First, my plea.
Please start loving us.
Please start caring enough about us when entire communities of people who look and sound just like us try to kill our spirits, our souls, when they try erasing us like we’re mistakes and smears.
Please do this despite what we ourselves say about our ownselves.
I am afraid to be a black American woman.
I am proud to be a black American woman.
Sometimes I’m tired of being a black American woman in America.
Now, our connection.
I’ve had nothing but time to watch America try to destroy us.
Since I was last here I’ve been walking, breathing and seeing funny; a lot about me’s been distorted and just different.
After a lifetime of having never been cut, at last count there are seven surgical scars across my weirdly gangly body, now home to the unnatural: a defibrillator, stints, stitches and a chest line leading directly to my heart. It’s how I receive dialysis three days a week when I sit in the blood-scrubbing chair.
I’ve been temporarily and completely sightless in one eye. After excruciating treatments and surgery, on Easter my sight returned fully in colors I hadn’t seen since Amsterdam.
Writing?
I fill Dollar General composition books in my elegant chicken scrawl documenting what my body’s become, how it’s shape-shifting, how my weakened physicality has rendered me publicly vulnerable for the first time in my 53 years.
Writing left me rhythmless before the landscape of letters.
Oh. And I now have nine toes.
Regardless of my frailty I never stop thinking.
My brain: She strong.
Until black women are guaranteed safety here, no one can be safe.
We’re the girders, the foundation, the under rowers of every system this nation operates on.
Three stories starring black girls and women triangulate my anger, hope and sadness for us in America.
In one week, the trials and triumphs of black women came into full focus.
First, Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam granted Cyntoia Brown clemency after a 15-year prison stint — half her life — for killing and robbing a john. Then, Texas police caught the two black men accused in the shooting death 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes while she rode in the car with her mother and young sisters. The shooter and driver thought they were affiliated with a rival gang.
Finally, with the airing and public flailing of Surviving R. Kelly, Kelly is being unequivocally exposed as the darkly exploitative pedophile many of us blacks have known he is for decades.
Decades.
I initially took this news cycle personally. What else is a black woman to do when other black women are under siege? I cannot go about my life obsessing over my minutiae, getting lost in self-pity. It’s settling in me: Black female bodies are so much trash, worth neither the worry nor the saving.
Watching Surviving R. Kelly in bed, my partner safe beside me, I could not figure out which was more jaw-dropping: the sheer number of girls, teens and women Kelly allegedly seduced, raped, beat, held hostage and urinated on or that rumors — graphic rumors and undeniable videotaped proof — have been allowed to run rampant like a feral dog in the black community of man.
Subtract blame for now; reconcile the depravity of this.
Marinate on how many complicit people comprise the ecosystem of Kelly’s hothouse for all this to grow: guards, drivers, lackeys, cooks, assistants, managers, record executives, (his) family members.
I’m thinking now about his incarcerated oldest brother and his older sister. He was nearly orgasmic describing his relief at Kelly’s June 2008 acquittal on child pornography charges for a videotape of the singer allegedly paying then urinating on a then-12-year-old girl.
The sad, sorry sick specter of Bill Cosby’s insatiable appetite for having unresponsive and non-consensual sex with the hordes of women who came forward is proof R. Kelly is prosecutable.
That is, if there is a district attorney in Cook County, Illinois, Fulton County, Georgia, or Broward County, Florida, who gives one good goddamn about the safety, security and inalienable rights of black American women.
And what of the treatment of victims of sex crimes?
Why did she wait so long?
Same reason you don’t go immediately to the doctor, reprimand your children, confront your boss or get your car fixed at the first sign of trouble.
Embarrassment. Fear. Shame. Fatigue. Depression.
Black Twitterverse and black Facebook are lit, pinging with finger pointing — mere distractions from the victims, the evilness of the allegations against R. Kelly and the apathy still lulling black folks to sleep, to the dance floor, to streaming his music.
We’ve all been seduced by R. Kelly, too.
The thing pedophiles love more than an unprotected, gullible victim is people who will find their own reasons to look at what the pedophile is doing, then look away.
We’ve served him well.
We kept quiet because “Ignition,” “Step In the Name of Love” or “I Believe I Can Fly” is our shit.
This isn’t my first time being sickened by R. Kelly.
In an earlier version of this column years ago in this very space I called, to no avail, for black radio to quit playing Kelly’s music in the wake of the leak — no pun intended — of the now-infamous “pee tape.” Black lives must only matter when they’re men killed in epidemic proportions.
Now the ground is swelling with blowback against Kelly. His record company dropped him, refusing to release new music until he’s cleared; a former manager turned himself in to answer charges of threatening the family of a Kelly accuser. Further, Kelly owes $80,000 in back rent for the Chicago studio alleged to be the site of untold alleged assaults.
Maybe we’re close(r) to punishment.
There’s no real justice.
For the record, I’ve always hated Kelly’s music.
It’s rife with clichés, saturated by banal carnality.
Turns out he’s been singing about what he’s allegedly done to his victims.
I write about what America’s doing to us. See how deeply we need one another?
Contact Kathy Y. Wilson: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jan 16-23, 2019.