Stop Raping Me, Stop Killing Me, and Stop With The Gaslighting
The Birthing of a New America
Trigger warning for mentions of rape and sexual assault:
I want to be clear from the outset rather than wait until the last paragraph to say that I am in no way defending the actions of Nate Parker. Dude raped a woman. And when the facts came to light, his initial and secondary responses were horrible. The issue that I have is with the way that it was brought to the attention of the collective consciousness on the Internet. Know that I am speaking as a woman who identifies as the L in the LGBTQIA+ alphabet, know that I am a survivor of both rape and sexual assault, and know that I am on the darker end of the skin tone spectrum in terms of my fellow human beings. I mention these things because they actively inform the way I registered the witch hunt for Nate Parker and I feel like I had to say something because of the way some very smart women chose to address the issue in their respective circles.
The first thing that hit my screen was that there was a segment of Internet that was trying to outrage people by outing Nate Parker, director of a black movie about insurrection, for being married to a white woman. The narrative was, how could a man who is with a white woman tell an authentic story about black people? The response from the majority of the folks who even bothered to give that ish any time was a collective eye roll. And so then it was, well he is with a white woman and he is homophobic. Nate Parker is on record as having said that he will never play a gay character, something else along the lines of not wanting to emasculate the black man and “promoting the race”…whatever that means, ’cause if he was handed twenty million dollars to play James Baldwin he would’ve memorized Giovanni’s Room backwards. And the experience — and the reading — would’ve taught him something about himself he is finding out now the hard way about what it means for all of us to be in this time here together. There was no outrage registered in any blaring fashion from the web about the homophobic remarks. Did you know that the advice Denzel Washington gave to Will Smith when he heard that Smith would be playing the lead character in Six Degrees of Separation was to never, ever let himself be filmed kissing a man? The thinking was that a black man would be stigmatized for the rest of his (life) career. Whatever. And, as one of the smart women in my circle clearly pointed out, people start where they are and can evolve. Often they do. All kinds of knuckleheads go on to be better. When neither story got the desired response from whatever it is that garbage corner of the Interwebs actually is, that is when the news of Nate Parker’s rape case started getting circulated. As a virus. That is the timeline. As the “Nate Parker is a rapist” narrative started picking up traction the “negro got a white wife” part kinda fell off. Ain’t nobody screaming at the top of their lungs about the homophobia. Not really. It is kinda just there, swingin’ in the breeze. The details of the rape were everywhere via the court transcripts…then Variety broke the news that the woman who was raped committed suicide in 2012 after a long battle with PTSD. She left behind a small child in addition to a brother, her parents, and other family. It was weird looking at my screen and seeing all the people on the larger worldwide web who were specifically first outraged about the white wife and who then piled on the other “talking points”, recoil in horror when they realized that the woman who was raped committed suicide. And they all fell silent while a majority of folks who are justifiably upset about the rape case and Nate Parker’s ridiculous statements are having a very important — and painful — discussion.
There is something in law called “fruits of the poisoned tree doctrine” wherein evidence obtained with the assistance of illegally obtained information must be excluded from trial. This whole discussion is not that exactly, but inasmuch as the lede in the discussion was not about a woman being raped but some twisted Hotep shit as its origin, yeah it is. The origin is someone being upset about Nate Parker’s white wife. I call bullshit. And I cannot help but know that if he was married to a woman identifiable in some way as black, there would be no call for protest. No outrage. A black woman got shot a couple weeks ago defending her home and her child, and black men called her crazy if they spoke at all. Milwaukee is being torn apart right now in the name of a dude who pointed a loaded firearm at cops. Nobody shows up for marches about Sandra Bland. These are observations.
I have zero patience for a dude having a life situation where his old rape case might come back to haunt him. But folks actin’ like that is what started this discussion is the lowest kind of duplicity from a part of the web that amounts to little more than a fever swamp, and I kind of wanted to say something to y’all about that. I am also not of the belief that there is any kind of human that is irredeemable. Somehow Nate Parker managed to keep that part of his life still for seventeen whole years though it apparently has been on his Wikipedia page for a very long time. I have never seen a movie with him in it, and Birth of Nation was the first time his name ever came across my screen. I am shocked at his lack of preparation for the inevitability of standing trial for rape coming to the fore. At the same time, the laws protecting women against the kind of crime Nate Parker was found “not guilty” of are reprehensible for their weakness. At the very same time, news cycles have a way of making flood and poisoned water disappear. Flint, Michigan still has poison being sent through the faucets. The parts of the south submerged in floods aren’t where money flows so prime time will be…
The whole narrative is systemic — violence against women. And perhaps even more reason to read discourse around, and the telling of, Nat Turner’s story. I want the woman who was raped to have some peace. I want the women who were raped to have some peace. I want rape to stop. I want women to have peace. I want some fuckin’ peace. So much so that it feels to me that we’ve reached a threshold of some kind that is becoming clearly defined. I know in my own life I certainly have. We’re here now. And to have even the slightest chance of a selective future we must deal with with our collective past. All of it.
The story of Nat Turner:
Nate Parker, you are an asshole.
