The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

First, the news…

Duke case reopens wounds for black women

The young black women can almost finish each other’s stories.

They go to a party, a concert, a nightclub. Twenty-somethings of all colors are flirting and dancing. And then it happens.

Inevitably, a woman says, a white man asks her to dance erotically while he watches. Or he grabs her rear end. Or asks for sex, in graphic detail, without bothering to ask her name.

“We can sort of count on it happening. My friends from California and New York and Boston all tell the same stories,” said 22-year-old Danielle Terrazas Williams, a graduate student at Duke University. “They’re watching you as if you’re performing for them, and it’s disgusting. You just sort of feel like, ‘Is this all we’re good for?”’

The stereotype is everywhere, said Rebecca Hall, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley who studies images of black women.

“Turn on a music video. A black woman is somebody who has excess sexuality spilling out all over the place. It’s excess sexuality that white men are entitled to,” she said. (more…)

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Here is a huge list of organizations that assist individuals who have been raped (because  men as well as women fall into this unfortunate category)

Point 1–Playing the “stupid” card: Black women, white women, Asian women, Hispanic women, and all other women who strip don’t do it because “the system” gives them no other choice. They do it because the money is good and quick. The same goes for men who are involved in this world as well (a.k.a. pimps). Doing this kind of work has its risks, especially if most of your clientele is usually intoxicated. ALTHOUGH THIS IS STILL NOT AN EXCUSE FOR ANY WOMAN TO BE RAPED FOR ANY REASON, let’s not dumb these women down by asserting that they are too naive and stupid to do anything else.

Point 2: Rape has existed in the black community for years committed at the hands of black men (most rapes in general are committed by someone familiar to the victim). Why all of a sudden the outrage and flashbacks of slavery (by the way, name me one negro today that has actually gone through slavery to be able to relate to the experience) when the alleged rape is committed by a white man?