A Luta Continua

In my years of being AfroerotiK, I’ve had to contend quite a bit with those who say, “That’s porn. That’s inappropriate!  That’s dirty!”  Or, the ever-popular, “Well, that’s okay in private but I can’t put that on my Facebook (or any other public acknowledgement of their affinity for my work) because I don’t want people knowing I get down like that.”  It’s always from the repressed and pseudo-conservative middle class Black folk who want to insist that anything sexual is offensive and beneath them.  They are the people who are disconnected from their sexuality so much so that they do things behind closed doors that they condemn and denigrate people for in public.  They watch porn, they have unprotected sex, they engage in dysfunctional sexual and emotional relationships because they are so disconnected from any sense of healthy sexuality that they are in denial but they condemn, denigrate, and demean my work as offensive because they are desperate to hold on to this make-believe façade that they are asexual and sexually conservative. 

Then, there are the freaks.  They don’t want to hear anything about love or monogamy or intimacy or communication or emotional maturity.  Any time they see or hear the words dick, pussy, and fuck they proclaim how horny it has made them.  Any nude picture they see is porn, they have no discernment between porn and erotica, no standards, and they don’t care if an image is taken with a cell phone, out of focus, and only shows a close up shot of a woman’s cervix, they think it’s hot.  They don’t care about objectifying women, they don’t care about degrading women, they don’t care about anything as long as it’s sexual.  Nothing is offensive to them.  Their Facebook pages are filled with images that would get me banned if I had them posted, they belong to every sexual group there is, all with the same pictures of guys with pictures of their dicks next to remote controls and messages from women with their ass bent over saying, “How was your weekend?  Hit me up if you want some of this.”  The men have 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of pictures of women’s body parts on their computers and it doesn’t seem to get old or boring or tired.  The women all want endless compliments on pictures of their body parts, their feet, their asses, their lady bits.  They are really content to be sexually immature and anything other than heterosexual vanilla sex is  . . . ughhhh, God forbid . . . that’s nasty. 

And if that’s not enough, now there is this emerging faction that seems to stand in unyielding opposition to AfroerotiK, it seems to be growing quite large in fact, that consists of young, Black, “educated” (and I use the term quite loosely because the educational system has dangerously mis and undereducated our youth for several generations now) “feminists” (again, using the term loosely because feminism has come to mean displaying vulgar sexuality with impunity, not fighting for women’s rights and equality like it meant in the good old days) who feel that anything and everything that Black women do is okay.  Degrading yourself?  Yeah, that’s great!  Objectifying yourself?  Yup, that’s not just fine, it’s great.  Conforming to patriarchal, misogynist, sexist, oppressive standards of what is means to be a woman?  You bet’ not say anything bad about the women who do that because they are choosing their own degradation and that’s empowering.  Wallowing in unhealthy, dysfunctional behaviors that are self-sabotaging and unenlightened?  Yeah, that’s their rallying cry, that’s the foundation of their movement. 

I get where it comes from.  Their motivations are pure.  They are tired of men and society in general demeaning and denigrating the Black female form.  They are trying, however misguided they may be, to assert that they are sisters with all women, regardless of their socio-economic status and position in life and they are saying that in solidarity, they want to be seen as equals to men.  Unfortunately, the “men” (using that term in the most generous way possible because Black males have been socialized to be emotionally stunted somewhere around pre-teens for several generations now) that they are trying to be equal to are not the standard by which anything should be measured.  They are genuinely trying to strike out against the status quo that says that men can be vile and repugnant and get a pass while women have to be held to absurd standards of purity and chastity in order to be considered valuable. 

The problem is that they are fighting the wrong fight.  They should not be fighting for women to be able to be as vulgar and sexually indiscriminate as men without repercussions.  What they should be fighting for is a system where men are held accountable, where they evolve, mature and grow, where women are not relegated to positions of sex worker, stripper, and ghetto diva.  They find the concept of women carrying themselves with dignity offensive, they fight against it saying that it’s “respectability politics” or the policing of women’s bodies to keep them oppressed.  They have no concept that there is something in between the standards of Victorian clothing and saving yourself for marriage and only having sex on Friday nights and having men pay to degrade and use you.  They can’t even comprehend of anything in between where women carry themselves with respect and own their sexuality without shame.  They are unilaterally outraged by the concept of me saying that you can own your sexuality, not be in denial of it, but it’s not okay to display it for all the world to see either or that it’s unhealthy to spend hours of your time making your ass clap so you can show it off on Vine.   They hear any critique of women’s sexuality as, “You are saying that women are bad for being sexual.” 

I can’t tell you how many Black folk fall into one of these three categories?  I obviously can’t give you an exact percentage but it’s the vast and overwhelming majority.  The people in the, “That’s nasty,” category aren’t reading this because I’m too offensive for them to follow.  The people in the second category aren’t reading this because it has too many words and all they want to see is porn.  The people in the third category read it all the way up to the part where I identified them and are right now preparing their counter arguments about how I’m slut shaming and about how they can twerk, make a few bucks on the stripper pole, use men for money while wearing seven inch platform heels to be sexy, and study for their exams and there’s nothing wrong with that. 

Then, there are the few, the proud, the AfroerotiKs.  There aren’t many of us, but there are a few who Black folk who don’t want to be ashamed of our sexuality anymore, who understand that we are entitled to pleasure and it shouldn’t be something we have to hide and pretend we don’t like in order to feel superior to anyone else.  We aren’t aroused by the sexually immature who are addicted to vulgar porn and who have no standards for what they find arousing.  And there are a few, hopefully growing in number, who understand that a great deal of the sexuality displayed in our society by the oppressed is unhealthy and detrimental and that there is a happy medium between purity and denial and “It’s all good.” 

So, I will continue to make erotica that shows people of African descent in loving, holistic, erotic, sensual depictions. 

I will continue to create art that doesn’t dismiss unhealthy behaviors as benign. 

I will continue to fight for ALL people of African descent to see themselves as sensual and erotic. 

And I will strive to create a new paradigm where there is balance, symmetry, and equality.  I will fight against oppressive standards that tell Black women that they must be virgins or they are whores and the diseased mindsets it creates in the men and women who believe on some level that sex is bad and dirty.  I will fight against the adult industry that dehumanizes, degrades, and objectifies women for the amusement of misogynists for a profit.  And I will not take up arms against those who staunchly defend unhealthy behaviors because they have never been shown a model of what healthy sexuality could be and they know nothing else. 

Abuse

Hear  me clearly when I say that I do not condone, endorse, defend, nor can I justify the actions of Ray Rice or the dude who beat his child with the switch.  I CAN and do understand why they behaved the way they did; I understand how Black men across the country are filled with rage, unable to process their emotions, and developmentally stunted so much so that the only thing they know is to perpetuate the violence that was inflicted upon them.  If there had ever been any significant study done on the effects of slavery in this nation, a slavery that is different than any other crime against humanity in the history of the world, there would have been investigation into the repeated and persistent torture and abuse that slaves suffered and how it affected them.  Because white people, and let’s put the blame squarely where it belongs here, again, because white people are intent on denying, ignoring, and negating the impact of slavery on the mentality and psychology of contemporary African Americans, the practices learned and handed down from generation to generation, the practices we learned at the end of the white man’s whip, those practices include beating, whipping, spanking, and punching to control people.  Black men are particularly affected because they are socialized and raised to be emotionally immature.  They are not given an outlet to express their emotions.  They are raised and socialized to be super macho, super manly, super emotionally retarded.  They don’t know how to even identify their emotions, let alone express them in a healthy way.  There are millions of Ray Rice’s and millions upon millions of men exactly like the other dude. 

Human beings, more specifically the human brain, has a need to justify and rationalize that its experiences, the factors that contributed to the influences that shaped them and BELIEIVE that were right.  It’s the mind’s defense mechanism.  It works to make people feel safe, to rationalize and soothe their feelings of insecurity and fear of judgment.  Slaves were beaten, BRUTALLY beaten, abused, and tortured for white people’s perverse pleasure, entertainment, and ego.  Slaves learned that abuse is the way to control people.  They passed those messages down generation from generation.  They beat their children because that’s all they had to control.  They beat their children because that’s all they knew how to do. 

My grandfather beat my mother and my uncle the way white slave masters beat slaves, with the same force and brutality.  He didn’t do it because he was a mean person, he was a very gentle soul.  He beat them brutally, BRUTALLY because he believed that was the way to make his children behave, conform, and stay in line like mindless slaves.  He was brutally beaten as a child.  He never thought that it was wrong or bad because his father was brutally beaten by his father, who was born a slave.  My mother beat me.  Daily.  She beat me when things went wrong at work.  She beat me when she was frustrated with the married men in her life.  She beat me to beat my individuality and uniqueness out of me, to make me be just like me.  She denies it now.  She claims she never even spanked me.  She swears she was a perfect mother.  Her mind is in conflict because some part of her understands that it’s wrong to beat your child that severely but there is also a part of her that tells her that what she did was right because it was done to her. 

My uncle probably got the most severe beatings from my grandfather.  He is an alcoholic now with EXTREME rage and anger boiled up in him.  He has severely beaten and abused all the women in his life.  He beat and abused his sons repeatedly.  His sons have perpetuated the same violence in their lives.  My uncle has been dangerously quiet about Ray Rice and the other dude because he is guilty of the things they did and worse.  It has to be causing emotional conflict.  He knows that he should say that what they did was terrible and wrong but he knows in his heart that he has done far worse than what they did.  What we do to Black boys by telling them not to cry, by telling them to be a man, by telling them that they can’t show emotion or they will be sissies is we create the inner rage and frustration that makes Black men rationalize and justify that punching a woman is okay because they desperately want to control something in their lives.  They want to be this one-dimensional and stereotypical “head of the household” and king of the castle that society tells them that they should be by virtue of their penis but they feel frustration and they lash out at the things that they are told that they should be able to control, the women and children in their lives.  It’s a pathology born in slavery. 

I cannot, will not, and do not condone what these men have done but I understand how their behaviors have evolved.  I get how Black men who are abusers are among their friends saying, “Yeah, I would never hit a woman, I would never hit my child like that,” when in fact they’ve done that and worse.  I understand how Black men feel that punching, beating, and whipping is all they have in their arsenal to control the rage that they feel.  I totally understand how Black mothers who feel angry, alone, frustrated, and who need to justify the abuse inflicted upon them repeat the patterns. 

Let us pray that the cycle can be broken.  Let us pray that there is within each and every descendant of slaves a tiny spirit of liberation that whispers that abuse and violence is wrong and it must end.  Beating your children doesn’t keep them out of jail, LOVE does that.  Nurturing does that.  Discipline does that but discipline doesn’t have to mean abuse.  What we suffered, we being you, me, and the collective Black race, was abuse.  Rather than saying, “Well, I was raised that way and I turned out fine,” let us now say, “What happened to me was wrong and I will not perpetuate the same thing on my children.  I will break the cycle of abuse.” 

Nigga What?

We embrace calling ourselves niggers, like that’s empowering, when in actuality, it’s disrespectful to our ancestors and just plain ignorant.  To believe yourself to be a nigger, to behave like you are an ignorant sub human (the true implied meaning of the word) has no benefit or value.  Defending the use of the word, trying to rationalize that it has been changed into something positive is insanity.  Nine times out of ten, the usage of the word is meant to be disparaging and degrading, EXACTLY the way white people intended it to be used, and on the tenth time, it’s an empty a sign of self-hatred masquerading itself as a term of endearment. 

White people expect us to behave like niggers, so calling ourselves that, ESPECIALLY in front of them, does nothing but reinforce to them that we are inferior.  To carry yourself like royalty, to walk with dignity, to boldly declare that you are not only equal to but better than white people with your speech, your actions, and your intellect is FAR more threatening to white people than calling yourself a nigga.  Want proof?  Write a blog calling yourself a nigga and talking about cars, drugs, guns, rap, sex, sports, and how much you love living in the ghetto.  You won’t get a response from white people.  Well that’s not entirely true.  You might get a response or two asking you to fulfill their sexual fantasies.  Then, write a blog, grammatically correct and spell checked, that talks about the greatness of black people, our strength, and our ability to excel despite racism, oppression, and bigotry.  Write about how our true history of greatness has been distorted with white lies and deception.  Discuss, academically articulated with footnoted and documented proof, advanced African civilizations and how white people re-wrote history to make themselves appear superior.  White people will crawl out of the woodworks to tell you that Black people are ignorant and that you are nothing but a dumb nigger. 

You have to ask yourself, what benefit do you get from calling yourself a nigga?  If calling yourself that makes you feel connected to other black people, consider yourself a slave on the plantation.  If you do nothing else this year, decide to stop using the N word to describe yourself, to describe other black people you want to look down on, or as some sort of synonym supposedly meaning Black person.  It’s negative, unenlightened, and stupid.