Editor’s Note: Rape culture is a pervasive evil that has damaging and fatal ramifications for Black women and girls. We can no longer fuel rape culture through complicity. Emphasizing this point is necessary and purposeful in that this title of this essay does not make this point firmly explicit.Â
By Ekemini Uwan
It was July 2017. My entire family flew out to California to celebrate my cousin getting married. As is our custom, once the dance floor opens aunties, uncles, moms, dads, grandmas, grandpas, and even the children race to the dance floor to get their groove on. At any given family function—particularly weddings—R. Kelly’s “Step in the Name of Love†will come on, and our whole family goes wild as everyone attempts to show off their best two-step. This wedding was no exception, and I was not exempt.
But when the song came at this particular family event, I had a few seconds of reservation. Should I step in the name of love, given the mountain of sexual abuse allegations against R. Kelly involving underage Black girls? Still, those seconds were cut off at the moment the groom’s fine friend asked me to dance.
That was the last time I would ever dance to another R. Kelly song.
RACEBAITR IS A COMMUNITY-FUNDED publication. DONATE $10 TO SUPPORT BLACK LIBERATIONIST WRITERS
One week later, Buzzfeed released a scathing investigative report about a sex cult R. Kelly runs with young Black women and girls he groomed since their early teens, women and girls whom he calls his “pets.” Last month, R. Kelly released a 19-minute self-aggrandizing song entitled, “I Admit.” In it, he attempts to absolve himself from his longstanding pedophilia saying, “I admit I fuck with all the ladies, that’s both older and young ladies/ But tell me how they call it pedophile because that shit is crazy.â€
R. Kelly’s ephebophilia has been documented for decades, beginning in 1994 when he married Aaliyah at the young age of fifteen. R. Kelly was 27 and the marriage certificate, which falsifies Aaliyah’s age as eighteen, serves as a haunting memento of his predatory ways. I knew about the infamous tape that was released showing him raping a 14-year-old girl and urinating on her; but at his trial he was found not guilty, granting him plausible deniability in the eyes of the public in spite of the numerous receipts to the contrary.
I never bought any of R. Kelly’s records nor been to any of his concerts,  but using such purchases as a barometer to gauge complicity is a woefully low bar. The fact of the matter is that at that wedding, I stepped in the name of complicity for five minutes and forty-three seconds of fleeting pleasure at the expense of R. Kelly’s many victims and survivors—Black women and girls—trampling them underfoot.
On April 22, 2018, a Black woman named Chikesia Clemons was victimized at a Waffle House restaurant in Saraland, Alabama. The Washington Post reports that before her order was placed she was given plastic utensils, but a Waffle House employee asked her to pay fifty cents for the flatware. According to that same report, Pat Warner, a Waffle House spokesperson, confirmed that  “Waffle House restaurants provide plastic flatware on request at no charge.†Chikesia rightfully refused to pay the fifty-cent charge and asked for the district manager’s information so she could file a formal complaint against the waitress. Â
As she waited in the restaurant, the police were called. Upon their arrival, three white officers manhandled Chikesia by wrestling her to the ground while one of the police officers choked her, exposing her breasts as she pleaded with them saying, ‘“You’re not going to grab on me like that, no!†and “What are you doing?†The officer retorts with a threat saying, ‘“I’ll break your arm, that’s what I’m about to do.â€â€™
This horrific incident transpired as Waffle House customers sat idly nearby, settling into their indifference, eating their food as they gawked at the three white officers tackling Chikesia Clemons, violently arresting her and sexually assaulting her by exposing her breasts.
Recently, Chikesia was found guilty of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, once again showing that the criminal “justice†system is antithetical to the survival and protection of Black people.
These two vignettes elucidate how rape culture manifests itself. Rape culture normalizes sexual abuse, violence, assault, and sexual harassment either implicitly or explicitly. It is rightly called ‘rape culture’ because we are all socialized into it at an early age.
In an interview on MPRNews, Kimberle Crenshaw said
…Sexual harassment goes on in school for young girls. And how often that is a factor that leads to girls either being suspended because they fight back or, sometimes, even asked to leave. Once again you have — in the earliest moments of a child’s interactions with institutions — the recognition that her body and her sexuality is there for the boys to either grab onto or be distracted by. But she’s the problem, not their behavior. That’s rape culture from the earliest moments of socialization.
As Crenshaw posits, rape culture is institutionalized and passed on to each generation, becoming normalized. This socialization happens in countless ways: when sexual violence is glamorized in television, advertising, music, and a host of other mediums, rape culture is at work.
Rape culture is at work when people make “jokes” about sexual assault. Rape culture is what causes people to ignore, dismiss, and trivialize claims of sexual assault. Rape culture ensures the survivor is not believed. Rape culture exists in workplaces and churches and schools when survivors are blamed for the sexual assault committed against them. Rape culture sees that less than 5% of rapists serve time in jail or prison for their crime.
One pillar of rape culture is misogyny, which by its rudimentary definition is hatred, disdain, and prejudice against women. However, if we are to understand the systemic nature of rape culture, Â misogyny must be extracted from the confines of that narrow definition.
Systemically, misogyny emerges in institutions and social systems in explicit and implicit ways, whenever women are met with opposition, hostility, hatred, or discrimination simply because they are women living in a patriarchal society where men continue to hold and hoard power, with white men being the absolute beneficiary at the expense of almost everyone else.
Though these interpersonal and systemic dynamics of misogyny are accounted for in their cases, neither definition truly captures the particular subjugation that R. Kelly’s victims and Chikesia Clemons endured.
Enter misogynoir, a term coined by Professor Moya Bailey and written about extensively by Trudy, the creator of Gradient Lair, who also helped expand the lexical definition of the term. Misogynoir is anti-Black misogyny aimed at Black women exclusively; it occurs both inter-racially and intra-racially. Misogynoir is not applicable to non-Black women of color. The precision embedded within the term is significant, because it describes a particular interlocking oppression only experienced by Black women.
Bailey writes, “Naming misogynoir was about noting both an historical anti-Black misogyny and a problematic intraracial gender dynamic that had wider implications in popular culture. Misogynoir can come from Black men, white men and women, and even other Black women.â€
For Chikesia Clemons, rape culture and misogynoir became even more apparent the moment the three police officers arrived, treating her body like a battle site with all the violent force of the state behind them. Not only exposing her breasts to everyone in the Waffle House, but pinning her –and her bare breasts—to the grimy Waffle House floor while threatening to break her arm.
Rape culture and misogynoir is the Alabama Police Department defending three white officers, stating that they “acted appropriately,†by charging Chikesia with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct, and declaring her guilty of the aforementioned.
Echoes of Crenshaw’s earlier quote reverberate through this heinous act of state-sanctioned violence: Chikesia Clemons’ body was not her own.
Like Chikesia, R. Kelly’s current victims and past survivors have also been subjected to rape culture and misogynoir, albeit in different ways.
Faith Rodgers, a survivor, recently filed a lawsuit against R. Kelly, is claiming that he raped her and infected her with genital herpes. Furthermore, Andrea Kelly—R. Kelly’s ex-wife—recently shared harrowing accounts of abuse. She called R. Kelly “a monster†that hog-tied her to their bed one evening. Hear Andrea Kelly in her own words
“I was tied up and left on the side of the bed, and he went to sleep. What was supposed to be my big beautiful mansion ultimately became my prison.â€
According to the Buzzfeed report, Kitti Jones, another survivor, said this about R. Kelly
…He controls every aspect of their lives: dictating what they eat, how they dress, when they bathe, when they sleep, and how they engage in sexual encounters that he records.†Jones recounts other egregious acts in which R. Kelly dehumanizes these young Black women by exercising ownership over them, essentially treating them as sex slaves.
This is rape culture and misogynoir.
And this is how we step in the name of complicity: when we fail to challenge friends and family members who still support R. Kelly by purchasing his albums and attending his concerts.
They have no excuse for not knowing, given the decades of lawsuits, settlements and harrowing accusations of sexual assault, rape, emotional, and physical abuse. We step in the name of complicity when we intentionally play R. Kelly’s music on various streaming platforms, in order to increase his streams and visibility. We step in the name of complicity when we dance to his music at parties and family functions instead of demanding, in that moment, that the DJ stop playing R. Kelly’s music, just as Tarana Burke did recently at an industry party. We step in the name of complicity when we do not support the #MuteRKelly movement, founded last year by two Black women, Kenyette Barnes and Oronike Odeleye, and instead wear “Turn Up R.Kelly” shirts (distributed by his stage hands) in defiance.
Like the patrons in the Waffle House who allowed indifference to have its way, keeping them glued to their seats as they watched three white officers assault Chikesia Clemons, we sit in the name of complicity when we fail to support Chikesia Clemons with the same vigor and passion (by signing petitions, donating money, and attending protests for justice)Â that we do for Black men who are victims of police brutality. Â
Malcolm X’s oft-quoted maxim reminds us, “The most disrespected woman in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.”
We are responsible for what we know; feigning ignorance is unconscionable. The choice is yours: will you sit in the name of complicity, step in the name of complicity, or stand in the name of solidarity?
Time’s Up.
Suggested Readings
Moya Bailey & Trudy (2018) On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism, Feminist Media Studies, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395. Â https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680777.2018.1447395?journalCode=rfms20Â
“Black women loving Black women: On the rituals that sustain community“ — Jailyn Gladney, RaceBaitR (March 8, 2018)
Ekemini Uwan is a public theologian and co-host of Truth’s Table Podcast. Her writings have been published in Huffington Post Black Voices and her insights have been quoted by the New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker.
