The Black Male Contradiction on Twerking.
The story begins with a few women twerking in Texas.
At the end of the day, if the moral is the story is that if Rihanna was twerking in your restaurant to your DJ playing a song asking her to throw that ass in a circle, that you would laugh and smile, but when a regular woman does it, the standards change…then you need to re-evaluate your standards and take up a class on how to treat people equally.
Or maybe the story begins with a baby twerking. You know the way babies dance. All hip and happiness and a language all their own.
Either no serious attention is paid to how the child expresses that language until a certain age, or perhaps in some groups, there is serious regulation from the very beginning of childhood (a suffocating approach). The choice in between the two is unpredictable as anything. Parents and children have so many ways to do this — the way they dress, the language they use — but their tool of choice is most often their music and dance. After all, as Lisa Belkin of the Huffington Post said back at the height of twerking and its novelty, “the hardest thing a human child has to do in life is to separate themselves from the people who made them. To do that they must define who they are. Which means that first they must define who they are not.”
I find myself asking what do Black people as a collective understand about agency? What do Black people as a collective understand about image? What do black people as a collective understand about desire? What do Black people as a collective understand about media? What do Black people as a collective understand about sexuality? What do Black people as a collective understand about white people?
What do Black people as a collective understand about white people as a group? For me, an understanding of how intoxicating that power can be, insidious and full of contradictions. Especially for those of us who loved them, whether it be a white or whitewashed person of any kind. I often explain the frustration I feel talking to some Black people about womanist or seemingly feminist issues as the same resistance that I sense when talking to all white people about black people.
So I ask the same questions above again, and would also add what do black people as a collective understand about the collective? Collective, meaning ‘done by people acting as a group.’ Collective meaning cooperation, mutual aid and a common goal…
We know how white people move as a collective. We know where most white people above a certain age stand. But with all groups besides Black women voting for Trump more than the last election, including Black men, the political understanding as to how we know Black Americans move as a collective split somewhere, at the crossroads of class or gender or both.
Is that by design, choice or fate?
In Texas, Kevin Kelley of True Kitchen + Kocktails told black women to get the fuck out of his restaurant because they twerked 3 times in a row but has Black women as 75% of his customers. It’s always been like that. Perhaps the most annoying thing is the villain of the story has this admitted lack of self control, awareness and accountability, whoever the villain is for you. Because the villain is staring at itself.
Perhaps the most annoying part of the story is how good the black woman is at so many things. That is the issue for a lot of men when young people twerk: that it is “advertising a really good time” with someone inappropriate. There goes that lack of self control again. It’s blinding. I am a woman of my generation. I am a woman who loves hip hop and it has bit me. And then got mad at me for bleeding. She was my first love, in my beloved blue mp3 player. She helped me appreciate my body more, my spirit, my soul, my health. Each year, women and trans people, including nonbinary people, in hip hop are inching more towards claiming their stake.
After all, the Black American experience is the blend of countries with a sore past, and the hardest thing a child or a culture could do in life is to separate themselves from the people who made them. To do that, they must define who they are. Which means that first they must define who they are not. This can be messy.
Kevin Kelley made it clear that he understands that. He knows what he thinks he is not. And for black women, the experience is the same.
I believe that a lot of people (in the hip hop community and in life) never get support for their sexual assault or domestic violence experiences. Likewise, I believe a lot of people harm people, regardless of gender. Sometimes, as a collective, we model the oppressive structures that made us, both African and American culturally and personally. All of these things don’t have to be unpacked in unison. After all, according to Joan Morgan in the 90s, “the enormous task of saving our lives falls on nobody else’s shoulders but ours.” Saving our lives and preserving our freedom despite our own programmed glitches into colonialist structures is hard. When we add traumatic experiences to the mix, like domestic violence, homicide, isolation, grief, sexual assault and everyday acts of racism, which have only exploded during a global pandemic, things only gets harder.
The thing about the #MeToo movement and straight Black women is that when Black women violate someone, it is treated as an inexcusable incident but when a Black woman is violated, there is something to be said about a systematic pattern of violence against Black people. Black men find that frustrating but fail to remember, there should always be something said about the systematic patterns of violence against oppressed people if we are to see a shift towards harm prevention and intervention. Otherwise, we are just standing and looking around, shuffling blame onto different ground.
Instead of surviving more horror, we could live through new growth. It must start with our children. I’m scared that re-imagining schoolhouses will neglect to teach Black children that they belong to themselves, their family and their community, in that order of importance and priority. They need to know that their body is their own and in order to protect it, they must love it by knowing their worth. They need to know that everyone is also afforded that same right. It has to be taught at home and reinforced by educational tools.
Speaking out is the next part. People are not going to like you for it. That is okay. You don’t have to like or be liked by everybody anyway. Feeling the sadness of being a part of a group of people that has most violently and repeatedly created horrific circumstances is not fun but neither is accepting that it is a part of you. Let them not like you. You already share a country.
When it comes to speaking up, follow your intuition. Prioritize truth telling over safety, comfort or fear sometimes. Even when you don’t think you can. Starting the conversation is better than not having it so things can remain “normal.” There is no need for things to remain that way.
