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

The following are random excerpts from commentaries written during the Duke fiasco:

The Duke Case’s Cruel Truth

Hateful Stereotypes of Black Women Resurface

By Lynne Duke

[excerpted]

Two black women performed an exotic dance. The white men in their audience shouted racial epithets, one of the women has said. Things got rough. Someone in the crowd held a broomstick aloft and shouted “I’m gonna shove this up you,” the other woman told police when she reported being raped. As the women fled the house, a neighbor reportedly heard one of the men shout: “Hey bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.”

In the sordid but contested details of the case, African American women have heard echoes of a history of some white men sexually abusing black women — and a stereotype of black women as hypersexual beings and thus fair game.

The mainstream media have largely tiptoed around the brutal truth that has been discussed among black women in private conversations, in the blogosphere and on college campuses. It is that the Duke case is in some ways reminiscent of a black woman’s vulnerability to a white man during the days of slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow, when sex was used as a tool of racial domination. (more…)

Knees jerk, tribes form as Duke rape case becomes national psychodrama

Betty Baye

[excerpted]

Rev. Jesse Jackson, meanwhile, told the Associated Press that the fantasy of white men hiring black women to strip is “as old as slave masters impregnating young slaves girls.” Later, Jackson announced that even if there was no rape, his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition will pay the young woman’s tuition so she’ll be able to pay for school and support her children without having to “sacrifice her body to make money.”

[...]

Nevertheless, the use or abuse of black strippers by privileged white lacrosse players has raised anew the issues of the objectification of women in general and of the alleged hyper-sexuality of black women in particular.

But let’s get real. Some of America’s richest corporations keep their stockholders happy by peddling movies, music and books that depict black women as sexually loose provocateurs. One result is that the generation that consumes the music, movies and books may not consider it a big deal that college students hire themselves out as strippers. (more…)

Rape, Mythology and Courage

By Veronica Njeri-Imani

The chaos surrounding the young African American woman who has accused several members of Duke University’s lacrosse team with rape provides new details to an age-old problem: violence against women of color in the United States. The nexus that few want to talk about intelligently—race, sex, and class–undergirds the court case that began being tried in public, on the news and streets of Durham, North Carolina, not behind closed doors with a robed judge.

It is of little surprise that the small Southern city that is approximately half African American and half White is the site of the crime. This is the same state about which Harriet Jacobs, an ex-slave and single mother of two, wrote of assaults by her slavemaster, a doctor, in the 1863 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. How sad that over 100 years after chattel slavery, Black women in the American South and elsewhere are being raped at will by men whose White skin and economic class status privilege them over the rest of the population. The so-called “Bible Belt” that boasts of its devotion to God is also host to strip clubs where self-professed “gentlemen” sling dollar bills at young exotic dancers on their lunch breaks, all in pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness.” (more…)

Duke case reopens wounds for black women

Many are fed up with stereotype of hyper-sexual African American female

As you can see here, the common theme used by the knee-jerk crowd has been “memories of slavery”. If I had the time, I would also post many of the heated exhanges that took place over the blogosphere.

About a year ago, a similar story took place in Ohio:

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Witnesses said several students saw a girl being punched and forced to engage in videotaped sexual acts with several boys in the Mifflin High School auditorium.

According to witness accounts given to school investigators, a 16-year-old developmentally-delayed student claimed she was dragged into the auditorium and was forced to perform oral sex on at least two boys, while more than a dozen other students were called to watch. (more…)

Just recently (about a month ago), here is yet another story about a gang-rape that took place in the mostly Black community in North Milwaukee:

From Chicagodefender.com/AP

An 11-year-old girl was sexually assaulted by as many as 20 boys as a 16-year-old girl watched and told her what sex acts to perform, authorities say in the latest mob attack to rock Milwaukee and set off another round of civic soul-searching.

“It almost leaves me speechless. It is just senseless acts of violence. It is inhumane. It is embarrassing to the city of Milwaukee and its people. … There should be outrage,” Barbara Nuell-Moore, director of the neighborhood-improvement group Project Respect.

The 16-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy have been charged in juvenile court in the attack, which took place on Monday in a house on the city’s north side. A 40-year-old man who also had sex with the child may also be charged, authorities said.

As for the others, “we’re dealing with a lot of nicknames so we’re trying to track down these people,” said prosecutor Matthew Torbeson. (more…)

If you find any commentaries that compare THESE actions to slavery please let me know. There are a lot of directions I could go with this posting after reading the first excerpts above, but I will get right to the point.

Those that know me well know that when it comes to women and children, I can be very protective. If I see a young child wondering in a crowd unattended, I will stand close by until I see his/her parent. If I see kids on the street doing something that could get them in trouble or hurt, my mouth is usually the one that tells them to find something else constructive. As for women, I never believed in letting a woman go to a door by herself at night unless me or some of the young brothas I was working with at the time saw to it that she got in her house safe. When my wife has to work long hours in her office at night by herself, no matter how tired I am I will bring the kids with me to her office and wait for her until she is done.

Why am I saying all of this?

I am saying this because it really bothers me when I see the ills of society being put on some kind of outrage rating system: Woman gets raped vs. Black woman gets raped by white man or white woman gets raped by black man. The same “rule” is also applied to the plight of children based on their race.

When I address the issues that affect men, women and children, I am more interested in addressing the problem itself and not all the other “fluff” that surrounds it. In other words, if a person is found guilty of being a rapist, that person should be treated as such. I don’t care about the ethnicity of the person (unless the crime represents a trend in that particular group) or do I care about his or her feelings or the ridiculous claim that poverty made them do it. Making excuses for one group while demonizing another group over the same crimes is just plain ridiculous and rooted in bigotry. If you noticed BEFORE the actual trial over the Duke rape case, folks have already arrived to their conclusions that these boys are guilty without hearing or seeing all of the evidence. To them, the unsubstantiated claim alone that rape took place by the hands of Whites towards Blacks is all they needed. Historically, the same has happened to Black folks in this country when a Black person was sent to prison or executed based on the unsubstantiated testimonies of Whites. Nevertheless, two historical wrongs do not make a right. So why repeat it?

Why is it that while the blogosphere (a media avenue that is not controlled by mainstream media) buzzed for weeks about the Duke “rape” case while the two gang-rape stories I mentioned above were barely talked about or discussed by many of OUR own websites/blogs (including the authors of the first three articles mentioned above)? While it can be convenient for some to blame MSM for many things, the blogosphere is something that is controlled mainly by those who are not in that industry. While we (the blogosphere) claim to be everything MSM is not, our responses to these stories show that in many ways were are just a mere reflection of the industry.

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