**TRIGGER WARNING** “I Say It’s All Good When It Really Ain’t:” Rape as Respectability?

By Guest Contributor R.N. Bradley

Image via madamenoire.com

“He so fine, he could rape me so good.”

Pause.

Yeah. You read that correctly. To borrow from my southern roots, I got “thowed off” when my student put this in the atmosphere while talking about black women’s sexuality in a multicultural space like hip hop.

Thowed. Off.

It happened in class about a month ago, and I have yet to find the words to ease the levels of high anxiety and horror that I continue to grapple with after hearing this phrase. Part of me recoiled like the 9-year-old little girl I talked about here; part of it was me as a grown woman angry at the fact that rape is contextualized and dismissed as a spectacle. By no means is this quick commentary intended to be a polished discussion of rape and blackness in the popular imagination. Instead, is more sporadic and “off the dome.”  It has no shaped trajectory but accentuates the messiness of rape discourse that currently exists in (black) American popular culture.

Aside from my immediate “WTF” moment was the jaw-dropping realization that this phrase annotates a (young) black female body. Rape as a lens of visible (hyper)sex ultimately leads to a conversation about shifting representations of rape and black women’s respectability. In order to be visible a black woman must be “rape-able?” The inversion of black women’s respectability as being considered “rape-able” creates a nasty, imploded lens of black women’s sex and identity that remains situated within historic plantation sexual politics. Black women as rape victims is stymied by the belief that black women have “moved past” victims–a status that was reserved for, you know, ‘respectable’ white women wary of predatory black men–to proponents of rape discourse because of the destabilized foundation of rape as traumatic discourse. Further complicating rape-ability is the investment by young black girls in the belief that rape equivocates good sex and, thus, removes the pain and trauma associated with rape. Due to (tweet) trends like “It Ain’t Rape If…” and shows like Family Guy and South Park categorizing rape as a joke, “rape me so good” opens up the horrifying possibility of black girls being open and prone to rape in order to be considered ‘deserving’ of warranted or unwarranted sexual attention “just for shits and giggles.”

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