THE UGLIEST FRATERNAL TWINS IN THE WORLD: RACISM AND SEXISM

In early 2015, a Belgium Newspaper that passes itself off as "progressive"  did a story where they attached an image of Michelle and Barack Obama that had been altered to look like two apes. 



The newspaper, Charlie Hebdo style, tried to pass it off, as satire.

SSDD.


But this isn't about that. This is about how racism and sexism travel along the very same corridors and stop to execute the same behaviors along the way.


Within the Belgium story --only the latest pile of disrespect heaved at President Barack Obama and The First Lady-- the African author tells another, smaller story about a television show he was watching while in Belgium. And it illustrates just how acceptable the crudest forms of overt racism are there. (I won't be visiting.)


On this game show  the author was watching, there was a question:

What is "the technical term for a child of mixed parentage. The phrasing was a lot more offensive than I have suggested (Obama is the son of a N**** from Kenya and a white mother, etcetera). The answer was 'Mulatto.' I expected someone in the audience to stand up and call the quiz master to order. No one did. The show went on as normal

The show went on as normal?

The show went on as normal.


People who are blissfully unaware of the micro-variety of the above illustrated MACRO-aggression in the United States, don't seem to realize is that this is the kind of moment that tends to let us know that we are surrounded by people are deeply steeped in racism.

The level of racism that seems likely present was not reflected in the words of the solitary game show host or the words of one or two contestants.  It's the reaction of the audience that tells you where normal lives. It isn't about one T.V. show on during one hour one day in Belgium. The n-word being used interchangably for black person plus "the show went on as normal" sans any reaction at all from the audience tells you a lot about how widespread over racism is in that country.


By the same token, Chris Brown, Ray Rice and Bill Cosby may not be representative of black men in particular or black people in general --as many have pointed out.  But the collective reaction, or lack thereof, toward Chris Brown, Ray Rice, and Jello Pudding Man is representative of sexism and general devaluation of black women within the black community.

It's the reaction of the audience, live and in person or at home watching television, that tell you what the attitudes are. Furthermore, there has been much written and discussed on these three men. And there has been a huge percentage of our African American population, much more than half that, tried to make sure that:

- the show will go on as normal for Chris Brown

- the show will go on as normal for Ray Rice



- the show will go on as normal for Bill Cosby



...all while acting  as if the financial success of these three individuals uplifts the entire black race in some way.

The thing that wounded me most was realizing that the video didn't impact Ray Rice defenders anymore than video impacted Daniel Pantaleo defenders (the man who choked Eric Garner to death).

Do not think that my heart hasn't slowly and gradually shattered over the taint that Bill Cosby's sexism (prerequisite for rape), classism, and respectability politics has left on Dr. Huxtable too. And by the way that pain is quite a bit more sharp than the pain caused by Mel Gibson ruining the "Lethal Weapon" series for me with his racism.

Danny Glover, Mel Gibson's co-star, played one of the first black characters in an interracially cast movie where he wasn't the chocolate dipped white guy or present as a stereotype, token, or joke. Mel Gibson completely ruined the "Lethal Weapon" series for me....and Danny Glover as a Black History Moment At The Movies.

But I got over it.  Mostly. It was relatively easy.  Nobody, except one or two of the megarich New Blacks, tried to defend Mel's racist tirades. So it was easy to just be sad and move on. 



But people did tried to defend Bill Cosby. Black folk worked harder to defend Bill Cosby than they did to defend Clarence Thomas from Anita Hill Back in the day. New Blacks, Old Blacks, and Slightly Used Blacks defended Bill Cosby from close to three dozen accusations of rape --at the expense of my sisters, be they black, white, mixed race, Latino, Asian, or another ethnicity.  

And let me be frank. It is especially galling to hear those wailing about racism ignore black women who say they've been attacked by Bill Cosby. 

I'm not Charlie Hebdo.

And I'm not Phylicia either.

The accusers? They ain't ALL lying. As much as I love Dr. Huxtable, they can't be. And those that think more than 2 dozen women are lying should consider how crazy they sound.  A conspiracy that reaches across decades and thousands of miles just won't hunt.

And in my opinion? Cosby is not a surprise.

The superiority within Bill Cosby's respectability politics has been discussed, hashed, and rehashed in grumbles and growls between black folk for over decade and feels like two. For those who still don't see the 'I'm a black person but I'm not THAT KIND of black person' in his rhetoric? You're just too afraid to let the pain come. Move on to the next article. Come back when you're feeling a little stronger. Then read on.

The brave should consider this: If you see a glaring superiority in one aspect of a person's life, that usually means there's a cluster of superiorities that the person is trying, with varying degrees of success, to hide.

In my mind, drug-em and rape-em is just the latest evidence of that core of superiority because I'm pretty sure that you have to consider yourself vastly superior to any person you might rape.  Isn't that how rape works between two men in every prison movie you've ever seen? The alpha dog rapes the smaller weaker man.

And reading between the lines of stories written by female rape survivors, I see the same thing. Rape happens between someone who considers himself superior taking advantage of someone who he considers weaker and less than. That's probably an expression of sexism in and of itself.

When the audience, otherwise known as the public at large, doesn't even notice that they live in a world where the rape victims can't speak for fear of being blamed, that almost has to be a sign that the sexism is rampant.

When black people can't speak up about racism, we know the racism is rampant. Why don't we know the same thing about sexism?  





The original article:http://africasacountry.com/belgium-is-an-insular-country-it-lives-like-history-happens-outside-of-it/

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN Ikard about Baldwin on Black Female Patriarchy

A REPOST FROM NEW BLACK MAN BLOG
http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-review-breaking-silence-toward.html

A pivotal moment in James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1952) sees the churchman and patriarch Gabriel being confronted by his sister Florence over a devastating past infidelity.

James Baldwin

Upon fathering a child with his mistress Esther, Gabriel stole the savings of his first wife Deborah and gave it to Esther to hush up the matter. Deborah wrote a letter to Florence testifying to Gabriel’s ruinous behavior, which left her neglected, isolated, and economically dependent on him.

When Florence musters up the courage to confront Gabriel, ten years after having received the letter, the effect on his psyche is profound:

“It had lived in [Deborah’s] silence, then, all of those years? He could not believe it…And yet, this letter, her witness, spoke, breaking her long silence, now that she was beyond his reach forever” (212).

Confronted with the suffering wrought by his patriarchal authority, Gabriel reels from the memory of Deborah as it is framed by Florence’s criticism of his actions. As if to underscore the power of speech in these women’s intertwined voices, Baldwin has Florence rebut Gabriel’s power over her by uttering,

“When I go, brother, you better tremble, cause I ain’t going to go in silence” (215).

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David Ikard

Ikard’s chapter on Go Tell It on the Mountain is exemplary in this regard because it introduces the idea that both men and women have a stake in black patriarchy—a dynamic that underscores the need for genuine intergender dialogue (rather than, say, a feminist critique of male oppression as “ONLY” an issue of men dominating women).


On the one hand, Ikard shows how the novel’s patriarch, Gabriel, consistently shores up his sense of masculine identity by compelling the black women in his life to submit to his religious and familial authority.

When his mistress Esther is left on her own with their unborn child, she is “virtually at Gabriel’s mercy” because she is a “poor pregnant woman of disreputable social standing” (64). Esther might reveal Gabriel’s infidelity to the church, but Ikard understands this as an impossible choice, given the practices of community policing which downplay such infidelity in the name of securing strong black male leaders.


In this way, Gabriel’s sense of himself as “the chief victim of white oppression and the burden-bearer of his family” continues to justify his ill treatment of black women.


Yet in his chapter on Baldwin, Ikard is also keen to show how the novel “disrupts the victimization discourse that allows black men like Jones and Gabriel to explain away their subjection of black women” (50).



                                         *    *     *    *   *


Crucial to this narrative disruption, according to Ikard, is black women’s recognition of and rebellion against their complicity with black patriarchy.

In the figures of Elizabeth (Gabriel’s current wife) and Gabriel’s mother, Ikard identifies how “women unknowingly support patriarchy in their relationships with men,” particularly through the“internalized…expectation of black female self-sacrifice” (50, 67).

1) Elizabeth buttresses Gabriel’s authority by assuming guilt for being a “bad mother” and having had sex prior to their marriage.

2) Gabriel’s mother is a more resonant example of black female patriarchy in that she “rears him to believe that as a man he should expect black women to cater to his every emotional, physical, and material desire” (55).


In both cases, Ikard outlines a convincing case to extend the study of black patriarchy to women who support its ideological and institutional viability.

Importantly, this perspective does not cast judgment on black women for supporting patriarchy but instead seeks to understand

1) how their stake in it is conditioned by white supremacy, and

2) how a more inclusive politics of resistance would overturn both racists and gendered structures of oppression.


Ikard’s perspective is echoed in the character of Florence, who emerges as the novel’s privileged witness to the range of patriarchy’s harms precisely because she has also suffered from black women’s (her mother’s) investment in patriarchy.

***************************



FROM A NEW BLACK MAN A PARTIAL REVIEW OF
"BREAKING THE SILENCE: TOWARD A BLACK MALE FEMINIST CRITICISM"  by David Ikard. Read More -  http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2009/07/book-review-breaking-silence-toward.html



Click Here for more about the book itself