Very Smart Brothas’ Fauxpology, Too $hort’s “Advice,” And Muffling About Intraracial Sexual Violence

I know that I’m not the first—or only—one to make this plain: The Combahee River Collective was founded partly due to Black women fighting sexual violence within some Black communities. Ntozake Shange and Alice Walker—among a few Black female writers who wrote about intraracial rape–caught just about all nine circles of hell for “making Black men look bad” partly because they dared to name that reality in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Enuf and No!: The Rape Documentary—through poetry, testimony, and oral history—does an incredible job on examining the realities of Black men raping Black women.

However, that’s not the myth, that’s not the stereotype about rapists and victims in the US. In this country, Black men are seen as the Ultimate Sexual Predator Of White Women, with political and pop cultures cycling this image from Birth of a Nation to George Bush, Sr.’s Willie Horton ad to the POTUS Obama drawn as a date rapist to the salacious racial innuendo and/or misinformation in the missing-white-women stories. Another statistic to counter this myth: according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) , only 3.3% of rapes have a Black perpetrator  and a white victim. (Source)

Bit there’s a flip to this: for some African Americans, the Ultimate Sexual Predator factually was—and, in some imaginations, still is—white. This image can be traced back to the both antebellum US and post-antebellum US, from when many white male slaveowners raped enslaved African and African American women through the Civil Rights Movement, when African American women reported their following the segregationist laws of going to the back of the bus became an opportunity for white men to rape them, which became a newly chronicled reason as to why that movement began.

From a personal perspective, I think this particular history trembled my Great Migration-from-Mississippi mom’s voice in her admonition to not “date white,” to inculcate that desire to date and marry Black: racial solidarity as a form of physical/(hetero)sexual protection, though she never stated it in such a way. I just remember an indescribable terror that harmonized in my mom’s talking about her “not wanting a white man in her home.” In fact, she used to say, “I remember when a white man could walk into a Black man’s house and rape his wife and daughter(s) and the Black men had to sit on the porch and. Could. Do. Nothing. About. It.”

However, a Black man raped me, which follows the statistics, not the history that my mom told me. And my ex-husband, whom she welcomed into her home, was white. And, according to several generations of Black female artists and scholars, the racial reality of my rape exists in tandem with the history of white men raping Black women in the US.

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