Our Fault

Anyhoo, later in the day, before I went the bed I did a little channel surfing and lo and behold who did I see?  Chris fucking Brown on Jimmy Fallon.

Somehow we all seemed to have forgotten the fact that this dude beat the shit out of Rhianna.  This wasn’t just some girl with a bloody swollen face.  This wasn’t a groupie or some chick that got lippy in the line at Burger King.  This was Rhianna!  She was a beautiful young woman with a great career in a high profile relationship with this dude and there she was, looking like Rodney King.

What was almost worse than the bruises on her face was the look of shame she had in the photos.  It was the look of defeat.

I know Rhianna has claimed to have moved on but here’s the thing.  Abused/abuser dynamics are a situation most of us do not understand fully.  What I do know is that the abused often stay because they feel so devalued that maybe they can’t see a better situation so it is up to all of us to let the abused and abuser know when some shit is not okay.

You know who was well aware of the Chris Brown and Rhianna incident?  Ray and Janay Rice.

This fact (yeah, I’m calling it fact) is what leads me to the next step.  It is all of our fault that Janay got knocked the fuck out and left on that cold casino floor because we continue to play crazy about domestic violence in this country.

Oh, when we see it on the news we go “Oh, that’s terrible.”  Then we turn the damned channel.  We even think it’s kind of entertaining.  We watch shows like SVU and are enthralled by the violence perpetrated on women and cheer the dectectives not realizing that the women are cast in inherently subservient positions as perpetual victims (Detective Olivia Benson not withstanding).  It also reinforces the idea that some men just can’t help themselves which is just as counterproductive.

That’s fiction but every weekend on 20/20 or 48 hours we are regaled by tales of some husband murdering his wife and/or kids because he hooked up with some stripper from Tampa with perfect D cups.

The one show that shows women in the same light is “Snapped” where some woman that has had enough beating and cheating finally takes the old .380 to her husband’s head instead of her own.  But I submit to you, that’s not snapping, that’s self-defense.

As a Black man I understand what constant mental pressure can do to your mental state.  In extreme conditions of pressure your only thought is release so I won’t begrudge anyone, man or woman, that chooses freedom over that level of oppression.

But Ray and Janay aren’t a TV show.  As she pointed out, this is their lives and I’m worried about them both. 

We have an abuser with no job, stuck at home dealing with the relationship that lead to the end of his dream.  We have a victim stuck at home with her disgraced husband that is being scapegoated for an endemic problem in greater society.  If they don’t get the proper help it would be like pouring gasoline on someone for smoking. 

I wish their families would have stood in and said that there can’t be a wedding until they are in a healthier place than they were the night before the elevator incident.  Maybe there was too much money involved, maybe they also come from a reference of violence.  Hell, maybe they did get successful help but still, I worry.

It seemed like they were ready to sweep this under the rug just like the media will if Ray never plays another down.  As a nation, we can’t allow this to happen.  Just because it will eventually fade from the TMZ driven media cycles, it can’t be removed from barber shops, hair salons and more importantly from our schools where young boys and young girls learn about how relationships work.

Most importantly, us mommies and daddies out there have to show our children what a loving relationship looks like.  We have to let our kids know that it isn’t okay to be an abuser or the abused and until we make progress on this front, every woman that covers a shiner in concealer or shields her bruised ribs will have every single one of us to blame because we can do better… and we don’t.

Let’s all remember that Ray Rice got a 2-game suspension for knocking his wife out, then he got kicked off the team for his real crime: Embarrassing the NFL.  Had that second video not surfaced he would be on the field this Sunday.  Personally I think they should have trotted him out thereu and made him wear a pink jersey every game so we never forget and that people would be forced to talk to their children as to why.