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If you haven’t seen Ava DuVernay’s 13th, drop whatever you are doing (maybe finish reading this piece first), go find a screen with Netflix, and watch it.
The film tells the story of how black men were deliberately portrayed as violent criminals in order to institute the system of social control we now call mass incarceration. The precursors of mass incarceration are slavery and segregation. Movies like Birth of a Nation, television shows like Cops, academic theories like ‘super predator’ and tough on crime political campaigns from Richard Nixon through Bill Clinton put the ball on the tee, draconian policies hit it into a nightmare.
13th is interspersed with profound insights from (mostly) black academics, lawyers and activists. Here is the media activist Malkia Cyril: “You have been educated in public deliberately over years, over decades, to believe that black men in particular and black people in general are criminals. I want to be clear, because I’m not just saying that white people believe this.… Black people also believe this and are terrified, of our own selves.
Here is the legal activist Deborah Small: “For me, what’s more disturbing is the degree to which black people bought into that. Many black communities began to support policies which actually criminalized their own.”
When the problem is laid out like that, the solution feels clear. In order to defeat the vicious racism of mass incarceration, we need to fight against the image of black men as violent criminals.
And then I had a heart-stopping thought: Is this one of the reasons that R. Kelly is still at large?
In other words, did the very reasonable concern about contributing to the pernicious "black male as violent criminal" stereotype play a role in allowing R. Kelly to victimize dozens of black women over many years?
It feels to me that most diversity progressive narratives about why R. Kelly is still not in jail center on how our society devalues black women, viewing them as not important enough to save.
In the most widely reported line of his interview about R. Kelly, Chance the Rapper stated: “Maybe I didn’t care because I didn’t value the accusers’ stories because they were black women.”
I absolutely believe that is true.
But these days, making a confession like that fits a bit too neatly into our preferred framework of wokeness - #MeToo, #TimesUp, intersectionality, men finally getting it, etc. – and is therefore a good way to win yourself applause.
But the larger statement includes Chance offering an insight that was less widely reported: “We’re programmed to really be hypersensitive to black male oppression.”
That’s Chance taking a real, shall we say, chance, and putting his finger on a truly challenging tension. Namely, did the absolutely justified sensitivity to black male oppression allow for a situation that facilitated, in the R. Kelly case, black female oppression?
The cultural critic Jamilah Lemieux gives voice to this same point: “When someone like R. Kelly gets in trouble, there’s this knee-jerk instinct to protect him from the system.”
She goes on to say that R. Kelly is not the first famous black man to try to abuse this well-intentioned instinct to protect as a way to cover-up behavior that hurt women, mostly black women. Justice Clarence Thomas famously called the 1991 sexual harassment proceedings against him a "high-tech lynching," language that helped rally African-American support to his cause.
This is all to say that it is undoubtedly true that if the girls were white, R. Kelly would very possibly be in jail.
But here’s another thing that’s likely true, and probably a bit tougher for diversity progressives to swallow: if R. Kelly was white, he would also probably be in jail.
How do diversity progressives ensure that righteous activism against the system of racist oppression called mass incarceration does not mean ignoring the predatory behavior of an R. Kelly, even when he happens to be black?
