Detroit Free Press opinion article- https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/contributors/2019/01/12/r-kelly-surving-r-kelly/2547679002/To my horror, I discovered that quite a few of my social media acquaintances are rape apologists, offering remarkably flimsy arguments in defense of Kelly’s abhorrent treatment of women. One of my now-former Facebook friends even suggested that as a black woman, my call for a boycott of Kelly’s music is rooted in racially-based self-hatred. One disturbingly common and totally ridiculous argument from black Kelly defenders (both male and female) is that Kelly is some kind of modern-day Emmett Till who is being unjustly targeted because of white America’s curious and deadly fascination with the sex lives of black men. Let's explore what's wrong with this argument.
It is sadly ironic that Chicago produced both Till and Kelly — one, a martyr, the other, a predator — whose tragic and horrifying stories expose the curious intersection of race, violence and black male sexuality in America.
Till’s murder was a defining moment in African American history. When Chicagoan Mamie Till Mobley sent her only child to Mississippi to spend the summer of 1955 with relatives, she underestimated the inherent danger for black men and boys in the Jim Crow south. While 14-year-old Emmett Till was in Mississippi, a white woman named Carolyn Bryant falsely accused him of lewdly flirting with her. He paid for her lie with his life. Till's mother, rocked by the grisly condition of her child’s battered corpse, held an open-casket funeral for him that shocked the conscience of the nation. It was a moment that some historians have called the unofficial launch of the modern civil rights movement.
It was also a moment that, for many, crystallized southern whites’ strange obsession with black men as sexual beings. Emmett Till may be the most famous black male who lost his life because of white fear of black sexuality, but he was far from the only one. Grim tales of black boys and men turned strange fruit on the limbs of southern trees fill collective black memory.
In her groundbreaking 2010 book “On the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power,” metro Detroit-based historian Danielle McGuire outlines how southern politicians and social leaders meticulously constructed the bogeyman of the “black beast rapist,” black men whose unchecked sexual urges were a threat to the sexual purity of white women.
Many of Jim Crow’s legal constructs were built on the foundation of protecting white women from these so-called black beasts, and when the law wasn’t enough to satisfy the blood lust of white mobs, they carried out horrifying lynching campaigns that often involved the excision of black male genitalia.
America’s enduring criminalization of the black male body — fueled by twisted and slanderous fantasies about the inherent danger of black male sexuality — has made some black people highly skeptical of any accusation of sexual misconduct lodged against a high-profile black man. The ghost of Emmett Till lingers over every charge.
Which brings us to Robert Kelly, the immensely talented and successful musician and producer who goes by the stage name R. Kelly, and chose for himself the nickname “the pied piper of R & B.” Since the 1990s, Kelly has repeatedly been accused of sexual misconduct ranging from charges that he engaged in illicit sex with underage black girls to allegations that he has brainwashed and is currently holding black women in an abusive sex cult.
Kelly faced multiple felony child pornography charges after widely-disseminated video of a person who looks remarkably like Kelly having sex with a pubescent girl surfaced, but a jury found him not guilty. Kelly has suffered no consequences for his alleged behavior in the court of law, and remarkably few consequences in the court of public opinion.
The docu-series offered bone-chilling testimony from Kelly’s former lovers, employees and other insiders who describe a man whose compulsion to physically, mentally and sexually abuse black and brown girls and women has gone completely unchecked. Kelly has leveraged his money and popularity to mute his alleged victims’ voices, and he continues to sell concert tickets and get radio spins.
Sadly, in their defense of famous black men who sexually abuse, some African Americans have overcorrected for the sins of Jim Crow, absolving predators like Kelly as some kind of karmic revenge for the black men who fell victim to Jim Crow “justice.”
But what do we tell the black women and girls who have been harmed by the blind eye we turn to Kelly’s misdeeds? Often, the very same Jim Crow era white men who strung black men up for imagined sexual misdeeds against white women refused to hold their white peers accountable for their very real sexual assaults of black women, who they called lying jezebels.
Fast forward to 2019, when several black girls and women have come forward to tell of the abuses they suffered from R. Kelly and like their ancestors before them have been disbelieved, disrespected and dismissed. In the documentary, hip hop artist Chance the Rapper apologizes for continuing his professional relationship with Kelly long after girls and women came forward to expose him. Chance pointedly admits that he “didn’t value the accusers’ stories because they were black women.” Because.
America must deconstruct its troubled history with black male sexuality and accept a simple truth: The real story of the sex lives of black men lies in its ordinariness, defined not by predators like Robert Kelly nor martyrs like Emmett Till. The overwhelming majority of black men have sex in perfectly normal, consensual encounters — just like the rest of humanity. But when black men make the decision to violate the bodily integrity of black women, we cannot be afraid to call them out.
