Black Girl Dangerous’ BBHMM Defense and Rape Apologia

by Robert Stephens on July 6, 2015

Last week, Rihanna debuted a video for her single Bitch Better Have My Money. Black Girl Dangerous founder Mia McKenzie, responding to unnamed “white feminists” who apparently charged Rihanna with misogyny, defends Rihanna’s video in an article titled This Is What Rihanna’s BBHMM Video Says About Black Women, White Women and Feminism. She acknowledges “there are images of a woman being kidnapped, held hostage, and even hung upside down from the ceiling while topless,” but her biggest takeaway is that “I see a black woman putting her own well-being above the well-being of a white woman.” For McKenzie, BBHMM’s violent revenge fantasy is an opportunity to castigate “white feminists” who “put their own needs and well-being above those of black women every day and call it ‘feminism.’”

I don’t want to get into a conversation about the proper interpretation of the video. Like any piece of art we can look at it in any number of diverging and conflicting ways. Diverging conclusions about art are one thing, but political arguments require a higher level of scrutiny. To McKenzie’s credit, I recognize the virulence of White women’s racism. I’ve experienced it firsthand. I can also empathize with McKenzie’s desire to defend another Black woman against White women’s claims of misogyny when White women have for so long “been surviving on [Black women’s] suffering for hundreds of years” as McKenzie put it. But the line of reasoning McKenzie employs as she attempts to defend the video from criticism has serious and, historically, disastrous implications.

Is Sexual Violence Against White Women Insurrectionary?

Sexual violence against White women as a means of asserting power in a racist society is not a new idea. Let’s begin with a quote from expelled Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice:

Somehow I arrived at the conclusion that, as a matter of principle, it was of paramount importance for me to have an antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white women… Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values and that I was defiling his women — and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man had used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.

Cleaver justifies his belief that raping White women was “an insurrectionary act” against White male authority, in part, by appealing to the history of White male violence against Black women. Yet he also renounces his prior view, confessing, “looking back I see that I was in a frantic, wild and completely abandoned frame of mind.”

Mia McKenzie advances a very similar logic in her article, but unlike Cleaver, she has yet to realize her error. McKenzie defends Rihanna’s video on the grounds that its revenge fantasy violence — where a White woman is kidnapped, drugged, and sexually abused — can be excused because “if a white woman has to suffer some so that she, a black woman, can survive, so be it.” Similar to Cleaver, McKenzie justifies her position by drawing on a history of White violence against Black women.

White women have been unapologetically violent towards black women for centuries. They’ve used the power of the state, of the police, of the courts, of the media, and of individual white men to harm black people, including black women, time and time again. They are as harmful to us as white men are.

I’m all for emphasizing the history of White women’s overt and belligerent racism. White women joined the Klan of their own volition, as a means of advancing their interests as women. White women actively participated in the lynching of Black people, most notably by lying about rape. White women, wrapped in the cloak of motherhood, were vicious opponents to school integration, going as far as to spit on Black children and calling them niggers as they attempted to enter White schools. Every step of the way, White women — as a class — have been the co-architects of White supremacist colonialism.

Yet, in no way does White women’s complicity in White supremacy justify sexual abuse against them. Any rhetoric to the contrary is the mark of sadism, not liberation. This point goes far deeper than McKenzie’s post. Over the years, a small number of Black radicals have entertained the fantasy of sexual violence as liberatory. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. As Cleaver writes about interracial rape as insurrection, he quotes Black poet Amiri Baraka’s quip in Black Dada Nihilismus, “A cult of death need of the simple striking arm under the street lamp. The cutters from under their rented earth. Come up, black dada nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.” Baraka’s revenge fantasy is Cleaver’s reality as he claims, “I have lived those lines.”

Black Political History Rejects Politicized Sexual Violence

To be clear, McKenzie states “I’m not saying it’s okay for black women to harm white women.” She also implores us to understand the video as a “creative and socio-political vision.” But the vision that McKenzie reads into the video is closer to Cleaver’s rape fantasy than anything remotely liberatory. I don’t really want to rehash the details, but the White woman didn’t even steal Rihanna’s money; the husband did. Even if we take McKenzie’s analysis for granted, and concede that the White woman was culpable in some way, how would she explain the fact that only the White woman — and not the husband — was stripped and sexually abused?

McKenzie’s correct, White women have harmed Black people in concert with White men, but Rihanna’s video makes no such allusions. Within the context of the video’s narrative as I understand it, the White woman was merely a passive beneficiary-cum-victim. She was attacked not in retaliation for her own misdeeds, but rather as a means to harm the White man. McKenzie’s attempt to politically legitimize this narrative is no different than the underlying logic of Cleaver’s rape spree.

The socio-political vision within the vast majority of Black political history has, without reservation, rejected politicized sexual violence in any capacity. During the Civil War, White men abandoned their plantations for the battlefield, leaving White women under what Frederick Douglass describes as the “absolute custody” of Black slaves. Douglass writes, “During all those long four years of terrible conflict, when the Negro had every opportunity to commit the abominable crime now alleged against him, there was never a single instance of such crime reported or charged against him. He was never accused of assault, insult, or an attempt to commit an assault upon any white woman in the whole South.”

In the decades following slavery, Black women, in coordination with Black men, testified in public forums and demanded accountability for White rapists, laying the foundation for mass civil rights movements. Danielle McGuire’s ‘It Was like All of Us Had Been Raped’: Sexual Violence, Community Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle chronicles this history.

Black women’s testimony and the willingness of black leaders to protect black womanhood must be viewed as part of [post World War II] resistance movements… For example, in Montgomery, Alabama, the organizational infrastructure that made the Montgomery bus boycott possible in 1955 stemmed in part from decades of black women’s activism and a history of gendered political appeals to protect black women from sexual assault.

The sexual revenge fantasies espoused by Cleaver and Baraka are in no way representative of Black politics in the past or present. When William Styron attempted to recast Nat Turner’s story as a sexual revenge fantasy, Black academics rose up and mercilessly rejected it. For generations, Black people have gone to great lengths to expose and reject sexual violence, particularly its use as a political weapon. That’s the legacy we must uphold, and any deviation — no matter how small — must be denounced.

After returning from exile, Cleaver eventually became a Republican. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest to see McKenzie follow a similar path. Even now, the petty-bourgeois foundations of McKenzie’s money over [white] bitches commentary would be right at home at CPAC. In a recent article, former Black Panther Elaine Brown claims Cleaver “individually did more to try to destroy the Party than the U.S. government” and he was “in the Party for no more than a year or so before being expelled.” By the time the Black Panthers separated from Cleaver, it was too late. I hope we don’t make the same mistake with Mia McKenzie.