A Social Disaster : Voices from Durham--Bryan Proffitt

Don’t Nobody Move
by Bryan Proffitt

I can already see folks packing up their pots, pans, and protest signs. I am reading the newspaper reporters, so quick to sensationalize in the past few weeks, rolling up their rage and heading home. The T.V. producers, not two steps out of the cutting room, headed back in to rewrite the story.

“White men attacked”

“Innocent Students Demand Justice”

“Tawanna Brawley All Over Again”

Please.

I’ve read the same reports that everybody else has. In mid-March, a Black student/mother/daughter/woman/human was hired to dance at a party hosted by members of the Duke University lacrosse team. She leaves the party, calls the police, and reports that she and a companion have been racially assaulted, and that she has been sexually assaulted by three members of the team. There is a medical exam that reveals sustained physical trauma. The Durham police take a DNA sample from every white member of the team because the woman identifies her assailants as white men. Weeks of protest, education, and counter-protest and counter-education. The DNA samples come back negative.

And?

Look, those of us that have been concerned about sexual assault for more than just the last few weeks have been clear about this thing from the start. We have a commitment to believing those who come forward with stories of survival first. This case is no different. Something dehumanizing, frightening, and wrong happened in that house. Regardless of the specifics, there is healing to be done and justice to be fought for. Sexual assault is a parasite that feeds on silence, and with each heroic public step forward, the wall of silence is chipped away. One of the most, if not the most, important factors in the healing process of survivors is to be believed. Too many are unwilling. Too many ask questions like, “What were you doing in his room?” “How many drinks had you had?” and “Why did you put yourself in that situation in the first place?” With each insidiously incriminating question, survivors are systematically put back in their places. And not just survivors of a particular assault, countless survivors who have had this story forced upon them are thrust back into reliving a painful process each time this cycle repeats itself. This case, as with most others, has done immeasurable emotional damage to ALL survivors.

But, the publicity of this case has also already provided the space for many survivors to heroically step forward and tell their stories. The importance of this space cannot be understated.

However, the inevitable backlash has already sown the seeds for future violence. From many corners, the questions about this woman’s profession have added bricks to the wall of silence. “She was a stripper. She should have known this was coming.” We don’t have this reaction when a construction worker is injured in an accident. We don’t chastise an airplane pilot when the actions of someone else cause a plane to crash. And we DEFINITELY don’t respond with, “well, he should have known this was coming,” to a tale of a policeman shot on the beat. The fact that this woman’s occupation was to play with the erotic is no justification for men raping a women they pay to provide a service. I’ll say that more plainly…there is nothing that this woman, or any woman, could have done to deserve being sexually assaulted, racially harassed, or otherwise violated or humiliated. Being in the wrong place at that wrong time is not a rape-able offense.

The fact that these responses have emerged, however, will serve to silence future survivors from coming forward, whether this particular woman’s story is proven in a court of law or not. A wife will not speak out against her husband because, well, “it’s her duty to provide him with sex.” A college student will not go to the police with her story because, “she shouldn’t have been drunk and in his room in the first place.” A gay high school student violently attacked will stay quiet because, “obviously, that is what he was asking for.” A sex worker will not step forward because, come on, “who would possibly believe a sex worker.” Even if this particular case is validated in a court of law, the seeds of doubt and future silences have already taken root.

And don’t let this thing get dis-proven in a court of law, or actually turn out to be false (those two statements, mind you, are not saying the same thing)…

Survivors will be forced further underground.

Conversely, men will become emboldened. For the last four years, my comrades in Men Against Rape Culture (MARC) and I have been doing workshops challenging men to confront the realities of sexual assault. I can’t remember a workshop when at least one man has not referred to the fact that men are under attack by women. “What happens if she wakes up and ‘calls' rape because she regrets it, or because we were both drunk? Now my life is ruined.” These men, of course, have little to no understanding about what it means to have one’s life ruined.

This is what having one’s life ruined looks like: regular sleep lost due to post-traumatic nightmares of sexual violence, a job lost due to the inability to focus while surviving from rape, doctor’s bills, a lifetime of counseling, expensive anti-depressants to keep you alive, eating disorders, struggles with a healthy sexuality and self-image, isolation and humiliation…these are just a few of the common after effects of sexual assault that might ruin somebody’s life.

Because of the process discussed above, it is extremely rare for someone to allege a sexual assault that did not actually happen. If this case turned out to be that exception to the rule of violence and silence, the white men on this lacrosse team will have had their lives altered. That much is true. The discomfort they would unjustly experience in that circumstance, however, is a toothpick compared to the forest of rape survival. Mountains and mole hills.

This particular case, as my MARC comrades and I say, is the “Rape CNN.” It is the sensationalized version of what happens every single day in this world. If we allow it to, it will dominate our public discussions about sexual assault for the next year. Those of us who have been working to end sexual violence, and all male violence, will not let this happen.

We know a few things, and we are going to keep those things at the center of our work:

1) Something very wrong happened that night at 610 Buchanan Ave. in Durham. It could have been sexual assault, the unchecked violence of racism, or the fear and intimidation that comes from just the threat of violence. Much of this wouldn’t even be deemed an injury in the eyes of this legal system. The legal system in this country is ill prepared to work for actual justice, and it will never be an institution that can promote healing. It has never worked for women of color, why would it work now? Even if these white men are found innocent of sexual assault, the psychological and emotional damage has been done to the woman who has survived the trauma, to survivors of all trauma, and to the community of Durham. We will still work for healing. We will still work for justice.

2) Sexual assault happens every day and in every community. We will believe that this particular case is true until we are thoroughly convinced otherwise. We need to hear it from the mouth of the woman herself, and even then we recognize the potential impact that Duke’s money, social intimidation, or a broken system could have on the truth. This is our commitment to helping heal the individual and social wounds of sexual assault. We will still fight for accountability for the perpetrators, reparations to the survivor and the community, and a renewed focus on creating spaces for healing and the PREVENTION of future racial and sexual violence.

3) We will continue to assert points #1 and 2, regardless of the legal outcome of this case. This case, while publicly significant, and significant in the lives of those involved, is a tear drop in the sea of sexual assault. We will stay focused on the work of long-term, sustainable change as we seek healing and justice for this survivor.

4) Black women, and other women of color, are raped every day. White supremacy works to convince us that Black women, and other women of color, cannot be raped because they are ALWAYS sexually available. We know that all women of color are human beings with full sexual agency that must be respected at ALL times, no matter their occupation, relationship status, or the decisions that they make about their lives.

5) Men rape, men support rape, and make can end rape. Rape is not sex. It is an act of violence. Specifically, it is an act of MALE violence, though women certainly perpetrate sexual assault in small numbers, mostly against women and children. And while not all men are rapists, almost all rapists are men. Men rape women, men rape children, men rape other men, and men rape transgender individuals. Men also benefit from patriarchy, the cultural, political, and social institutions that privilege men and create hierarchy that must be enforced by violence. Men threaten and intimidate and use our power to frighten others. Men, most importantly, can play a powerful role in ending rape. It is our problem; it is our challenge; it is our task. Men can end rape.

6) America, and the world, is sick with white supremacy and racism; heterosexism and homophobia; patriarchy, sexism, and transphobia; and poverty and capitalist excess. These systems all interact to create a culture of violence that must be changed. We teach our children the lessons of these systems, and they grow up to reinforce them. We must dismantle these systems if we hope to end the onslaught of violence.

7) Survivors will create the path forward. In resisting violence, homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, and capitalism, survivors of oppression generate the vision for the rest of us to follow. Their strength and their humanity is the only way out.

So don’t pack up your bags folks. It’s not time to retreat. It’s time to dig in and get ready for a fight that doesn’t end until the violence stops and we’re all free. It’s the fight that’s going to save our lives. It’s the fight that’s going to save our souls.

***

This essay was strengthened profoundly by the brilliant and challenging criticism and editing of Christy Tronnier, Nancy Wilson, Bob Pleasants, Beth Bruch, Dasan Ahanu, Kai Barrow, and Theo Luebke. Many thanks y’all.

Bryan Proffitt is a Hip-Hop generation white man that writes, organizes, teaches, and lives in Durham, NC. He is one of the co-founders of Men Against Rape Culture, and can be reached at bproffitt33@yahoo.com. Please send feedback.

A Social Disaster : Voices from Durham--Wahneema Lubiano

Perfect Offenders, Perfect Victim:
The Limitations of Spectacularity in the Aftermath of the Lacrosse Team Incident
by Wahneema Lubiano

Legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw has asserted that the default doctrine of colorblindness in law forces black Americans “to articulate themselves as perfect victims as against a perfect discriminator” [citation: The House That Race Built, (ed.) W. Lubiano]. Crenshaw’s language about the working of the law helps me think about some things that I’m hearing in this moment. Throughout various discussions of the criminal and social issues of this incident, I hear desire on the part of various constituencies for the comfort either of being able to construct a perfect offender and a perfect victim, and, therefore, some kind of resolution, or the converse position–the comfort of saying that the impossibility of constructing a perfect offender and a perfect victim means that nothing happened and that nothing needs to be resolved.

There is a spectacularity to what has been discussed and represented, and that spectacularity, I think, is driven in no small part by some desire for our understanding to be complete, coherent, and visible. This moment’s intensity is driven equally by the relative privateness of our encounters. We’re part of a university and a city, but absent the space that was opened up by the protests, vigils, and scattered limited fora such as this one, we don’t have a public sphere where discussion easily flows. And in the midst of the difficulty of bridging the distances between us and the structures of power wherein decisions are made, we have to yell in order to be heard.

At the same time we read and watch the media through which positions are articulated, and we consume again and again the spectacle that is news and the news as spectacle. Whatever our desires and fears are in this moment, depending upon our ability to be heard, the threads of our fears and desires are woven through the positions we articulate. And the positions that are articulated are filtered and modified by hierarchies of power and influence and by conventional wisdom which is itself influenced by powerful actors. The heat, then, is necessarily turned up.

In other words, I’m suggesting that some of the discussion, the rhetoric, being circulated in the aftermath of the incident and coming either from those defending the alleged offenders or those defending the alleged victim, is rhetoric driven, haunted, by a fight over whether or not we have offenders who can be seen as “perfect” in their villainy and a victim whose victimage can be seen as necessarily complete and thus “perfect.”

Within the terms of the responses to the incident, I understand the impulse of those outraged and who see the alleged offenders as the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus. Further, this group has been responsible for extended social violence against the neighborhood in which they reside. In short, by a combination of their behaviors and what they represent in terms of social facts, and by virtue of their relation to the alleged victim, for those who are defenders of the victim, the members of the team are almost perfect offenders in the sense that Crenshaw writes about. As more information circulates and the stakes are raised by virtue of considerations of Duke’s and the nation’s long-standing class, race, and gender disparities, they are increasingly “perfected” as offenders. As part of this dynamic, the young woman, black and non-wealthy, made even more vulnerable by virtue of being employed by the perfect offenders and outnumbered, approaches the state of perfect victim. However, even within the media circulation of narratives, neither the offenders’ nor the victim’s “perfection” is absolutely complete; our own imaginations and our own language has to complete it.

For those who are critical of the victim, her specific vulnerabilities as someone who works at a job socially disapproved of by much of the public, whose presence in the house constitutes for them a mitigation of her victimage–even a rationale for what might have happened to her, and whose complexities as parent and student are marginalized in discussions that support the offenders, her victimage is far from perfect. Being a woman already means that her behavior is subject to heightened social scrutiny and disciplining and makes her a target both of free-floating sexism that regulates the social behavior of women and of Puritanism about the body and its display. For those critical of the alleged victim, her “perfectness” as victim is severely decreased by her position as an outlier in terms of norms of acceptable female gender behavior. Against this assault by her critics, her race, her gender, her class standing, her status as a mother, and her position as a student have to be rhetorically heightened by her defenders in order for them to secure a tenuous hold on her perfectness as victim.

Within the specifics of this moment, for those who are critical of the team, in order for their “perfectness” as offenders to intensify, any ethnic differences among the offenders have to disappear into a general “whiteness”; any differences among the familial wealth has to disappear into a general understanding of their privilege; and any differences among the behaviors of individual players has to disappear into a general understanding of their record of bad behavior. Within the specifics of this moment, any complexity of the victim has to disappear into a general understanding of what she represents historically–a category of those socially, economically, and politically disadvantaged who are subject to the domination of the offender category. The perfectness of the offenders has to be solidified so that a critique of their social and institutional production can be underscored. Against this solidification of their perfectness as offenders, their defenders have to reinforce and heighten the circulation of rhetoric around a narrative, among other things, of their wonderful athletic ability, understandings of them as fine, upstanding young men or boys who are good students, the products of good homes, and the possessors of good characters attested to by their grades, their performances, and the fine characters and records of those who support them. Their perfectness as offenders has to be lessened, mitigated, or disrupted to the point that any bad behavior is forgiveable by virtue of the mitigations – mitigations such as “they aren’t any different from other young men” who drink and party in boisterous manner and, occasionally, slip over the line of acceptable behavior; therefore, what is happening to them is a horrible injustice. Their offense has to decrease in size and severity.

In this moment, my concern is with the attractiveness either of the dynamic of the construction or the utter dissolution of perfect victimage and perfect offenders and, by extension, the demand that any offense itself be perfect or perfectible. Whatever is routine about this incident is marginalized while a desire for the incident to live up to its most horrific possibilities fights it out in public discussion with its rhetorical other – the desire to mitigate the routine ugliness by insisting that the most horrific possibilities are impossible under the particular circumstances of the case. This fight of desires then extends to the question of evidence – a demand for perfect evidence on the part of the defenders of the team (a demand most spectacularly articulated by, but not limited, of course, to their lawyers). The idea that evidence, like all other aspects of the incident, is part of a circulation of narratives seems to be lost as the newspapers and the television move from one flash point to another.

Now, why am I talking about what is happening in discussions about this incident in this way? Why am I raising these questions? I want to move from the specific harms associated with the incident alleged at the house on N. Buchanan Blvd. in order to look at the more difficult to “see,” the less spectacularly visible harms of more generally structured and distributed sexism and racism. I want to do this for what I consider two imporant reasons.

1. I want to help clarify thinking and discussion around what has happened in the aftermath of March 13th. If a crime occurred, I want to insist that the victim need not be spectacularly represented or constructed as a perfect victim; the offenders need not be spectacularly represented or constructed as perfect offenders; the crime need not have the contours of the worst possible set of actions that can be imagined for great harm to have been done to this young woman. Gendered violence is much more often banal and routine as much as it is horrific. I want us all to remember that.

2. As a precondition of thinking through the complexities of necessary institutional change in this moment, I offer my critique of perfect offender, perfect victim, perfect crime, and perfect evidence construction and dissolution as an analogy for thinking about such change. I offer this to all of us but especially to individuals, newspaper editors, and columnists weighing in on this matter in print on this campus. I do think that the Duke administration is getting the point.

In other words, (1) Duke need not be proved to be the worst or the only institutional sinner ever to have inhabited the earth, (2) not every single person of color and/or woman on this campus needs to have been harmed moment-by-moment by either the most horrific presence of racism and/or sexism or their most routine manifestations, and (3) Durham does not need to have to prove that it never benefitted from Duke’s presence, in order for change in the institution to be undertakened. And the proving of all acts of individual racism, sexism, and gendered violence is not necessary before structural racism and sexism are addressed.

Different versions of this desire for perfection that I’m talking about become visible in a kind of dominant or mainstream discourse and call for a perfect proof of harm: within that discourse, all people of color must be called some version of nigger, raghead, or wetback for racism to register its presence; all women must show themselves to be of sterling character and careful of their dress, behavior, and location when sexism is demonstrated in order for its workings to be acknowledged; all those who are less well-off must certify their lack of income and its relation to their diminished social and economic opportunities in order for classism to be raised as a concern.

What attention to spectacularity brings with it is a hideous cost: the absolute worst that can be imagined must be shown to be present for any harm to be perceived as possible. Such thinking, if extended to a history of the institution’s past or a history of its present, means that harms can’t be addressed unless the worst possible individual subjects are caught in the act of behaving in the worst possible fashion to the most severely injured and worthy victims. A movement away from the demand for spectacularity of sexism, racism, and gender violence toward understanding and consideration of the everydayness of those things could work toward erasing or at least easing the almost knee-jerk dismissal of charges of racism, sexism, and a critique of class entitlements, a dismissal continually on display in newspaper editorials and columns, and by individual speakers and groups that insist on spectacularly visible expressions of such. We don’t have to wait for fully attested to conspiracies among highly placed officials, or cross burnings on the quad or in dorm halls, or assaults attested to by perfectly placed witnesses and evidence in order to undertake change.

Regardless of the “truth” established in whatever period of time about the incident at the house on N. Buchanan Blvd., the engine of outcry in this moment has been fueled by the difficult and mundane reality that pre-existed this incident and that continues to occur in everday and non-spectacular life in this place. Whatever happens with the court case, what people are asking is that something changes.

***

Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African and African American Studies(Ph.D., Stanford, 1987). Before coming to Duke she taught at Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin, and Williams College. Her essays and articles have been published in Social Text, Cultural Critique, boundary 2, American Literary History, Callaloo, New Engladn Quarterly, among other publications. She is author of the forthcoming books Messing With the Machine: Politics, Form and African-American Fiction and Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: "Deep Cover" and Other "Black" Fictions, and editor of The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (1996). Her current research interests include African-American literature, African-American popular culture and film, womens' studies, black intellectual history, and nationalism.

A Social Disaster : Voices from Durham--Mark Anthony Neal

(White) Male Privilege, Black Respectability, and Black Women’s Bodies
by Mark Anthony Neal


“As a black female, you go to a party, you're expected to dance, you're expected to be sexually provocative. You [are expected to] want to be touched, to be grabbed, to be fondled…As if they're re-enacting a rap video or something. As if we're there to be their video ho, basically. We can't just be regular students here. We can't just go to a party and enjoy ourselves.”—Audrey Christopher and Danielle Terrazas Williams (The Independent Weekly, 3.29.06)

“Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”
—Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”


When a young black women was allegedly raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten by members of the Duke University Lacrosse team of March 13th of this year, it was initially treated as little more than another case of “(privileged) boys gone wild”. As word began to spread about the specifics of the case, various communities mobilized to lay claim to its significance. These groups include Durham residents with long-standing grievances against the University, activists rightfully protesting yet another incident of alleged sexual violence related to a college campus, members of various black communities who wanted to highlight the racist implications of the alleged assault and of course those who felt that too many people were rushing to judgment about the alleged rapists, well before the true facts of the case were established. At the center of all of these claims and allegiances is the body of a young black woman, who in many ways has been continually assaulted, by the inability of the various narratives surrounding the case to take serious the realities of racialized sexual violence against women of color.

To date no charges have been filed in the so called “Duke lacrosse rape case”. The results of a DNA analysis taken after the alleged attack suggest that the members of the Duke lacrosse team were not involved in the attack, though the local district attorney will continue to pursue the case. As such I am less interested in trafficking through declarations of guilt and innocence in the case, but rather interested in illuminating the various perceptions that have been and will continue to be projected onto the body of the black woman who is the focal point of this case. As has been reported so far, the accuser is a full-time student at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and a single mother of two. The young woman and a friend were purportedly hired to dance at a bachelor party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in Durham—a residence shared by several of the lacrosse team players.

Though some have downplayed the significance of race in this case—violence against women is violence against women—the intersections and race and gender are palpable. As Greg Garber notes in his fine coverage of the case for ESPN.com, the default request for exotic dancers at mainstream escort agencies is often white women (preferably blonde and big-breasted). Thus in all likelihood, regardless of what happened inside of 610 N. Buchanan Blvd, the young men were hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed. If these young men did in fact rape, sodomize, rob, and beat this young women, it wasn’t simply because she was a women, but because she was a black woman.

UCLA and Columbia University Law professor and critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw explains the uniqueness of discrimination against black women in her seminal essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”. According to Crenshaw: “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction , and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling in any number of directions, and sometimes, from all of them.” Using the traffic intersection as a metaphor, Crenshaw argues that black women often “experience double discrimination—the combined efforts of practices which discriminate on the basis of race and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as black women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as black women.”

Of course there are historic discourses that have constructed black women as hypersexual insatiable, and exotic—such discourses have often been employed as the rationale for racialized sexual and rhetorical violence against black women. Contemporary examples of such discourses can be found in the flippant and hateful on-air comments by national radio personalities Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boortz, who described the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse case and U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, respectively, as a “ho” and a “ghetto slut”. Though it is often the music videos of hip-hop artists that are targeted for the degradation of black women’s bodies, these videos—like the syndicated shows of Boortz and Limbaugh, television networks like BET and MTV, and recording labels—are simply the vehicles for the corporately controlled circulation of black women’s bodies as such . The message is clear: black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them. Thus it should not be surprising that a generation of young white men, for whom the consumption of hip-hop has been second nature, would find a black exotic dancer desirable or in the worse case scenario, sexually available to them, even if she resist their advances. But the Duke lacrosse rape case is not simply about centuries old dramas across the color line—It also about the tensions within black communities about which black bodies deserve protection and defense

As the “identity” of the young black woman in the case began to be constructed in the media, it was revealed that she was an “exotic dancer” and un-wed mother of two. These facts should be irrelevant in a sexual assault case, but as is well known, defense attorneys often seek to demonize rape victims—in the courts and in the media—so that the integrity of the victim is called into question. The goal is to have the public and juries to believe that rape victims bear the burden of responsibility in their assaults. As scholar Wahneema Lubiano recently opined, this is part of the tenuous status of being a women in American society; If you are not “at home” under the “supervision” of a father or a husband, it is open season on your body. Already there have been attempts to portray the young woman who was raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten as immoral on the basis that she was a “stripper” and an unfit mother, who left her two children home while she performed.

But such demonization takes on another dynamic within the world of “black respectability.” It was clear from the outset, that for some black communities in Durham, NC, the young women was not a “respectable” victim. The concept of “black respectability” can be traced back to the struggles of African-Americans in the early days following “emancipation”, where so many of the former enslaved sought to find common ground—a shared humanity—with the white citizenry. The strategy behind “black respectability”—exemplified in the late 19th and early 20th century by the Black Women’s Club Movement and the New Negro Movement and much later by the NAACP Image Awards—was to put the “best face” of the race forward. Accordingly, it also meant that less savory black bodies and antics had to be reduced to so-called “dirty laundry”—never to see the light of day. It was a logical strategy, given the pervasiveness of white supremacy in the century after emancipation and the desire of many black leaders to fight racism, disenfranchisement and racist violence on moral grounds. But it also created the context where those black bodies and practices that were not thought to be respectable enough were jettisoned to the margins of black life and culture.

Ultimately the desire was to find the most “respectable” victims to help animate black communities to struggle against racism, segregationist practices and disenfranchisement. The late Rosa Parks embodied such a “victim”. As noted scholar Aldon Morris notes in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Parks galvanized blacks in Montgomery, AL and nationally, in part, because she was a “quiet, dignified woman of high morals”. (52) The same could not be said for fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, who more than 8 months _before_ Rosa Parks’s historic act, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Unlike Ms. Parks, Ms. Colvin loudly protested the request that she move from her seat and was eventually charged with assault and battery on the bus driver who made the request and the police officers who were called in to intervene. When it was eventually revealed that Ms. Colvin was an un-wed, pregnant teen, black activists in Montgomery backed off of her case, waiting for a more respectable candidate—Ms. Parks—to emerge. Though the Duke Lacrosse case occurs in a different historical context than the Montgomery bus boycott, the silence and ambiguity emitting from some in black communities in Durham and elsewhere resembles the efforts of Montgomery’s black leaders to distance themselves from Colvin.

Even more profound are those who would distance themselves from the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse case, because she was involved in “immoral” behavior. Such a point was made by Herald-Sun columnist John McCann—in many ways the “voice” of Black Durham—who suggested that the case was about the “consequences of violating moral laws.” (3.29.06) He later added in a subsequent column that the young woman was at 512 Buchanan Blvd. to “arouse and titillate young men who allegedly stumbled the same way she did—inappropriately using the body and mind.” (4.04.06) In McCann’s world a “thin line separates the criminal”—rape—and the “immoral”—exotic dancing. McCann’s comments are reflective of a deep social conservatism that offers little protection those who are thought to be immoral. Thus had the alleged victim in this case had been a gay black man or a black lesbian—such as the late Sakia Gunn (and far too many like her)—who was randomly assaulted, their assaults would likely be met with the same level of silence and moral scrutiny (as compared to your run-of-the-mill gang-banger, who gets shot by a law enforcement officer).

The real immorality here is the way that “silence” makes so many black folk complicit in sexual attacks against black women and girls. For every media spectacle, which highlights sexual violence across the color line, there are numerous black women who are assaulted in their own communities and even homes by black men. This is the point that Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s poignant documentary NO! makes throughout. Black male sexual violence against black women and girls is more often than not, met with blatant silence and denial or in the case of black celebrities, what University of Florida law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown calls “black protectionism”. In her book Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African-Americans (Rowman & Littlefield) defines black protectionism as “what happens when the African-American community rallies around its fallen heroes—those prominent blacks who have been accused of wrongdoing.” Black protectionism figures prominently in issues of rape and sexual abuse in the black community given the number of highly visible black men, to name a few, who have been accused (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), convicted (heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson and former congressman Mel Reynolds) and recorded (R. Kelly) of/in acts of sexual abuse and harassment against black women and girls. In each case, to varying degrees, these men benefited from black protectionism. As Russell-Brown notes, “black protectionism splits the Black community by gender. It treats prominent black men as a unique class.”

The Duke lacrosse rape case has generated so much attention and media coverage because it traffics in the time tested spectacles of race relations and white privilege gone awry. Regardless of whether or not anyone is indicted and convicted in the case, the reality is that women will continue to be raped and those sexual assaults will continue to be met with silence and a degree of dismissiveness that holds the victims accountable for attacks on their bodies. If anything should come of the human tragedy that is unfolding in Durham, NC, it should be to challenge us as a nation to take very seriously the incidences of sexual assault—in all of its forms—and to construct responses to those crimes that are reflective of a society concerned with all assaults on our humanity.

***

Mark Anthony Neal is Associate Professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and the author of four books, including the recent New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity.

1231 Fulton Avenue

So here’s the backstory: Joan Morgan and I have known each other for about 35 years. We grew up together in the same South Bronx tenement—1231 Fulton Avenue—and went to “Head Start” and Kindergarten together. Our parents, especially our not-so-feminist-feminist mommies, always knew we’d be South Bronx success stories, but neither Joan nor I thought we’d ever become part of the chorus of “voices” that would help define a generation. In many ways New Black Man is a response to When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost—the kind of cross-gender conversation that hip-hop needs to be about now. Recently Joan and I have been fortunate to take our show on the road. We were both in the room when KRS-One imploded at Stanford a few weeks ago, but we won’t be discussing that here. More recently Joan and I spent a few days at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where we were hosted by professors David Ikard (a fellow black male feminist) and George White. The video links to our conversations are below:

Understanding Chickheads, Pimps, Golddiggas, and Gangsta Rappers: A conversation with Hip Hop Feminist Joan Morgan and Mark Anthony Neal

Hip Hop Culture in the Academy: A panel discussion
Panelists: David Ikard (Moderator), Joan Morgan, Mark Anthony Neal, George White, and RaMonda Horton Ikard

Book Review--Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity

Phonographies : Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity
By Alexander G. Weheliye
Duke University Press (2005), 304 pages

Reviewed by Matthew Somoroff

“No Western modernity without (sonic) blackness and no blackness in the absence of modernity” (45)—in a nutshell, this is the big idea in Alexander Weheliye’s new book, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Crucial to his project are a wide definition of “the sonic” within black cultural production and a belief in the centrality of aurality (and/or orality) to twentieth-century black culture. Weheliye’s engagement with the sounds of black cultural production (sonic Afro-modernity) owes a significant debt to Fred Moten’s In the Break (2003), in which Moten privileges the sonic and aural within black performance and propounds a theory of black culture as inherently performative and black performance as inherently radical.

Weheliye departs from Moten in his meditation on the intrinsically technological nature of sonic Afro-Modernity. In the exciting introduction to this volume, Weheliye notes how the sound technologies and listening practices associated with black music have not received enough critical attention. My interest was piqued when I read that Weheliye proposes to “establish a dialogue between literary texts and current popular culture to conjecture how sonic technologies and black cultural production have fruitfully contaminated each other” (8). This is a book about the agency of black cultural producers as practitioners and innovators of Western modernity.

This is also a book about the nonlinguistic power of sound, about the ability of sound to act as both “writing” (in the sense that it signifies in an abstract and systematic way) and something beyond “writing”—something more embodied and sensual. In his first chapter, Weheliye posits the phonograph as a site where the ostensibly separate categories and writing and sounding were collapsed, thus challenging the prevailing Western discursive bias towards the visual and the written.

Weheliye approaches his subject matter from the perspective of a literary or cultural critic; that is, his ideas and theoretical stances mostly build off of his close readings of cultural texts. A benefit of this volume is Weheliye’s refreshingly eclectic choice of texts and their juxtapositions. Weheliye not only positions readings of texts by canonical authors such as Du Bois and Ralph Ellison beside the practices of DJs and a recent Hollywood film, respectively, but he also structures his arguments to highlight the merits of reading these pieces of black cultural production in tandem.

Weheliye juxtaposes Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk with the artistic practices of DJs in Chapter Three. Just as DJs create rupture by fragmenting musical materials while forming new musical wholes through the juxtaposition and/or combination of erstwhile separate recordings, Du Bois’ text can be seen as one of the first “mixes” in twentieth-century black culture in its use of contrasting literary forms and modes, and its inclusion of fragments of spirituals in musical notation. Reading this chapter, I detected Weheliye’s satisfaction with his own feat of DJing in his “mixing” of Du Bois with contemporary DJing practices. The conception of Du Bois as proto-DJ and of contemporary DJs as Du Boisian sound-smiths struck me as one of Weheliye’s more successful expositions of how sonic Afro-modernity is “a series of compounded materiodiscursive echoes in and around black sounds in the West” (8), or put differently, an aurally centered cultural mode traversing the boundaries of supposedly discrete historical periods.

Yet for all Weheliye’s talk about exploring “sonic Afro-Modernity,” I found a strange dearth of sound in the book, or at least a dearth of close engagement with the kind of materiality of sound he seems to celebrate. Weheliye analyzes the recordings of the Haitian/American rap group the Fugees, the Afro-/Italian-German rap group Advanced Chemistry, and the black UK musician Tricky to show how all three articulate what Weheliye terms “diasporic citizenship” with the aid of sound technologies (see Chapter 5). When he thinks about the Fugees, he thinks more about their lyrics and the visual content of their music videos than the sound of their music (though he observes certain notable musical features: the use of acoustic guitar, the combination of rapped and sung lyrics). When he discusses Ralph Ellison’s essay “Living with Music” (Chapter 3) and Darnell Martin’s film I Like It Like That, Weheliye shows the reader how an important African-American writer and the first African-American woman to direct a Hollywood film both conceive of sound recordings in the construction of urban spaces (Ellison plays his LPs louder to drown out annoying singing from a next-door neighbor; Lisette, the protagonist of I Like It, uses technologies such as the Walkman to create a sonic space of privacy).

These analyses show how sound technologies either facilitate the dissemination of black music (in the case of the Fugees) or appear within the daily lives of musical black people (in the case of Ellison and I Like It). However, they do not really seem to theorize exactly how sound technologies figure in the experiencing of black music (at least not the way the book’s opening rumination on Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “Wake Up Everybody” suggests Weheliye is capable), or explain how “these [sound] technologies have been significantly shaped by black music” (20).

In his chapter on sonically constructed “Afro-modern” spaces, Weheliye mentions the paucity of “studies that analyze how sound articulates space” (108). While he cites the work of Jonathan Sterne (The Audible Past) in his discussion of the early years of the phonograph (Chapter 1), Weheliye’s thoughts on sonically constructed spaces could have been informed by Sterne’s 1997 article “Sounds Like the Mall of America.” This article explores how “Muzak” is used to structure of the spaces of a large US shopping mall; different styles of music delineate boundaries between various stores and hallways, much in the same way Ellison and Lisette create bounded spaces for themselves with music of their choosing.

Weheliye’s vision of “sonic Afro-modernity” is an idea, a frame in which to think about black cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond, that is full of potential because of its recognition of the importance of technology in the aurality of black culture. His call to consider “(sonic) blackness” and modernity in symbiotic proximity deserves our attention. If Phonographies only lays out the groundwork for Weheliye’s ambitious conceptualization of black modernity, it has still served a valuable purpose. Hopefully future work (by Weheliye or others) will extend these theories into new practices for the study of the African diaspora.

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Matthew Somoroff is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Music Department at Duke University

“Truth Chappelle Style” -- Stephane Dunn on Dave Chapelle

“Truth Chappelle Style” by Stephane Dunn

The truth is permanent; everything else’ll fall by the wayside.

Twenty years from now when young black comedians speak of their comedic models and pay tribute to the legends who came before, Dave Chappelle will probably be one of them. Chappelle’s famous walk away from his reported fifty million dollar show on Comedy Central cast him into the glare of superstar celebrity, but it is his public comedic dialogue since his return from finding rest and peace in Africa that may define his place in comedy history.

Chappelle has gone from becoming the latest black comedian to rise to public stardom to stepping into an unlikely role-comedic seer of his generation. From the beginning Chappelle’s show positioned race, class, and the social conventions that they defined at the center of his satirically sharp sketches. Most assuredly, characters like Chappelle’s Clayton Bigsby, the blind black racist who doesn’t know he’s black, highlight the comedian’s no holds barred approach to comedy. Some viewers and critics believed he went too far and a great many of the mixed audience that made it one of the most successful variety shows ever simply loved it. Yet, at the height of the show’s success, Dave Chappelle began to question the politics of stardom and Hollywood. He also questioned the power and responsibility that went along with his talent for highlighting and making people laugh at the often hidden racial taboos that underline cultural differences.

He “bounced” in his words to Africa where he escaped the machinery that came with newly found American stardom. Since his return, Chappelle’s first public dialogues about why he left with Oprah Winfrey and then on Inside the Actor’s Studio with James Lipton, showcase a man whose thinking seriously about the art of his comedy and how to negotiate being true to himself while avoiding becoming another tragic star who falls just as he’s risen to the top. The radical aspect of these dialogues is the way that Chappelle’s appearances on the shows transformed those platforms into spaces where we get to witness perhaps the most revealing and certainly funniest discussion about race than we’ve seen in a long time. Chappelle emphasized that despite media stories to the contrary he was never crazy and fame wasn’t too much for him to handle. It was all the superficial stuff that accompanies mega success. As he told his student listeners and Lipton, “You can become famous but you can’t become unfamous. You can become infamous but not unfamous.”

On the Oprah Show, Chappelle’s profound simplicity and vulnerability brought out the protective big sister who knows the challenges of fame in Winfrey. He struggled to articulate his experience trying to navigate Hollywood celebrityhood. With all of its many intensive dialogues with actors, Chappelle’s gritty conversation on Inside the Actor’s Studio was historical in of itself. The always formal and distinguished Lipton actually got up and danced a little ballet to Chappelle and the audience’s delight. Several times Lipton attempted to speak in the vernacular, his enunciation of words like “honky” adding to the most intense yet hilarious Inside the Actor’s Studio discussion thus far. Chappelle sat chain smoking and working hard at remaining himself and honest at all times. He volleyed back and forth playfully with Lipton, who carefully described Chappelle’s comedy as a medium that revealed black people to whites in ways they missed. Every black American is bilingual Chappelle informed him.

Chappelle says he’s waiting to see how Dave Chappelle is going to turn out. So are a lot of us given the public way his professional and personal life has played out so far. It may be that the torch has been passed to him as his model the legendary Richard Pryor said. In the meantime, Chappelle is interjecting a significant critical dialogue into the public sphere. He admits that he doesn’t know if he’s right or wrong or when his comedic wit goes too far. Yet, he’s making us laugh and think while daring to make mistakes and care about being on the right side of history. The comedian with the very educated parents who didn’t like school says that he might’ve liked to be a teacher. Ironically, he gave the listening students a lesson or two Chappelle style: It’s important to cross the lines. You don’t know if you’ve gone too far until you cross the line.

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Stephane Dunn is the author of the forthcoming Baad ‘Bitches’ and Sassy Supermamas: Race, Gender & Sexuality in Black Power Action Fantasies (University of Illinois Press)

Homophobia and The Civil Rights Movement? MLK Jr's Legacy is Up for Grabs

In the backdrop of Coretta Scott King's funeralization is a battle for Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy as a humanitarian. Though Mrs. King vociferously denounced homophobia in her latter years, her daughter Bernice and Bishop Eddie Long (whose church served as the literal site of Mrs. King's funeral) have been equally vocal their concerns that same-sex relations are damaging to the black family. What would Martin Luther King Jr.'s position have been on the subject of same-sex relations in the black community? Guest essayist Erica Edwards offers some insight.

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The Aesthetics of Charisma in the New ‘King’dom;
Or, Tomb-Raiding and the Legacy of Civil Rights
by Erica Edwards

On December 11, 2004, an estimated 25,000 people participated in a march called “Reigniting the Legacy,” a procession from Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change to the city’s Turner Field in support of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The story of this march, led by Bishop Eddie Long, the pastor of a mega-church outside of Atlanta, and Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr. and an elder in the church, illustrates how the charismatic political aesthetic is put to use to police African American sexuality, to align black religious groups with the ‘family’ or ‘moral values’ agenda of the right, and to keep ideas of manhood tied to or tangled up with a model of religious and political leadership that relies on unyielding categories of sexuality and gender.

Charisma, most clearly defined by the sociologist Max Weber, refers to “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which [a leader] is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” In the political context, it is a mixture of sacred and secular impulses—it is a structure of group relationship centering around one exceptional man (usually) perceived to be gifted with a privileged connection to God. This individual’s right to rule is always held to be the function of divine ordination. For Weber, charisma represents a revolutionary force that opposes old, sedimented forms of rule. Notwithstanding the potential of charisma to ‘do a new thing,’ I want to question this identification of charisma with the new and examine its implementation of a revolutionary conservatism, a radical return to an older, putatively stable order. What I’m calling the charismatic aesthetic here is the assemblage of performative and symbolic elements that produce the charismatic scene, things like spectacular oratory, the masculine (or masculinized) body, and the positioning of the leader in front of or above his followers.

For black Americans, charisma as a form of political authority has become an organizing myth for ideas of political mobilization. While social historians have distanced their scholarship from “Great Man” theories of history, the history of black social movements as the byproduct of charismatic leadership continue to circulate widely in popular culture. Clayborne Carson’s essay on Martin Luther King’s charisma suggests that in popular civil rights history, “a Great Man is seen as the decisive factor in the process of social change, and the unique qualities of a leader are used to explain major historical events” (Carson 448). The leader is history’s indispensable protagonist: without him, history (what is believed to have happened) and historical narrative (what is said to have happened) are impossible. Carson goes on to suggest that King has functioned as the necessary protagonist in the public narrative of civil rights and is seen as the exemplary political spokesperson and miraculous history-maker. He embodies, for post-civil rights black culture, the quintessential charismatic leader and Great Man—the king, as it were, of black history and black politics.

King’s role as charismatic exemplar was at the center of the “Reigniting the Legacy” march’s claim to social authority. The use of the King Memorial as the starting place at which the leader lit a torch from the memorial’s eternal flame, the circulation of King’s rhetoric in quotes included in publicity and speeches, and the location of the march in King’s childhood home, Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, all exemplify the organizers’ deliberate alignment with the cultural memory of King. The march made a bold investment in the political capital associated with King’s idealized status in the nation’s imagination.

The march’s goal was reportedly to “get back into the conversation of the nation,” to introduce black Christians as vocal participants in the national discourse on marriage and sexuality. Quoting King’s warning against the “appalling silence of good people,” the march’s publicity describes its goal as the “protection of marriage,” including “strategic policy direction for a constitutional amendment to fully protect marriage between one man and one woman.” The march being framed, ironically enough, as a coming out story, participants in news photographs wear shirts reading “Stop the Silence” and the event is touted in news stories as an opportunity to speak in “one voice,” to articulate “a unified vision of righteousness and justice.” In a moment less than a month after voters in 11 U.S. states, including Georgia, approved of state constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and in a state that had passed a Defense of Marriage Act nine years prior to the march, the march’s leader, ostensibly alarmed by the suppression of anti-homosexual sentiment, told reporters, “This is our coming out day. We are here to stay and will be heard.” Passing a counter-demonstration of 50 gay rights activists, the march proceeded from the King Center to Turner field, where a recorded speech by Bishop Long played over the loudspeakers to greet the marchers entering the stadium. In her introduction to Long, Bernice King said, “I believe this day will go down in the history books as the greatest showing of Christ and his kingdom in this century” and designated Long “the prophet appointed by God to speak the mind, heart, and gospel of God.”

The march’s primary message was a call to crystallize rigid categories of sexual and gender identity, to buttress conservative family values in the name of historical ‘legacy’ and civil rights. As a literary critic, I’m as concerned with the form of the march—its architecture—as I am with its content or message. I’d like to draw our attention to the aesthetics of this religious, political event, that is, to the various symbolic ingredients that produce the performance of charismatic authority. To raise the question of the aesthetic is to ask: What makes a thing good, true and beautiful; what makes it appeal to the senses? Charismatic authority is, at its heart, is a question of aesthetic value: Ann Ruth Willner’s extensive research on the subject suggests that “it is not what the leader is but what people see the leader as that counts in generating the charismatic relationship” (Willner 15). Charisma is constituted by a cycle or dynamic of perception and performance, a relay of symbols between leaders, followers, and observers.

As far as I can gauge by journalists’ reports, The “Reigniting the Legacy” march made use of at least four powerful symbols in its production of the charismatic scene. First, the site of departure, King’s burial site, indexed a primal source of mourning for African American leadership. The march tapped into what Willner calls “postmortem charismatic authority,” authorizing its social claims by making the memory of King do necessary political work in the present. Indeed the march can be read as a tomb-raiding mission that dug up the remains of King’s authority for its own use, hence Keith Boykin’s assessment that the march “hijacked” King’s dream. The fact that the march was a raising of the dead dressed up as a ritual of mourning was shored up by the all-black attire of the majority of the marchers.

Next, Bishop Long’s own physical presence added to the symbolic tying of charismatic authority to the male body. The domain of charismatic authority, particularly in the civil rights tradition, is most often a masculinist sphere of influence—Steve Estes suggests as much in his recent book on manhood and civil rights when he argues that the masculinist rhetoric of political speakers “rallies supporters by urging them to be manly or to support traditional ideas of manhood” (Estes 12). In this instance, charismatic performance—the acting out of a privileged connection to the divine—plays out as a bourgeois, heteronormative family romance: Bernice King gestures to Long as her deceased father’s substitute and successor, and in the drama, Bishop Long plays father not only to her but to all. As much at is purported to “reignite” the legacy of civil rights, the march represented an Oedipal performance that demanded the slaying of King’s dream of egalitarian social life and the coronation of Bishop Long as father figure or new king for the race. The public family drama fortified the march’s homophobic appeal to the union between one man and one woman as the prime marker of “righteousness” and “justice.”

Finally, the torch and the march forward, like the tomb and the bishop’s physical positioning, functioned symbolically to attach charismatic leadership to a rigid, masculinist, heterosexist conception of black Christian identity. The torch is a common emblem of enlightenment and tradition that signifies the transferability of power—the Olympic torch, for example, is carried along from one location to the next to signify the passing on of unquestioned eternal values (like unity and tolerance). In this scene, King’s power is kept alive eternally in the memorial flame; Long accesses it in order to possess King’s authority. The march, in the end, ignited the bishop’s own power, his position as new spokesperson for the ‘good people.’ Further, the historical function of the march for blacks in America, Eddie Glaude has suggested, is to perform or “to continuously retell the story of bondage, the march toward liberation, and the discipline necessary to remain free.” The torch confers the power to free and to discipline, to liberate and to police the criteria for living freedom out.

A strange mixture of funeral procession, soldier march, Olympic opening ceremony, worship service and political rally, the “Reigniting the Legacy” march placed charismatic authority on center stage. It showed how charismatic leadership, often masking itself as a ‘natural’ expression of black religiosity and political consciousness, actually produces itself through self-conscious performances of authority that are tied to a narrow, patriarchal and homophobic conception of manhood. The question, perhaps, for those of us interested in engaging the church in a radical critique of heteronormative masculinity is: is charismatic authority an acceptable means or the only basis for the creation of an egalitarian religious body? If Kelly Brown Douglas is correct that “the change in attitude toward sexuality within the Black church and wider community must begin not at the top with Black church leadership…but at the bottom with the people who sit in the pews,” it also seems right to call into question of the church’s social architecture and what appears to be a patriarchal investment in the metaphysical distinction between leaders and followers.

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Professor Edwards specializes in African American literature, gender studies, and black political culture. She is currently at work on a book project under the working title Contesting Charisma: Fictions of Political Leadership in Contemporary African American Culture (forthcoming in 2011 on the University of Minnesota Press). Her work, published in Women & Performance, Callaloo, American Literary History, and Transforming Anthropology, shows how contemporary African American literature challenges us to think in new ways about the relationships between African American narrative, American popular culture, and the contemporary history of black politics and black social movements.