My thoughts abt this are hewed to my thoughts abt systemic racism. It's not that the system is broken, it's that the system emboldens and promotes the fallacy of "genius" men and the women they desire and jack off to in the guise of muse. rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features… via @RollingStone
There is always a racial element never discussed when it comes to these high-profile men at the center of the #MeToo movement —their desires and muses center around young white women and girls who embody a purity that black women and girls are not perceived as embodying.
I remember reading Lupita Nyong’o's Op-Ed in the NYT abt her experience w Harvey, the chosen-ness of it that was layered throughout. The entire "What could this be? How could I get this lucky? How do I navigate this terrain as a black woman?" It resonated. nytimes.com/2017/10/19/opi…
Reminded of my experience at Charlie Rose, but also w the guy who assaulted me years before, had invited me to NYC to interview for an internship at CBS that never existed, feeling chosen and lucky that a powerful white man would see the value and/or appeal of a black girl.
In America, black girls are degraded and commodified and killed. We are told we are not pretty or valuable and shamed for being smart or ambitious. When the most powerful men in the system take an interest, it's a sudden, mind-boggling negotiation with our psyches.
To be an arrow in the quiver of white men is an intoxicating, exploitative trap. But even more devastating is the way we feel after we realize we weren't an arrow, or desired but the manifestation of a long-held, deeply exoticized fantasy, see: Lupita in #TwelveYearsASlave
And this is just us as girls, young women. When we grow into black woman adulthood we become mammies, untrainable bodies that missed the mark, will never meet the standard of thin white women beauty, the hips offend, we die in childbirth.
All to say, #MeToo is a movement founded by a black woman that only came to light and commercial credibility when a white woman got mad. Think about that.
