The Street Harasser's Heaven Is Black America's Hell by Robert Lashley
“black men have unloaded a torrent of abuse towards women of color”
This essay was prompted by the overwhelming number of women protestors at the front line of rallies this autumn, marching against the shooting of Mike Brown. (More here.) The author would like to note that the piece was written before the Ferguson grand jury decided not to press charges, and while it has no bearing on his belief in the piece, it is not his very first response to the grand jury.
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The activist frat boys cat-calling the women on the Ferguson front lines flip Marx's quote like a hotcake; proving that—in African American History—tragedy is repeated as heckle. For the sexist bros harassing the sisters protesting Michael Brown's death sound just like the sexist civil rights leaders who discounted every woman who ever helped them.
And just like the black print media's “boys will be boys/it's just a comment” attitude glossed over the structural damage that sexism did to the movement back then, the “why can't you just smile and say hi” ethos that reeks from black male social networks will destroy the new freedom struggle before it starts.
What the harassers behind the Ferguson front lines have also done—along with activists, pundits, and thousands upon thousands of black men on Facebook—is give birth to a terrible irony.
In their rage to defend black male honor—and one has to sift through a lot of cognitive dissonance in regards to their opinions on that subject—they have become worse than the monsters they accuse every black woman who criticizes a black man (no matter the subtext) of portraying black men to be.
Thousands upon thousands of black men have unloaded a torrent of abuse towards women of color; attacking them for talking about what they have to go through on a daily basis, attacking a girl who had her rape made viral and even being apathetic to them when black women are being killed for speaking out against it.
Particularly agonizing in regards to this subject is the silence of a different class of black gender warriors. Black men like Steve Harvey, Jimi Izrael, Hill Harper, Ishmael Reed, and Tyler Perry won’t resort to the same rhetorical abuse of Tariq Nasheed, the despotic dean of Black Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) nation wide. More than that, they frame their arguments as if they are performing a service for the race. They “care about black women, not feminists.” They see a “feminist conspiracy to destroy the happiness of the black family.”
It doesn’t matter that they expect black women to be twice as good and twice as human, to “act like a lady and think like a man.” Whatever that breathtakingly problematic and gender restrictive sentence means. They are policing black women “out of love and the betterment of the community,” and if black women just sacrificed more and kept their ambitions and backtalk to themselves, the black community would be improved.
Which leads to this question: If the soft-core wing of the black male gender police squad was so concerned about the betterment of the entire black community, then shouldn’t street harassment be the perfect time for them to speak up?
If they cared about the community as a whole, shouldn’t doing what one can to stop street harassment, and speaking out against a rape made viral (or a rape, period), be an urgent subject?
If they wanted all of us to sacrifice for the greater good, then shouldn’t at least one of them say that hundreds upon hundreds of black men hurling abuse on black women and defending an online rape is a terrible thing?
And by god, shouldn't they speak up for the black women who are fighting for their rights at this very moment?
The answers to what they should do, have done, and will do have depressed me more than almost anything I have seen as a cultural critic. If the Black MRAs who terrorize women of color online need to be shamed, it also needs to be said that they are doing the broader black media’s dirty work, too.
These are men who have historically glossed over the sexism of civil rights icons, helped R Kelly's statutory rape trials to heighten his crossover profile, ignored 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg's black women slave chain chic, supported the violent hipster rages of Odd Future and Chief Keef, and gave a base for the vile phenomenon that is Chris Brown.
They do not deal in facts but generalities, because these men do not believe in logic and facts. They believe in power, domination, and victory in the eternal battle of the sexes that constitutes so much of Black men's discussion of gender.
And the greatest fear of my life as a black intellectual is that they will win.
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Header image courtesy of photographer Maria Louceiro. To view a gallery of her photos, go here.
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Robert Lashley is the author of The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). A semi finalist for the PEN/Rosenthal fellowship, Lashley has had poems and essays published in such Journals as Feminete, No Regrets, NAILED, and Your Hands, Your Mouth. His work was also featured in Many Trails To The Summit, an anthology of Northwest form and Lyric poetry. To quote James Baldwin, he wants to be an honest man and a good writer.