I always say: It’s not about people letting themselves be victimized. You have to look at the assailant. The attacker. The abuser.
The real issue is with a person that can know someone is weaker than them for whatever reason and knowingly, willfully, and perhaps even gleefully hurt that person.
Babies. Women that have been indoctrinated and mentally damaged by patriarchy. Love- and attention-starved teenage girls. Literally hungry and homeless women and girls. Women that have been broken by repeated abuse. Girls and women who are addicts. Girls and women with mental illnesses. Why are we more comfortable blaming them for what these grown ass men do than blaming the men?
Why do we as a society and black community HATE women so fucking much? And why can’t we see our misogyny for what it is?
We revere fame, money, celebrity, and yes, manhood, virility, violence, and toxicity, and then pretend like “we don’t understand” why so many girls and women get into fucked-up situations with men. Or they get raped or molested or abused or assaulted and don’t tell. Or don’t leave.
Because we have taught these girls and women that they are the rightful receptacles for the garbage these men put on them.
And look what we do to them when they do tell.
We blame them. We deride and degrade them. We brutally and adamantly isolate, alienate, and abandon them in their worst time of need.
We say everything that we previously preached about the sanctity of childhood and the proper role of men as protectors and the unbridled nature of cishetero male sexuality and the desperate male thirst for power and dominance and the allure of passive women is now irrelevant. It’s not gospel anymore.
No, we say: It’s you. You – disempowered black female individual living in a kyriarchy that has never valued you or made provisions for your safe and healthy existence – should be able to keep every person and thing that seeks to harm you up off of you without ever wavering in that effort. You hoe. You slut. You fast ass. You gold digger. You liar. You tease. You traitor. You nasty. You funky. You ugly. You bitch.
We are horrible. We let R. Kelly happen. We let all the R. Kellys in our community, in our circles, in our families happen.
We deliberately sacrifice black girls and women to make black boys and men that are ultimately monsters. And perpetuate the cycle another time. Through another generation.
Say what you want: I say fuck R. Kelly and anybody that thinks that what he has done is all right.
Fuck anybody that doesn’t see in his victims all the mistakes we make in raising our black girls the way we do – to see themselves the way they do and see men the way they do and misunderstand love the way they do and misunderstand violence the way they do.
The Bluest i 