In case you’re not in the loop on this one, Thirty-something year old, R&B crooner, famous for such ditties as “Bump & Grind,” the wedding classic “Feelin’ On Your Booty,” and “I Believe I Can Fly,” was accused in early June of videotaping sex with an underage girl. He was later indicted on 21 felony counts of child pornography and since then more tapes have surfaced with Kelly allegedly feeling on the booty of more girls. He’s also released a single, “Heaven, I Need a Hug,” in his own defense. Ugh.

When white folks mess up, they seek the absolution of Barbara Walters, but when my people mess up big time, they run to a major black outlet like BET to tell their story to a montage of the accused singing in the church choir. Most certainly Audre Lorde’s words “Your silence will not protect you” become increasingly prescient as the days pass. Yet, when it comes to these celebrity tell-somes, they should heed sister Audre and shut their privileged pie holes. For me, these interviews only make matters worse.

That’s my knee-jerk reaction. Let’s move on to the complexity. “What complexity?” you may ask, “He’s Chester the Child Molester and that’s all there is to it!” However, I want to raise two issues: one, the continued vilification of black women, and now girls; and what to do with Angela Davis’ important, classic writing “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist” (http://www.siu.edu/~bas/raperacism.pdf).

The black community’s discussions of black women’s sexuality were historically silenced to combat negative stereotypes about our sexuality as a justification for sexual assault/exploitation in slavery. If black women were painted as brazen hussies or hot-to-trot Jezebels, how could their white owners possibly rape them? What white man, so goes late 18th and 19th century logic, could control himself in the face of such wanton Negritude? The thread of this racism persisted as Tawana Brawley, Anita Hill, and Desiree Washington found out. Each case speaks to the one before it.

In the case of R. Kelly, we’re faced with how we fit black girls into the paradigm of “asking for it.” Message boards are jumpin’ with “debate” about who’s guilty: R. Kelly for being fool enough to tape sex with minors or the minors for being jailbait. It is rare that discussion circles back around to the issue of a grown man getting busy with a child. It seems too redundant to say, but for the knuckleheads out there, I don’t care what that child was wearing or how she danced or if she sat down butt-naked in R. Kelly’s lap---that fool shoulda’ known better, not because he could get caught, but because it’s wrong. In her most recent release Experience: Jill Scott, Jilly from Philly’s song/commentary, “The Thickness” breaks down why grown men should not be mackin’ our babygirls and calls the black community to the accountability table for a family meeting.

The black community is past due for a deep look at itself when it comes to how we avoid dealing with sexual assault and exploitation, particularly in our homes. It’s a tricky proposition for people pathologized in U.S. politics, media and culture. When some African American women rejected feminism in the early 1970s, it was a critique of the family that was one problematic. Under a system that destroyed black families, many sought refuge from hostile and racist workplaces in the confines of nuclear and extended families. I understand the impulse to circle the wagons, but to completely ignore valid critiques about patriarchy and the price to families is short-sighted. That impulse, combined with the caveat against “airing dirty laundry” is about as effective as the Catholic Church’s in-house handling of abuse.

The other complicating factor is how we struggle with black men against racism, but also about sexism, as the Combahee River Collective Statement instructs us. Our political allegiances are tested each time an African American man is accused of rape because we more easily recall a history of lynching justified by the alleged rape of white women. It is with less ease that we acknowledge statistics showing that the majority of sexual assaults are intra-racial. How to reconcile Davis’ cogent intersectional analysis of racism, sexism and capitalism when confronted with the heart wrenching recounting of being raped by a brother as told by Amherst College professor Andrea Benton Rushing in her essay, “Surviving Rape: a morning/mourning ritual” or the survivor stories of Charlotte Pierce-Baker’s Surviving the Silence (1998).

Some of us are beginning to speak out (see Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s commentary “Why an R. Kelly”--- http://www.thehutchinsonreport.com/060802feature.htm). In the meantime, what you, R. Kelly, and the entire black community needs is not a hug, but a metaphorical smack in the back o’ the head, so that we can wake up and handle our bizness.

Kim Springer is trying hard to resist being SBW (SuperBlackWoman) and preserve some of her sanity through writing, teaching Africana Women’s Studies at Portland State University in Oregon, and living/breathing Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

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