Duke case reopens wounds for black women
Many are fed up with stereotype of hyper-sexual African American female
The young black women can almost finish each other’s stories.
They go to a party, a concert, a nightclub. Twenty-somethings of all colors are flirting and dancing. And then it happens.
Inevitably, a woman says, a white man asks her to dance erotically while he watches. Or he grabs her rear end. Or asks for sex, in graphic detail, without bothering to ask her name.
“We can sort of count on it happening. My friends from California and New York and Boston all tell the same stories,” said 22-year-old Danielle Terrazas Williams, a graduate student at Duke University. “They’re watching you as if you’re performing for them, and it’s disgusting. You just sort of feel like, ‘Is this all we’re good for?”’
Black women have been talking about this for a long time now, but the conversation has heated up since accusations surfaced that white Duke lacrosse players raped a black student they had hired as a stripper and shouted racial slurs at her.
Loose talk about the case has fed the stereotype that black women are hyper-sexual and readily available. Rush Limbaugh, for example, called the black student a “ho” on the radio. He later apologized.
The stereotype is everywhere, said Rebecca Hall, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley who studies images of black women.
“Turn on a music video. A black woman is somebody who has excess sexuality spilling out all over the place. It’s excess sexuality that white men are entitled to,” she said.
Black women stew about the narrow, negative ways they are nearly always portrayed. They are either quick-tempered and full of attitude like Tyler Perry’s Madea character or the comedian Mo’Nique, or they are barely dressed and brazenly sexual like the women mimicking strippers in so many music videos.
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So when the Duke case erupted, it hit a nerve. Krista Summit of Durham, N.C., started a blog on the case, “Justice 4 Two Sisters,” referring to the two exotic dancers sent to the lacrosse team’s off-campus house, and it got 18,000 hits in the first two weeks. Formal discussions of the case have been held at Duke, North Carolina Central University, the alleged victim’s school, and at such institutions as Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and Spelman College in Atlanta.
The discussions started with the Duke incident but quickly turned toward larger concerns of black women, and in some cases widened into a discussion of sexual assaults in general, with white women joining in to express their concerns.
The facts about the Duke case remain in doubt, but the image of a black woman stripping for a room full of white athletes shouting racial epithets is painful to many black women.
This woman may be a stripper, but that is not all she is, black woman say. She is also a student and a working mother.
“If she’s a stripper, she becomes part of a seedy underworld,” Williams said. “What would the story look like if the headline had said, ‘Lacrosse team allegedly gang-raped and strangled a mother of two?”’
“There’s a certain level of disrespect on campus toward African-American females,” said Erica Howard, a junior at Vanderbilt. She cringes at the memories of a string of incidents on her campus with “girls who were walking in front of dorms and white guys would come up and grab them.”
It happens so often that campus police even have a name for it. They call it “forcible fondling.”
Santina White, a black senior at the University of Texas at San Antonio, was enjoying a Dave Matthews Band concert when a white male student struck up a conversation. “The first thing he wanted to talk about is how sizable his manhood is compared to black men,” she said. “We are always being looked upon as if that (sex) is all I like to do — that’s all I want.”
Again and again, women say pop culture reinforces the stereotypes.
“The way the media portrays black women, there are very few roles for black women that aren’t hyper-sexual,” Williams said. “Music videos are an obvious source. As benign as we think they may be, for some people music videos and movies are the only glimpse into black life that they will ever have.”
Hip-hop music videos routinely show black women nearly nude simulating sex acts and dancing erotically.
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“Is that a rapper’s fault that that’s the way society is portrayed?” she asks. “Sex sells everywhere. Every commercial you look at, it’s all based around sex.”
Of course, it’s complicated. No one forces black women to disrobe on screen. And many of these images of black women accompany music produced and performed by black men. The raciest hip-hop videos play on “Uncut,” a Black Entertainment Television program starting at 3 a.m.
“The message that men get about black women is these are women that are available to them, that they have easy access and their sole purpose is to serve their pleasure,” said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke.
“The history of white men and black women, and the special fantasies and exploitation, is old and ancient,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson said when asked about the case. “The historical pattern of this behavior arouses so many fears and conjures up so many bad memories.”
Joan Morgan, author of “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down,” said hyper-sexualized images of black women have “been here since slavery,” when white men owned black women and used them sexually. “But when you can look at a music video and see the same images acted out by white folks in the early 19th century, you’ve got to connect the dots there.”
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