I struggled with where to put this as this week has continued, and like all writers, I think most will go here and some will go on Medium, when I do my monthly post. Just as everyone else, I am truly disgusted by powerful people in this country, and this started with the 2000 election and just continued from there. As I watch all of this corruption go down, I wonder what it must feel like to believe that identity protects, rather than attacks, or needs to be defended. What must it feel like to believe the lies that we are constantly told and “educated” with on a regular basis? However, as a Black woman, I cannot help but sigh as the empire finally confronts itself with the reality that it has always been a culture of violation. Nobody thinks it will be them, but violators and abusers never sate themselves on just a few targets.
In the beginning, colonizers considered that all nonwhite individuals–or poor white individuals in their home countries–were available to be violated. Discussing violation is abhorrent and stressful, but that is truth, and it is the reason that so many BIPOCQ individuals bear the names of the people who “owned” us. Colonizers bred with us for violence, pleasure, and revenue, but power more than anything else, and reminded us of that on a regular basis. Sally Hemmings and Pocahontas were changed into “love” stories because people would still find the truth to be too lurid. Despite hypersexualizing Black women, I am truly pleased that more of us have taken back our sexual power, either through demanding pleasure, or choosing celibacy. Turning sex from violation to pleasure is more than a victory, since so many people tried to take away our autonomy through violation.
Once nonstop violation began to be viewed in a poor light, people became more discrete with it, but BIPOCQ targets were still the soup du jour on most people’s menus. We were the ones who were forced to have the babies, while the dominant narrative was fighting against back-alley abortions. BIPOCQ targets had to deal with men of all ranges seeing us as prey, while those same men made a point of protecting the women within the dominant narrative. The stories of Aretha Franklin, Maya Angelou, and Oprah Winfrey were just the most prominent, but far from the only versions of violating children. BIPOCQ individuals are accustomed to imperial defenders being all too willing to take away the innocence of children, even as we have also fought for our childhoods.
The problem with abusers and colonizers is that once they got the taste for violating those without power, they refused to stop themselves even for those they were “supposed” to protect. People got so comfortable violating girls of color, beginning with their slaves and conquests, that they continued into thinking that all girls were fair game. That leads us to today, when we see that even after centuries of “stability” and the illusion of a “fair and just society,” the empire is still adamant about displaying its power on all levels. All we are seeing now is the collapse of our illusions that any of the masks this empire wore would last forever. One of my favorite scenes in “A Time to Kill” with Samuel L. Jackson and Matthew McConaughey is when McConaughey is describing everything that happened to Jackson’s daughter. He ended his closing statement with this phrase: “Now, imagine she’s white.”
* Image taken as a screenshot from here.
Chasing A Dying Empire 