| The American Empire has a secret it reveals every now and then. Like many Black Americans, I learned from grandparents to listen for the description of the man who committed some local crime. If the announcer said a man robbed this or that bank or a man killed another man, we understood that the first man was White and, in the second case, a White man killed another White man. For the Black man, the crime was a robbery of a local store. Maybe the Black man was bold enough to rob two ma and pop stores. Attacking White property was the key to seeing a Black person's name in print. In the '50s and '60s, it was not often the announcer in a northern city like Chicago would describe a rapist as a Black man. Yet, in "Assault of Girl Exposed a Shameful Secret," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Eugene Kane writes, the assault of an 11-year old Black Milwaukee girl by a group of Black men and boys "exposed a shameful secret." "It was the shame of seeing the incontrovertible proof about levels of societal dysfunction in some areas of the Black community that can't be explained in conventional terms." It is not that Black men raping Black girls and women has not happen before or that Black men like fathers and uncles were not sexually abusing daughters and nieces. But the rape of girls and women in the Black community has increased, and it has become almost a ritual for establishing manhood among Black boys and men. I don't know why, but when I read Kane's article, I felt the shame of Black women as both victims of and spectators to rape. "Some family members of some suspects," Kane writes, even "provided dubious alibis later disapproved by police." Who are these family members who would shamefully defend and validate the necessity for women to fear our fathers, brothers, uncles who seek to control our bodies? Where is the collective outrage of this nation? It is engaged in revealing secrets. The "stealing" of Black boys by manipulating their minds so that they see in their own mothers, sisters, daughters, and nieces the "enemy" is a crime for which we are complicit as long as we do not challenge and engage educational institutions with the responsibility of empowering our children with knowledge of their cultural heritage. Behind the masculine symbol of flag and cross, Black girls and women's bodies are the sites for the historical conquest and persistent control of the Black community in the U.S. But now -- what land, what community is captured in the conquest of Black women and girls' bodies? By way of rape, we have the relatively powerless conquering women and girls, instilling fear in the potential victims, and proclaiming control of a community that itself is dominated by low wages, high unemployment rates, unequal educational opportunities, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, drugs, and a host of other problems. Our "enemy" is our complicity with injustice heaped against our community. "Every day out in the street now, I remind myself that Black people in Amerika are oppressed. It's necessary that I do that. People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more you tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave," Assata Shakur observed. The Black men and boys in Kane's article, and the many like them, have learned from our "masters" to achieve power by mutilating, ravaging, and killing the bodies of others, who are human, like them, but for whom control becomes an obsession. Where is the shame in this adoption of "oppression" as the "normal state of things"? Becoming proactive citizens on behalf of all of us -- starting with our little girls and little boys -- is not an option. The American Empire that it is increasing becoming dysfunctional at its core, and its core has always stood for freedom and the idea of democracy. The empire is exposing its insides, for its core, the most historically progressive in this country, according to a blackcommentator report, are Black Americans. We are between the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex, between low wages and unemployment, between forgetting our values of compassion and fighting injustice. We have settled for the normalcy of conquest. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, Halle, the father of Sethe's children and her "husband," could only watch as Sethe's body was assaulted by her White owner and his nephews. After watching in shame, Halle sat forever and ever rubbing butter on his face. Here is shame. We remembered and did something about it. But what do our children know of this memory? |
| Voices/Dr. Jean Daniels Dichotomy of powerlessness |
 |
 |