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I'll be honest; I've been looking at singer R. Kelly cross-eyed for a long time, as much as I like such songs as "Step in the Name of Love" and I believe I Can Fly." I was always put off by his relationship with the late singer Aaliyah, with whom he had a bogus "marriage" in 1994, when she was 15. So I was not among those who cheered last Friday's verdict clearing Kelly of child pornography charges related to a videotape that allegedly showed Kelly having sex with a 13-year-old girl. According to news reports, some jurors said that they did not buy the Kelly defense team argument that he was not the man in the tape, but they could not be certain whether the female in the tape was the 13-year-old in question. The tape is about a decade old, and the young woman who was Kelly's alleged sex partner did not testify.
For bloggers and one very irate group of black men, the fact that Kelly's career has been barely affected by the trial and related controversy reflects a disregard for the lives of black girls and women. For example, here's Arlene Jones:
We seem to be in some sort of trance when we can justify a grown man
not only having sex with a child but recording it as well. It also says
a lot about all those who went out of their way to buy a copy of the
tape or scoured the internet to see it there.
Brittany Jackson grew up on Kelly's music, and believes she has seen its malign influence first hand:
[W]hen we’d walk down school hallways, we’d see boys
grabbing girls’ butts or saying something sexual. I think a lot of the
blame goes back to Kelly because he was particularly good at mixing the
sacred with the profane.
Miss Yaminah says that the sexual abuse of teenaged girls is a much bigger problem than we like to admit:
As much as we hate to admit it, R. Kelly’s case is more common than it
is an anomaly. I think the case is shocking to people because there is
actual evidence, a graphic depiction, of how a young woman is stripped
of her innocence. But it doesn’t start with the act. It starts in the
mind. The sacred feminine is not respected in our community because it
is not understood, and unfortunately, young girls being abused and
exploited is one of the consequences.
There is a group of black men who are inclined to agree. Contributors to the book, Be A Father to Your Child (Soft Skull Press, 2008), they have launched an online petition that they are asking black males to sign as a gesture of commitment to protecting girls and women from violence and exploitation. It is reproduced below with the permission of one of its authors, Spelman College History professor William Jelani Cobb.
Statement of Black Men Against the Exploitation of Black Women
Six years have gone by since we first heard the allegations
that R. Kelly had filmed himself having sex with an underage girl.
During that time we have seen the videotape being hawked on street
corners in Black communities, as if the dehumanization of one of our
own was not at stake. We have seen entertainers rally around him and
watched his career reach new heights despite the grave possibility that
he had molested and urinated on a 13-year old girl. We saw African
Americans purchase millions of his records despite the long history of
such charges swirling around the singer. Worst of all, we have
witnessed the sad vision of Black people cheering his acquittal with a
fervor usually reserved for community heroes and shaken our heads at
the stunning lack of outrage over the verdict in the broader Black
community.Over these years, justice has been delayed and it has been denied.
Perhaps a jury can accept R. Kelly's absurd defense and find
"reasonable doubt" despite the fact that the film was shot in his home
and featured a man who was identical to him. Perhaps they doubted that
the young woman in the courtroom was, in fact, the same person featured
in the ten year old video. But there is no doubt about this: some young
Black woman was filmed being degraded and exploited by a much older
Black man, some daughter of our community was left unprotected, and
somewhere another Black woman is being molested, abused or raped and
our callous handling of this case will make it that much more difficult
for her to come forward and be believed. And each of us
