Rihanna and the Defense Reflex

Most of what you’ve heard about this situation has been said before, but all of it warrants being said again. My friend Elizabeth Mendez Berry is better at articulating these layers concerns than most. She wrote “Love Hurts,” that noted article about domestic violence and hip hop that appeared Vibe four years ago and weathered a hailstorm of criticism in response. This is an interview that she did with illdoctrine.com on the implications of the Rihanna assault for the culture and for communities of color. More recently she wrote this on the  Chris Brown/Rihanna situation.

I would like to be surprised at the response to this Chris Brown-Rihanna situation but I’m not.  Even in the initial fog of gossip and rumor you could see the half-formed defenses of Chris Brown coming together. I’ve written previously about the way that a black man’s fall from public grace seems to strike a chord with black people in way that few other things can. Call it the Black Male Defense Reflex. It’s the reason that figures like Michael Jackson, Barry Bonds and OJ Simpson — men who never went out of their way to express solidarity for, or interest in, issues affecting the black community — nonetheless become rallying points when they find themselves in trouble.

I suspect that this need to defend black men, to assume that all accusation is false accusation is a legacy of lynching. Those decades of seeing black men dismembered, incinerated and hung on the flimsiest of suspicions led us to develop the social equivalent of an immune system, where we surround and protect black men at all costs from the pathogen of white racism.

This was crucial to our survival in the dark days of American history but at this point it’s become something like lupus — a disorder where your immune system begins to attack your own body. There is no victory to be had in reflexively defending black men, especially when the victim in this case is another member of the black community. There is no progress to be found by diminishing what he did or minimizing it’s impact. And contrary to the most feeble arguments I’ve heard, even if she did strike him first it wouldn’t justify an all out assault of the severity Brown is accused of.

Here are a few stats from the American Bar Association on this issue as it relates to black women:

African Americans African Americans, especially African American Women, suffer deadly violence from family members at rates decidedly higher than for other racial groups in the United States. However, it is observed that research concerning family violence among African Americans is inadequate.

• Overall, African Americans were victimized by intimate partners a significantly higher rates than persons of any other race between 1993 and 1998. Black females experienced intimate partner violence at a rate 35% higher than that of white females, and about 22 times the rate of women of other races. Black males experienced intimate partner violence at a rate about 62% higher than that of white males and about 22 times the rate of men of other races.
  

  Callie Marie Rennison. and Sarah Welchans, U.S. Dep’t of Just., NCJ 178247, Intimate Partner Violence (2000), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/ipv.txt

• African-American women experience significantly more domestic violence than White women in the age group of 20-24. Generally, Black women experience similar levels of intimate partner victimization in all other age categories as compared to White women, but experience slightly more domestic violence. (Estimates are provided from the National Crime Victimization Survey, which defines an intimate partner as a current or former spouse, girlfriend, or boyfriend. Violent acts include murder, rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault.)
  

  Callie Marie Rennison, U.S. Dep’t of Just., NCJ 187635, Intimate Partner Violence and Age of Victim, 1993-1999, at 4, (2001), available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/ipva99.htm

• Approximately 40% of Black women report coercive contact of a sexual nature by age 18.
  

  Africana Voices Against Violence, Tufts University, Statistics, 2002, www.ase.tufts.edu/womenscenter/peace/africana/newsite/statistics.htm

• The number one killer of African-American women ages 15 to 34 is homicide at the hands of a current or former intimate partner.
  

  Africana Voices Against Violence, Tufts University, Statistics, 2002, www.ase.tufts.edu/womenscenter/peace/africana/newsite/statistics.htm

• In a study of African-American sexual assault survivors, only 17% reported the assault to police.
  

  Africana Voices Against Violence, Tufts University, Statistics, 2002 www.ase.tufts.edu/womenscenter/peace/africana/newsite/statistics.htm

None of us wants to see another black man ensnared in the criminal justice system — but even more than that none of us should want to see the kind of behavior that makes it necessary.