Apparently, he was twelve and she was fourteen. They were out in the woods during a family gathering and had wandered away from the adults, and according to Larry, she let him have it. “I felt sorta used,” he said pensively, sucking on a stick of beef jerky. “But it felt pretty fuckin’ awesome. Best two minutes of my life up to that point.”
Oh yeah: she also happened to be his cousin.
But once removed.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In one of my classes yesterday, a doctoral student gave a presentation on Black women and the clinical setting. This being a diagnostic class, the assumption was that sooner or later these would-be clinicians would be “treating” a Black woman; this being the University of Michigan, the class was 87% white. A good move on the part of the professor, as one of my fellow students remarked later: “I don’t think I ever met a Black woman before I came here.” (To be fair, I think this guy is from a very small and insulated Mormon community in the Southwest.)
The presenter talked at length about the intersectionalities of race, class and gender, as well as the disparate worlds many Black women must inhabit (work, home, community, pop culture stereotyping, etc.). (This was a lot of material to cover in a 45-minute presentation but somehow she made it work.) Finally, she spoke about the relationships between men and women in the Black community, and disclosed her own feelings–past and present–of having a “sense of responsibility” to Black men. A girl who identified herself as Latina raised her hand to say that she, too, felt the need to protect and shelter Latin men from a larger culture which is hostile toward them. A Yemeni girl said the same about Middle Eastern men.
I began thinking that, essentially, white women do the same thing for white men, but since we belong to the dominant ethnic culture, this “protectiveness” for lack of a better term is essentially invisible*. We simply don’t recognize all the ways in which we participate in the system of white male supremacy (which doesn’t even benefit the majority of white men, either). Having spent a lot of time as a white female, I can tell you with authority that we are socialized and in many cases, taught outright from an early, early age to normalize white men’s behavior/violence/attitudes/beauty standards and downright fear the behavior of men of color. You see this a lot whenever white girls are griping about something that plagues women of all colors, ages, shapes and sizes: street harassment. If it’s coming from a white guy, we barely notice. But if it’s a car full of Black men? Oh my god! We fret, we clutch our pearls, we dash into the nearest convenience store for shelter, we call our boyfriends panicking, we brag about it later to our girl friends. It’s pretty disgusting.
A study about a girls’ club in Buffalo, N.Y. that I just read confirmed the above. The researcher was studying the importance of multicultural female-only spaces on teen girls’ development in urban areas. The Buffalo girls’ club was compared with a teen center in New York City. What the researcher found, among the white, working-class girls in Buffalo, was that nearly every one of them had some terrible shit going on at home: their dad or their uncle or their brother was an alcoholic or abusive or a rapist or in trouble with the law or was beating the shit out of their mother every night, and so forth–you get the idea. (I’m not trying to downplay how awful this is, but rather exhibit the scope of trauma in these girls’ lives.) However, the girls would never say anything bad about these men–relatives**, school mates, neighborhood acquaintances–who were white. They didn’t even like to talk about the abuse they’d experienced and greatly minimized its seriousness. Yet if one of the girls was catcalled by a Black boy, or if one of their brothers got into a fight with a group of Hispanic boys at school, the girls’ faces lit up and they practically fell over each other to tell the interviewer how awful these incidents were. Black and Latin boys in particular were seen as more violent and more sexually precocious than white boys, whose dating intentions were seen as more “honorable” and whose violence was acceptable or rationalized in some way.
And it does not stop after high school. Several weeks ago I went out to the bar with some of the people at my internship. The group is mostly white women, mostly with decent education: nurses, social workers, bachelor’s-level case managers, that sort of thing. A couple of beers in, it started. One of the nurses loudly and drunkenly asked one of my co-workers, let’s call her Rachel, about the new guy she’s dating (who, as someone whispered to me, twittering, is Black). You know where it goes from here: Oh it’s going fine, we’re having fun together, blah blah blah. Second question: Is it true? Are their dicks really bigger? And on and on, and more statements having to do with genitalia and sentences containing the words, “once you go black…”
I have yet to be in a casual conversation with co-workers where the second question out of anyone’s mouth about the white guys we happen to be dating has to do with the size of their penis.
*Like many things belonging to the dominant culture, white skin makes it possible for many of our very culturally- or class-specific oddities to go unnoticed. (That is, until SWPL came along–hence its brilliance.)
**Minimizing abuse from family members is common across cultures, so maybe this isn’t so odd. However, the researcher found that when the girls whose (white) mothers were involved in interracial relationships, disclosure of the abuse as well as derogatory racial slang and epithets were used to color the events.