Looking for Leroy by Mark Anthony Neal

Author:Mark Anthony Neal [Neal, Mark Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, Men's Studies, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9780814758366
Google: 7qAUCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2013-04-22T04:24:39+00:00

4

R. Kelly’s Closet

Shame, Desire, and the Confessions of a (Postmodern) Soul Man

Preface from a Critic Trapped in R. Kelly’s Closet

In 2008 the R&B singer Robert Sylvester Kelly was acquitted of over a dozen charges of child pornography. The case centered on a widely circulated and bootlegged video that purported to show Kelly performing sex acts with an underage black female. Kelly’s case elicited much discussion about child pornography and rape in black communities, and conversations as well on the role of parenting—or the lack of it—when children become prey to adult sex offenders. According to jurors in the case, they didn’t find Kelly’s accuser believable as a victim. Such a reading of Kelly’s accuser falls in line with historical narratives in which black women are “unrapeable” in the eyes of the law. As Saidiya Hartman, one of the many commentators on the subject of black women and rape, writes in her book Scenes of Subjection, “In nineteenth century common law, rape was defined as the forcible carnal knowledge of a female against her will and without her consent. Yet the actual or attempted rape of an enslaved woman was an offense neither recognized nor punished by law.”1 Hartman suggests that the rape of a black woman was “unimaginable” given notions of lasciviousness and immorality that were tethered to black bodies, and black women’s bodies in particular, in the minds of many whites.

There has also been a long history in the United States of highly visible and powerful black men publicly humiliated for criminal acts and lapses of judgment. Figures as diverse as the heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson, who was punished for flaunting his relationships with white women in the early twentieth century (he was accused of violating the Mann Act—the interstate transport of prostitutes), and the former Washington, DC, mayor Marion Barry, who appeared in an FBI surveillance tape smoking a crack pipe with the FBI informant Rasheeda Moore, have been publicly knocked off their perches. It has often been easier for some in black communities to believe that the disgrace that befell these men was the product of some larger conspiracy to undermine the stature of strong black men, than to admit that these men might have been engaged in behaviors that deserved closer scrutiny or even punishment. Not surprisingly, in the years after the Kelly indictments were announced, he was arguably more popular than at any time in his career. While Kelly owes part of that success to his keen ability to produce music that remains relevant to an audience that is decidedly younger than he is, it also speaks to the extent to which some have sought to protect him or at least not pass judgment on him until he had his day in court.

The fact that so many folks have downloaded footage of the videotape that was at the center of the criminal case against Kelly or have purchased bootlegs of the so-called Kelly sex tape speaks to the extent to which so many of us were already complicit in the crimes that Kelly was accused of.

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