How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(24)
I get where it comes from. We were all fed the same thing. As inspirational as we found Dre’s music, Snoop’s flow, and Cube’s criticism, an articulated fear and hatred of black women was part of what made them so nationally attractive. Like nearly all of our lyrical pedagogues, the MCs that came a generation before Kanye practiced a form of spectacular psychological and/or emotional dismantling of black women passed down by the practices, policies, and patriarchy of America.
Chuck D and Flav told us all that women were “blind to the facts” of who they were because they watched the wrong television shows. Slick Rick warned us to pre-emptively treat women like prostitutes since all they did was “hurt and trample.” Too Short painted the freakiest of tales and constantly reminded us that the correct pronunciation of the words “woman” and/or “girl” was “bitch.”
Big Daddy Kane and Nice and Smooth let us know that no matter what we heard from Too Short, pimping was never easy. The Geto Boys showed us how to kick a woman in the ass if she claimed to be pregnant with our baby. Before we elected a modern Falstaff with hoish tendencies to the White House, MC Ren taught us how to gang-rape the fourteen-year-old daughter of a preacher and sodomize any women “saying that they never would suck a dick.”
So yeah, that’s what we were taught, but at what point does listening to artists obsessively encourage manipulative relationships, sociopathic deception, and irresponsible sex with women doubling as accessorized pussy become not just destructive, but really, really boring? If Kanye West won’t, or maybe even can’t, explore the meat of that question, isn’t he still too great to exploit it?
That’s some of what I wanted to tell Les after he said that thing about treating females like cats. Instead of saying any of it, though, I just hovered over him in his runaway spot, feeling extra good about myself for wanting to say any of it at all.
A month or so later, I sat in front of a computer screen in New York and wrote a piece critiquing both Les for reducing my grandma to a cat and Kanye for the destructive gender politics in his art. I ended the piece with what I thought was a harpoon to Les’s gizzard: “I should have asked Les if he deserved to ever have his hand held by a woman.”
The essay generally, and that sentence specifically, helped me run away from the truth, from reckoning, from meaningful change.
I don’t want to run any more.
I am better at fucking up the lives of a few women who have unconditionally loved me than Les is at lying and Kanye West is at making brilliant American music. And even worse than the bruising parts of Kanye’s art, the paranoid femiphobia of HaLester Myers, the pimpish persona of Stevie J, the abusive gender politics of Paul Ryan and Todd Akin, and the thousands of confused brothers out there who think “misogyny” is the newest Italian dish at Olive Garden, I have intimately fucked up women’s lives while congratulating myself for not being Kanye West, HaLester Myers, Stevie J, Paul Ryan, Todd Akin, or the brothers who like that misogyny with a few breadsticks.
Even before this essay, I wanted the fact that I’ve read, and taken notes on, everything ever published by Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Imani Perry, dream hampton, and Rebecca Walker to prove to everyone—especially women I’m interested in—that I’m way too thoughtful to be a dickhead. I wanted folks to know that I’ve made my male students reckon with being born potential rapists, and that I’ve defended black girls in need of abortions from rabid pro-lifers at abortion clinics in Mississippi. I wanted women to know that I was a man who would always ask, “Are you okay? Are you sure you want to do this?”
I couldn’t wait to tell some men—but only when in the presence of women—how sexism, like racism and that annoying American inclination to cling to innocence, was as present in our blood as oxygen. When asked to prove it, I’d dutifully spit some sorry-sounding mash-up of Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, and Mark Anthony Neal. But just like them, I never said that I know I’m sexist, misogynist, and typical because I have fucked up the lives of some women in ways that they would never fuck up my life. I never said that I’ve used black feminism as a convenient shield, as a wonderful sleep aid, and as a rusted shank to damage others who would do everything to avoid damaging me.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that. And of course there are all kinds of qualifications and conditions I want to explore. But beneath all of that conditional bullshit is a lot of ugly.
This is what I refused to admit, not only when I looked down at Les for making his comment about females and cats that night, but also the following day, Christmas Day, when Les sat across the room from me in Grandma’s pink throne and wouldn’t wake up.
Grandma looked up at me with a fear I’d never seen in her eyes as I rubbed melting ice cubes on Les’s temple and his bottom lip.
As Les was laid out on a stretcher and lifted into the back of an ambulance, his eyes still didn’t open, but huge tears dripped slowly into his ears. With his eyes still closed, Les cried that cry that comes from way deeper than hurt.
He cried all the way to the hospital.
After we were at the hospital a while, the doctors said Les’s blood alcohol level was almost .35. He had nearly drank himself to death. When Grandma went in the room with him, she told Les that she had a strap in her purse and she was going to whup his ass if he ever scared her like that again.
When Grandma left the room, I hugged her as tight as I could. She kept saying into my chest, “I don’t know why, Kie. I just don’t even know.” Then I went in and gripped Les’s thick fingers. He mumbled something about a “seven” and clutched the front of his overalls, which were now drooping around his belly button.