt I'll be able to see Parker's face and disconnect it from what he's done, not by the time the movie is released in October. Heck, I'm still trying to disconnect Mel Gibson, the actor, from his "Lethal Weapon" character. And it seems like it's been at least 5 years since his racist tirade all but ended his career.
I'm currently reading a Nate Parker interview in Ebony magazine.
Just like O J ran to BET when things got rough, Parker seems to have run into a blackness in the form of a black magazine to save him. He seems to be saying all the right stuff about consent and rape culture now. Instead of using one six year old daughter to block questions, he's using all five of them to say how much he's learned as a man.To tell the truth, I do hope he's actually repentant, that his faith is real and not as convenient as it seems. If he hadn't gotten his head handed to him over the last week, mostly due to black women raising hell, I'd be more inclined to take him at face value. Whether I decide to believe in sorrow or not though, I don't want him to have my money or huge success, not now and maybe not ever. I wish there was a way for the movie to succeed without him succeeding. I may be too vengeful by half but men need to pay for crimes against women. And black women need to stop giving black men a pass for the sake of our own community, even if it was a white woman attacked, this time. What a black misogynist will do to a white woman he'll do worse to a black woman. I hope that's not what Parker is or remains, but he's setting an example for misogynists no matter who is he today in 2016 Taking away Parker's Oscar, taking away his bid to be a winner in the toxic masculinity sweepstakes isn't perfect. But if 100,000 young black boys the age of 14 and up see this black man lose because he ravaged a woman then all of us in the black community will be better off. R. Kelly has pretty much been allowed to skate. Some of us tried to let Bill Cosby skate while others of us tried to make sure he didn't. Nate Parker is should be the first one in what I hope turns out to be a short line of domestic abusers and rapists that we allow to escape, at least, the justice of public scorn. I hope white people get on the ball with their low status white women because we're all living here in America here together, but we have to take care of our own community first. We have people, mostly white, attacking us from outside -- the reason Black Lives Matter exists. We cannot let the predators among us multiply because they saw the predator that came before them skate with an "I'm sorry." Black rape culture and black toxic masculinity are the ultimate in foulness to me. Do you know why? Because other women don't call their men "brother." I'm not going to help Nate Parker along by supporting his movie. I can't do it. I shouldn't do it. I'm kinda of upset with myself for thinking I should do it. Like everybody else, I'm still somewhat conditioned to save black men at the expense of everybody else. http://thankherforsurviving.blogspot.com/2015/05/black-femiinism-more-than-definition.html
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