Unscrewed by Jaclyn Friedman

Author:Jaclyn Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2017-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

To the contrary, the pregnancy rate among African American teenage girls declined 56 percent between 1990 and 2010.

And it’s not just white conservatives like O’Reilly who insist that Black women subjugate their sexuality in order to be acceptable “symbols” to imaginary Black girls. When Brittney Cooper, a prominent Black feminist theorist and cofounder of the influential blog Crunk Feminist Collective (CFC), explored what it meant to be unmarried, Christian, and a sexual woman at the same time in a 2011 CFC essay called “Single, Saved and Sexin’,” she faced such a wave of backlash from her own community that she spent a weekend crying on a friend’s couch. CFC commenters and other Black Christian bloggers told her that “young Christians who read this and accept your words as gospel and fall into sin will be on you”9 and the very Christ-like “someone needs to pimp-slap [your] pastor.”10 Winfrey Harris recounts story after story of Black people taking on the policing of Black women’s sexuality, like the female BET executive who banned a “mildly spicy” video from R&B artist Ciara but allowed much more explicit videos by Black male musicians to be aired. After all, learning to play by the rules of the dominant culture is a survival skill for most marginalized communities. Or, as Winfrey Harris put it, “Knowing that their daughters will be presumed guilty of lasciviousness until proven innocent, black parents can hardly be blamed for teaching girls to keep any appearance of sexual desire, no matter how benign, under wraps, the same way that they teach their sons not to give police officers or wannabe community watchmen reason to kill them.”11

It’s a Russian nesting doll of dehumanization. Lift off the head of the impossible standards for sexual respectability that many Black women have internalized (and taught their daughters), and you’ll find white people using the idea of innocent Black girls to shame grown Black women who dare to insist on their right to their own sexuality and humanity. Open that one, and you’ll see Black girls like Danielle being treated as criminals because their actual bodies are never afforded the presumption of sexual innocence. Inside that one, discover African women stereotyped by white slavers as sexual “animals” to justify dehumanizing them into bondage (and, not incidentally, raping them while enslaved).

It is the bankrupt fauxpowerment of respectability politics that led Cooper to call for a third way, a place where Black women’s humanity has room to unfold. In her 2012 essay “Disrespectability Politics: On Jay-Z’s Bitch, Beyoncé’s ‘Fly’ Ass, and Black Girl Blue,” she spells it out this way: “We must consider the potential in the space between the diss and the respect—the potential (and the danger) of what it means to dis(card) respectability altogether. This space between the disses we get and the respect we seek is the space in which Black women live our lives. It is the crunk place, the percussive place, the place that makes noise (and music), the place that moves us, the place that offers possibility in the midst of two impossible extremes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.