"Our awareness of the prevalence and magnitude of sexual assault has outpaced the systems that expose and adjudicate it. It’s incredibly Difficult to match these two things up. But for activism to carry the authority of journalism—or for journalism with an activist conclusion to work—there are basic practices that can’t be set aside." Jia Jolentino from "Is the End of the Era of the Inappropriate Literary Man" published in Jezebel March 2016
If you read this, please remember this was written in March of 2016. Obama was still President. No one thought Trump could be really be President then. Cosby, a black man, was arguably the most prominent public face of rape and sexual assault. That he is black is important but not definitive, his crimes are far more important than his race, which is the difficult thing. The thing we may shirk from. The thing that in its horror still demands a bit of nuance, precision, and detail to navigate.
This Article here is one of the articles I have read in the last few years, that I appreciated the most. Published in Jezebel. It discusses the relationship between journalism, activism, and sexual assault/sexual assault allegations in light of the specifics surrounding Thomas Sayers Ellis and the women he interacted with. The issue rocked a small poetry world who is somehow centered in the black. People who know Thomas, the women, and his past, responded in different ways.
For me the main point of this article is its sophistication not only clarifies the specifics, but also, by example, highlights the limited capacity of the "black" to publish sophisticated journalistic inquiries about such matters. Ellis intersects with the black. This is obvious, as obvious as the fact that Cosby does too. It is an intersection that does not simply fall into clear binary lines-outside of the most important fact, that women are abused and this is often ignored by our society.
The first testimony on Vida's Web-Site began, " I met him at Bread Loaf. I thought he was real cool. I liked his pro-black vibe. Like many people, I got trapped in his "white people are the enemy game."
The Free Black Space response is to monitor the intersections of the "black" with current trends and in the news. We are news not news. One way to speak of our approach is an approach that gets at the thing that reads the news itself. The black is always tricky. It is a point that becomes evident with Ellis, or Cosby, or Birth of a Nation, or even Emmitt Till and the places where the intersect with the rape culture and systematic mistreatment of women in our culture.
But here's the deal, every time I thought about an appropriate response, I realized how difficult it was. Some of that was a result of my own issues and trepidation; but part of it was a question of limited resources. We are a blog. We are free. There is a point where journalism is work that is regimented, deadline, and in sync with the current times. Its a difficult thing to do, sometimes, when it is not your job-the way you make your read and butter.
A proper response from a journalistic or activist perspective is not simply a matter of resolve, proper views, or craft. To some degree it is a matter of capital, infrastructure, and institutional power. Some of our responses to matters that intersect with issues on the bottom of a binary are dictated by a quick search for the appropriate hierarchy that can be played like a Trump card in the discussion. As individuals, but more importantly as a community, we often lack the time and infrastructure to investigate and deal with the complete picture. It is a sign of our social media, tweetable, trending times. As the country began to move into position for a better and more thorough confrontation with its rape culture and failure to protect the right's of women-Ellis and Cosby were part of a beginning trend. But what begins in the black can easily be considered insignificant. It's underground, off radar. The Ellis accusations/sexual misconduct, were completely in sync with where we are now.
Jia Jolentino and Jezebel here actually renewed my faith in journalism (at least for a brief moment). I was so thankful to see a thorough approach that could not be reduced to a for or against position. This article should have been published by some form of black media. Given all the intelligent and talented writers we have; the situation was an opportunity for us to struggle with the issue and deal with the difficult. If we had published it, we would have been ahead of the curve. That was the opportunity in the tragedy from a writer's perspective. But it is a difficult thing to do without capital and infrastructure. Some of our responses to accusations and current trends are based on time, our jobs, and the limited commitment we can give to such matters. It is hard and time consuming to write, engage complexity, and unravel the knots {as the Tao says).
In retrospect, what came to light with Thomas was ahead of a larger national trend. There is a difficult clarity in this article. Jolentino wrote the article I wanted to write. I am shameless in my admiration and envy. But am I also as admiring and envious of Jezebel. Feminist media is more sophisticated and ideologically complex than that of the black. Where the black too often rides the wave of the hip and the predetermined conclusion within a binary, feminist writing and scholarship has a more sophisticated bandwidth, which includes institutions, sophisticated media, profound theorists, and activist mobilization.
I know it is hard for the Black to imagine that. We respond to some issues with our gut of right and wrong, because we don't have time to do the work. There's something easy about the black public discourse that always leads to the same conclusions. Many black writer's and intellectuals are trapped in a maze where the codes of knowledge confine them to destinations that some of there work may not support. Editors and systems of power demand they operate within the limits. This point is about the diversity of the publishing industry and how it effects the production of our literature and representations in the media. We imagine that diversity is a problem, but haven't fully discussed how the lack of diversity currently shapes our media presence. What happened with Thomas Sayers Ellis needed someone dispatched from the black to engage in investigative journalism on the matter. Th article here is longer than most of what I read about the issue in other places. The title itself gets at some of the difficulty. The length is the clue. So much converged in that moment, that at this point may even be predictive.
Caution is required to talk about such things. I am of the opinion that Cosby, then Thomas, then Trump, then
