Thick

by Tressie McMillan Cottom

  It is not easy to read about girls. As a voracious reader, I knew perhaps all of the widely available books. I loved Ramona Quimby, danced with the idea of teenagerdom in Sweet Valley High, and decided I was Claudia in the Baby-Sitters Club. I understood that these were not the books you read in school, but after one had read The Diary of Anne Frank, school reading was all boys on rafts and men traversing the Canterbury Tales and wicked wives who betray their kings. The first black girl I read in school was in the seventh grade. It was a poem by Nikki Giovanni, still my romantic favorite because it was when I decided that I would write my own poems, my own stories. Until college, if I wanted to read about black girlhood I had to read the life stories of black women. That is what I was searching for at seven years old when I read Anne Moody.

  The thing I remember most about reading for black girlhood was that the easiest way to locate the girl in a story about a woman was to search for the sexual trauma. It was always there: a dirty uncle, a mother’s new husband, a dotty brother, a mean boy at school, a nasty white man, any nasty man. Being raped, molested, “touched” seemed to be the one thing, other than Jim Crow and beauty salons and spirituals, that hung black womanhood together.

  It is certainly what I have in common with Oprah Winfrey and Gabrielle Union and the hundreds of black women who wrote to me when I decided to write about R. Kelly. R. Kelly is a superstar. I was there, living my black girl middle years, when R. Kelly became what we used to call an “urban” radio star. He sang dirty R&B for black young people who needed soul music that was not their parents’. By the 2000s, R. Kelly was an unlikely crossover artist, mostly based on a horrible song in which he believed he could fly. It is just the kind of inspirational, soulless black music that corporations love. It made R. Kelly a safe negro for millions of white consumers. At the same time that R. Kelly was becoming Steve Harvey–fied for mass audiences, his reputation as a sexual predator was solidifying in black communities.

  Before the internet, for rumors like the ones I heard about R. Kelly in the 1990s to reach a mid-market, school-age community, they had to travel the hard way. People up north had to tell a cousin on the phone down south who told their friends who reveled in being the ones with the celebrity gossip at vacation Bible school and weekend sleepovers. I heard it from a cousin, a boy who was in his fourth or fifth rap group. No woman in his family would ever be left alone with R. Kelly as long as he had something to say about it. Mind you, no one we were related to was at risk of running into R. Kelly, least of all me. But that is how news was delivered, with equal parts self-importance and public service. R. Kelly liked to touch young girls and we all knew it.

  Strangely, it was the same cousin who had told me a few years earlier which black girls deserved what they got. It was over a plate of ribs at my aunt’s dining room table that I learned that being a woman is about what men are allowed to do to you. I was fourteen years old. Mike Tyson was the most famous boxer in the world.

  For the black people I knew, he was the pinnacle of the black sports elite. He had been born poor and worked his way to riches and fame. But it was 1992 and he had just been found guilty of raping an eighteen-year-old named Desiree Washington in a hotel.

  “Y’all act like she’s a woman,” my cousin said. “She is—excuse me, Auntie—a ho.”

  That’s what I remember most, next to the ribs. My cousin was defending a convicted rapist to a room full of black women, all but one related to him. The elder women shook their heads. The elder men left the room, knowing a fool’s errand when they saw one unfolding.

  My cousin was feeling himself. Young and approaching fatherhood, he stood his ground. Desiree Washington was a ho, bringing down a black man who had made it.

  “What was she doing in the hotel room?” he asked.

  “She could have been butt naked in that room and it shouldn’t matter,” I replied.

  He explained how I was different from Ms. Washington mainly by telling me that she was a ho, and implying that I was not a ho by what he left unsaid. There are hoes and then there are women. As a teenager I could go either way. But as a relative I could go only one way: I would not be a ho.

  I was not angry, but I was hurt.

  “What if your girlfriend is pregnant right now with your daughter?” I asked. “A girl?”

  “No daughter of mine would be raised to go to a hotel room. I ain’t raising no ho.”

  It was then that I learned that black girls like me can never truly be victims of sexual predators. And that the men in my life were also men in the world. Men can be your cousin, men can be Mike Tyson, and men can be both of them at the same time.

  That resonated with me more recently, as new accusations against R. Kelly emerged in 2017. For decades, he has faced various allegations of child molestation, sexual violence, and abuse (in 2008 in Chicago, for instance, he was found not guilty of child pornography charges). The 2017 firestorm involves the families of two young women who have accused Mr. Kelly of holding their daughters against their will, an accusation one of the women vehemently denies.

  Whether or not the accusations are true, R. Kelly’s history with women is still soul-crushing: He surreptitiously married the singer Aaliyah when she fifteen. He admitted to having had sexual relations with young women whose age he cannot or will not verify. And he has portrayed himself as a Svengali too likable to be a sexual predator. As we once did around our big family table, millions of his fans colluded in that portrayal.

  I was older when R. Kelly became the sexual predator du jour. Still, I heard the stories. I lived in Chicago for a year in the early 2000s, and the rumors were everywhere. I heard about the McDonald’s near a middle school where he supposedly liked to troll for young women and the friend of a friend at work who knew an underage girl who had “dated” him.

  I remember the stories about Aaliyah. I fought with friends, men I adored and respected, when videotapes of R. Kelly having sex with what appeared to be an underage girl were being peddled on street corners.

  At a house party, the men laughed when I announced I didn’t want us to watch the video, but they finally acquiesced when I displayed the telltale signs of female rage. It was as if a “crazy woman” was a fair reason not to watch child pornography, but my request was not. Never mind respect for the child. I still remember the one guy whose comment about the girl on the cover of the videotape cut through the nervous laughter.

  “Look at that body. She almost ready,” he said.

  What would it take for a black girl to be a victim? I still do not know, but I know what I have been told by men who love me deeply. My friends told me that once they desired you, then you could not be a victim. My cousin said once you were a ho, you could not be a victim. I already knew all of these things by the time I was married, but still it was my father who taught me best of all.

  He was in the hospital with a case of the poors. You don’t manage your diabetes because someone on the block will pay you for the test strips, you go to the hospital with the poors. You cannot get all of your blood pressure pills because you split them with your girlfriend who makes $145 a month too much for the good Medicaid, you go to the hospital with the poors. You rob Peter to pay Paul but Peter is broke too, you go to the hospital with the poors.

  My father was a big man. He was loud and gregarious. He was 100 percent invested in capitalism. “If niggas can give it away, they can sell it,” he would tell me. Two weeks after I got married, my new husband and I were summoned to the hospital to visit my dad. He was holding court from the bed, directing me and my stepsister on how to handle his affairs. At the time, his main affairs involved one of us going down to the eviction court and telling the judge that he was in the hospital. Dad wanted an extension on his countersuit against his landlord, whom he had not paid in a few months. He knew he would lose the case. He wanted only to run down the clock until his new girlfriend’s housing voucher came through. Being a poor capitalist is complicated.

  What wasn’t complicated was w
hat it meant that I was a wife. He had not made it to the wedding. We had eloped, which should have told me something that I was too distracted to notice. This was his first look at my husband. They bonded over their shared careers in television. Pleased, my dad turned to me and said, “Just so you know, if he ever beats you, I won’t just take your word for it. There are two sides to every story.” To my mind, husband beating and husband raping are right next to each other on the Richter scale of fucked-up things men you trust can do to you. I took it to mean what my cousin once meant—black girlhood ends whenever a man says it ends.

  Two sides to every story. Almost ready. She a ho.

  Those are the kind of comments I have heard hundreds, if not thousands, of times, from men and women, to excuse violence against black women and girls. If one is “ready” for what a man wants from her, then by merely existing she has consented to his treatment of her. Puberty becomes permission.

  All women in our culture are subject to this kind of violence, when people judge their bodies to decide if they deserve abuse. But for black women and girls, that treatment is specific to our history as much as it is about today’s context. New research corroborates what black women have long known: people across gender and race see black girls as more adultlike than their white peers. In her book Pushout, Monique W. Morris shows that teachers and administrators don’t give black girls the care and protection they need. Left to navigate school by themselves because they are “grown,” these girls are easily manipulated by men.3

  The presumption of childhood is not only that you are off-limits to adult desires, but that should an adult violate you, the penalties will account for your structural innocence. But, for black girls, the presumption of innocence is gossamer, at best. One of the few surveys of public attitudes about black girls was conducted in 2014.4 The majority of those surveyed said that black girls need less protection and nurturing than white girls. Being perceived as grown comes with consequences even when you are not yet an adult.

  Those consequences are far-reaching. When a black girl is perceived by those in her immediate social sphere as “ready,” the legal system reinforces that she was ready when it sees her through the expectations of an adult. And we know how little concern the legal system has for women who report sexual assault. Women have the burden of proving not only their assault, but that they did not deserve to be assaulted. The former is bad enough. How do you prove the penetration was forced in the hours after you are emotionally traumatized? Or that you weren’t drunk or high? Or that you said no before he started but not while he was “finishing”?5

  Women have found it nearly impossible to meet the burden of proof. But what if you have proof of violence on your body but the protocols for seeing them systematically erase them? That is the potential of domestic violence protocols that rely on photographic evidence to corroborate a woman’s claim in court. The cameras used in criminal domestic violence cases are supposed to document the bruises thought typical of getting one’s ass beaten. In a quest to be “evidence-based,” a nurse is only allowed to call a spot on a battered woman’s body a bruise if it can be seen with the naked eye. What if your skin is too dark to show the bruises that the police often require to believe that you were abused?6 For black women, a camera designed not to see our abuse becomes a protocol that will only label such spots “dark.”

  There are many what-ifs for women to prove that they have been sexually assaulted. And each of them fails most women, but they fail black women as if by design. Like the cameras that cannot see and the protocols that will not name, the what-ifs just barely work when the woman involved has the possibility of innocence. That is something black women rarely have, and black girls are thrust into that structural vulnerability younger than their non-black peers.

  When adults say that black girls, not yet adults, are more knowledgeable about sex than their white female peers, they are saying that a girl child is responsible for all the desires that adults project onto her. She does not need the protection of childhood, for she has never been a child. This system of neglect and abuse is mostly ignored in social and education policy, because the violence is often sexual and it happens to girls whom society views as disposable. We rarely focus on how programs are failing black women and girls, or how we could intervene to help.

  When President Barack Obama created a task force for young black men in 2014, it took months of demands by black women for a similar task force to be created for young black women. Even then, the girls’ task force did not receive equal attention or funding.

  Watching men I love turn a girl into a woman and a woman into a ho has never left me. That conversation at my aunt’s dinner table was not the first time I felt deeply afraid, but it left a cut that will never heal. It’s the kind of wound that keeps you alert to every potential doorway through which you might enter as a friend, sister, or woman, but leave as a bitch or a ho.

  It is the culture that gives us something like R. Kelly. It is a culture where someone like radio personality Charlamagne Tha God acts as if he is exactly that, a god among mere mortal women who can debate women’s right to say no for sport. Charlamagne is just the latest in a string of men I could name that are not Bill Cosby big or who did not assault mostly white women like Harvey Weinstein. These men live in the urban enclaves of media culture neighborhoods on radio stations and music labels and third-string reality television shows. The names sound like a place I might go for a good time: Power 105, Hip Hop Divas, The Source. These are the places Me Too cannot reach. In these corners black men are too oppressed to also oppress. They are too easily jailed, imprisoned, invisibilized in a prison industrial complex to be batterers or rapists. They made it and we are collectively responsible for lifting them up.

  If R. Kelly is our culture’s pied piper, then Charlamagne is a bit like our court jester. He is from Moncks Corner, South Carolina, a place I actually know more than a little bit. It is country and black and southern and hard to make it out of. Charlamagne is not particularly talented, except in his willingness to be seen. He translated that into a successful career on urban radio and the equivalent of Off-Off-Broadway cable television. He made it.

  Along the way Charlamagne has played with the rumor that he is also a rapist. In interviews he talks casually about “beating the case.” The case in question is that of a fifteen-year-old girl who claims she was drugged and raped at a house Charlamagne rented for a party. He beat the case. But he did not let that make him shy about critiquing the veracity of rape culture. He has, at different times, admitted to “fucking” a woman too drunk to consent, “smashing” while high on drugs, and “taking that pussy.” I’m no prude. I, in fact, curse like a sailor. I’m not particularly dismayed at the language about sexual intercourse. It is precisely because I am familiar with what it means to say you smashed that I can look through the words and to the context.

  Charlamagne’s comments are mundane in the world of barbershop talk and beauty shop talk and corner talk and lunch room talk for millions of black people who have grown up on hip-hop culture. It isn’t Charlamagne smashing that should concern us. It is what he will admit to even as he denies ever having raped a woman. Take for instance how he says he “beat” that rape charge of a fifteen-year-old girl:

  I rented a cabin at a place called Short Stay on Nearby Lake Moultrie and invited a whole gang of people to come over and party.… The night started off great—lots of drinking, smoking, dancing, and bullshitting. But at some point one of the girls passed out and when she woke up later that night, she claimed that some of the dudes at the party had sexually assaulted her. I wasn’t there at the time—I’d left to go get some weed—and when I finally heard about what had happened, the entire party had cleared out.7

  Then-twenty-two-year-old Charlamagne will admit to having parties where fifteen-year-old girl guests are presumably so normal as not to have caused any alarm. He will admit he was getting everybody high for some bullshitting. And, while he maintains he did not rape an
yone, Charlamagne cannot fathom why someone would think that he would. If a girl was there she must have been ready.

  That is the same line R. Kelly is toeing. After years of near silence, in 2018 R. Kelly released a nineteen-minute song called, I kid you not, “I Admit.” Like Charlamagne, it isn’t so much what R. Kelly denies doing, but what he is comfortable admitting—as defense—to having done:

  I admit I fuck with all the ladies, that’s both older and young ladies (ladies, yeah)

  But tell me how they call it pedophile because that shit is crazy (crazy)

  You may have your opinions, entitled to your opinions (opinions)

  But really am I supposed to go to jail or lose my career because of your opinion […]

  But this is my advice to you ’cause I’m also a parent (parent)

  Don’t push your daughter in my face, and tell me that it’s okay (my face, okay)

  ’Cause your agenda is to get paid, and get mad when it don’t go your way (yeah, [your] way)

  What R. Kelly will admit to is liking the ladies young. He will admit to branding some of them because they like it. He will admit to maybe marrying a teenager at one time. But he thinks we go too far with this whole rape thing. As with Charlamagne, who will smash as you’re passed out or pay for the weed that gets the fifteen-year-old party guest too high to consent, one has to wonder what would qualify as rape for the urban radio pied piper and court jester.

  For me, as a noncelebrity, it was easy to discern in the black women’s stories I loved that what did not qualify as rape was anything done to a black girl. When I went looking for stories about black girls like me, the easiest way to find them was to look for the door, the moment when a black woman had been someone’s ho. Almost without fail it is there in every black woman’s story. Given that racial segregation persists in our most intimate dwellings—our homes and our families—black women most often cross the threshold when pushed by a black man.