However, some people use their sob story to not to help others but to deter criticisms of their own bad behavior.
It's the attitude of "I don't like to be abused, but I can abuse whoever I feel like abusing".
It's the attitude of "if you judge me by my character, you are a racist guilty of perpetuating abuse of people of my race."
That's the attitude of Dan Inouye, Bill Cosby, R Kelly, Russell Simmons and Tariq Ramadan.
Earlier this year, I mentioned about the r Dan Inouye (former senator from Hawaii) in my blog posts
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2018/02/comments-on-metoo-al-franken-and-dan.html
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2018/03/dan-inouye-was-rapist.html
Dan Inouye was a young adult Hawaii when the attacks on Pearl Harbor happened. He had to deal with a lot of anti-Japanese racism that was magnified of that incident.
Later in life, Dan Inouye sexually abused a hairdresser who was sent to his apartment for an errand. That hairdresser Lenore Kwock, who went public about her experience, was later told by Japanese-Americans to "please don't do this to our hero".
Excuse me?
So just because Dan Inouye suffered racist discrimination he should be allowed to get away with sexual abuse?
But it's not just Dan Inouye!
People like Bill Cosby, R Kelly, and Russell Simmons had multiple accusers who say those men sexually abused them. All 3 men (and their defenders) used the tragic history of their ancestors (plus unrelated incidents in modern times) to put their accusers and critics on the defensive. As if it's "racist" to judge African-American men by the content of their character.
The words "Emmett Till" has been used to deter criticisms of African-Americans accused of sexual abuse.
Emmett Till was an African-American teenage boy in the 1950s. He was from Chicago and was visiting family in Mississippi when he was jokingly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a European-American woman. Instead of just brushing that off as a silly act of juvenile immaturity, Bryant told her husband and exaggerated details of the incident to him. The husband and his friend later confronted Emmett Till and brutally beat him to death. The killers (Roy Bryant and JW Milam) was acquitted by an all-white jury, then later bragged about getting away with murder.
European-American women who accused Bill Cosby (and other African-American men) of sexual abuse had been demonized as just another case of Emmett Till.
African-American women who accused African-American men of sexual abuse have been demonized as "not being loyal to the black community", "race traitors" and "putting more black men in jail".
As if arresting & convicting sex offenders is somehow equivalent to the police stopping and threatening African-Americans for merely existing in European-majority neighborhoods.
As if arresting & convicting sex offenders is somehow equivalent to the government's excessive laws against minor sins (ie weed smoking, gambling) that are enforced more harshly against African-Americans as compared to European-Americans.
Even worse, there are some African-American men who defend Cosby/Kelly/Simmons/etc by using the same exact talking points that white supremacists use to dismiss concerns about abusive policing against African-Americans.
Elizabeth Adetiba, “R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, and the Black Community’s Hypocritical Approach to Accountability,” Medium, April 19, 2018
https://medium.com/@elizabethadetiba/r-kelly-bill-cosby-and-the-black-communitys-hypocritical-approach-to-accountability-2fe2e057b6d1
The excuses we make to defend those accused, and the lengths we go to make women, particularly Black women, responsible for their own assaults are eerily similar to white America’s responses to accusations of racism. As a social scientist in training, I often peruse the comment sections of news articles, social media sites, and blog posts dealing with news related to race relations, as well as issues of gender-based violence, to get a better sense of what — and how — society thinks. While some prefer to focus on what celebrities, politicians, and television personalities have to say on these issues, there is much more at stake at the grassroots level. As a result of what I’ve seen, I can honestly say that the playbook that white people use to avoid confronting the existence of white supremacy within society might actually be the same one black people use to avoid acknowledging the sexual and physical violence that is so often perpetuated by the men in our communities. Here is a breakdown of the strategy:
- Deny the existence of the problem, even when evidence is present — i.e. “fake news!”/ “these girls are setting him up!”
- Refuse to acknowledge the problem without an unrealistic amount of evidence — i.e. “we don’t know what happened before the camera started recording!”/ “she doesn’t have any proof she was raped!”
- Question the integrity of the victim — i.e. “what did he expect to happen when he ran from the police?”/ “if she didn’t want to have sex with him, why did she leave with him?”
- Blame the incident on the supposedly deviant and pathological nature of the victim — i.e. “he looks like he was up to no good!”/ “she looks like a thot anyway!”
These reactions often come to light in the wake of high-profile events like police shootings or, in this case, allegations of abuse at the hands of Black male celebrities. But the misogyny that is spewed in response to these incidents is just as violent. A few weeks ago, when word got out that rapper Fabolous had been arrested for assaulting his longtime girlfriend and children’s mother Emily B, hundreds of individuals rushed to social media to declare that she deserved her abuse for staying with him despite their tumultuous relationship. Other rappers chimed in with Play #1 and disputed the allegations, saying that Fabolous was too gentle for such a thing. Days later when video showing an enraged Fabolous being restrained from lunging at Emily by his own bodyguards, the conversation quickly shifted to the aforementioned Play #2: many were quick to point out that we, the public, had no idea what Emily had done before the cameras began rolling to make Fabolous angry.As if there’s anything one could do to justify getting one’s teeth knocked out by a spouse.
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Shanita Hubbard wrote an article for the New York Times about her experiences as a teenager being catcalled by young men, the same young men who also experienced being victimized by abusive policing due to their race.
She says that the community is quick to defend African-American men who are being abused by the police, but is reluctant to stand up for African-American women being sexually abused by African-American men.
Shanita Hubbard, “Russell Simmons, R. Kelly, and Why Black Women Can’t Say #MeToo,” New York Times, December 15, 2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/opinion/russell-simmons-black-women-metoo.html
This state-sanctioned abuse at the hands of police evoked, and continues to evoke, a community response that literally and figuratively calls for the protection of these young men, and rightfully so. A community is right to fight against over-policing and brutality. It should encourage victims of police violence to speak up and put pressure on local politicians to take a stand.
But when your community fights for those same people who terrorize you, it sends a very complicated and mixed message. Even worse, sometimes the community members fighting back consist of young women who were once the little girls walking home from school doing their best to be invisible in hopes of avoiding what nobody ever called sexual assault. This sends the message that your pain is not a priority. It tells you that perhaps you are not a victim, because those who are harming you are also being harmed and we need to focus our energy on protecting them. After all, their lives are at stake.
#MeToo is triggering memories of that corner that I’ve tucked away for 20 years because I’ve been taught there are greater needs in the community. Perhaps this is part of the reason studies indicate only one in 15 African-American women report being raped. We’ve seen the unchecked power of white men ravish our communities, and we carry the message of “not right now” when it comes to addressing our pain if the offender is black.
Maybe this is why more victims of sexual assault within the hip-hop community have not come forward. Is it possible that black women who work in hip-hop are silent victims, with pain they have been conditioned not to prioritize? I suspect this is true — but I can’t say with certainty.
How can these women who live at the proverbial intersection of race and sexism, who grew up crossing that corner, ever be a part of the national #MeToo conversation when they can’t be heard in their own community?
The intersection of race, class, sexism and power is dangerous, and the most vulnerable women among us must navigate it alone. They are terrorized, then expected to fight for those who terrorized them because a seemingly greater predator is at large. Their faces will never grace the cover of Time magazine, and in some cases their silence will never be broken, if they hold the same false notions of power and victimhood that I once clung to when the cognitive dissonance became too strong.=====
And of course, the response to the Cosby/Kelly/Simmons/etc allegations include "but what about Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? Why nobody criticizes them?"
But the reasons those 2 names come up is because they already faced TONS AND TONS of criticism.
At this point, those 2 are more famous for their scandals than their movies.
I don't even think I've seen any of their films because they're marketed to an older demographic. And I'm 38! So that means there's already 2 generations that came after mine that know nothing about Woody Allen and Roman Polanski except those scandals.
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Now on to Tariq Ramadan, a professor who is a Swiss-born descendant of Egyptian Muslim immigrants. He is a prestigious professor and writer with expertise in religion and philosophy. He is also a sex offender with multiple allegations.
Mona Eltahawy, “Muslim Women, Caught between Islamophobes and ‘our Men’,” New York Times, November 29,2017,
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/muslim-women-sexism-violence.html
Given the global reach of such claims, you would think that when the Swiss-born Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, now on leave from teaching at Oxford in England, faced (and denied) accusations of rape and sexual assault from at least three women, that report alone would have reminded everyone that sexual harassment and worse can exist in any community.For Muslims, however, the reports have instead served as a reminder that we Muslim women are caught between a rock and a hard place — a trap presenting near-impossible obstacles for exposing sexual violence.The rock is an Islamophobic right wing in other cultures that is all too eager to demonize Muslim men. Exhibit A is President Trump, who has himself been accused of sexually harassing women and was caught on tape bragging about it. Nevertheless, he has used so-called honor crimes and misogyny (which he ascribes to Muslim men) to justify his efforts to ban travel to the United States from several Muslim-majority countries.An ascendant right wing in European politics meanwhile jumps to connect any reports of misconduct by Muslim men to their Muslimness and to Islam as a faith rather than to their maleness and the power with which patriarchy rewards it around the globe. Witness the aftermath of a sexual assault against women in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve two years ago, in which the men’s faith and ethnic backgrounds were highlighted as explanations of the assaults.
“Many Muslim women have been reluctant to discuss this Tariq Ramadan case because in part they don’t want to feed into elements of the media’s Islamophobic and racist framing of these allegations,” Shaista Aziz, an Oxford-based freelance journalist, told me. “This does nothing to encourage women to report sexual violence.”
The hard place is a community within our own faith that is all too eager to defend Muslim men against all accusations. Mr. Ramadan’s defenders have dismissed the complaints against him as a “Zionist conspiracy” and an Islamophobic attempt to destroy a Muslim scholar. Too often, when Muslim women speak out, some in our “community” accuse us of “making our men look bad” and of giving ammunition to right-wing Islamophobes.But they get it wrong. It is the harassers and assaulters who make us “look bad,” not the women who have every right to expose crimes against them. Mr. Ramadan’s case is also a reminder of the veneration of Muslim male scholars that gives them incredible and often unchecked power.
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I don't know about you, but even though I have Latin American ancestry and I've heard the president and his defenders demonize Latin Americans of bringing "drugs and crimes" and "being rapists", I feel ZERO solidarity with actual sex offenders who just happen to share my ancestries and face the same racism I faced!
Locking up Latino sex offenders is NOWHERE NEAR EQUIVALENT to the way the government is abusing Latino families in immigration detention centers!
Defending the rights of Latin@s, African-Americans, Muslims and other marginalized communities requires a demand that we all be judged by the content of our character.
When I mean "judged by the content of our character", that means we should NEVER hesitate to hold sex offenders accountable!
It's NEVER ENOUGH to just demand respect from European-descendants, especially when most people are violated by members of their own race!
The idea that "we should hesitate to hold sex offenders of our race accountable because we are being oppressed by larger society" is JUST STUPID!
The idea that non-white women should accept being abused by members of their own race is JUST STUPID and DISGUSTING!
