When The Mixed Black “Slut” Goes To Washington

Let's reframe this shame and harmful legacy

I promise these dispatches are not going to be defenses of the people I am voting for.

But what I DID say I would do is look at the stories that make up These American Lives we lead and there is a big one that pops up under new management over and over again especially when Mixed Black women decide to run for the things and ask the country to give them power.

And the story I really don’t like is the one most recently known as “Jo and Ho.”

Jo and Ho is not a clever new accusation. It is like all other accusations and the story no one wants to claim: the story millions of people have in their heads about Black women as hypersexual, promiscuous, baby-making, five-baby daddy-having, cheating, scheming, and mistress-making Black women. Now Jo is no longer running for president, but the supposed Ho is and that means we’re going to hear some wild and terrible things.

What most people don’t know is that a lot of the eventual power and reach of the feminist movement came from Black women in the 1800s who rose and declared their virtue, sexual ethics, morality, and bodily autonomy as real, sacred, and worthy of defense.

They were tired of generations of widespread, socially accepted lies that made them a category of women who were allowed to be abused, harassed, and assaulted without legal recourse.

The backbone of the American economy, where trillions of its dollars (today) were initially made to build what we see today, depended on White men’s free access to Black women’s bodies. They could not be raped, because they were not legal entities with agency or free will. They could not be harassed, because they were not a protected class of ladies. They had no choice but to have forced conceptions and births to provide more slaves when the international slave trade was abolished.

For feminism to assert and legalize the idea of a woman as a human being with legal, physical, and political rights that were not tied to a random man’s assessment of her character, Black women had to first organize against the lies that had been levied against them specifically.

So this round, where everyone whispers their accusations or nods at the supposed fact that Madame Vice President Kamala Devi Harris is where she is because she slept with some men, is old. So old. We’ve heard this before.

What is funny is what people don’t hear themselves saying when they say things like that.

So I made a helpful list.

1: If Black women get power in America, it is primarily because they must have sexually used men.

2: A Black woman is not good enough to get into office, so she has to sleep with someone.

3: White men withhold positions of power until Black women sleep with them!

4: For a Black woman to win a position, it must be because she cheated or took the easy way out. She could not have had a policy, platform, or education worth voting for.

5: Black women in power ought to account to me for what they do with their sexuality.

6: It is my business to know who Kamala Harris slept with at any given point in her career.

7: We all know how Black women really are.

What is beautiful about this ugly history is the reminder that when some of us rise, we have the power to bring others along with us. That one distinct group and their experience can mutually connect with another social group and together achieve respect and freedom.

What is sad about this ugly history is that we don’t know it, and so many women are left with the stain and the shame of these sexual whispers and stereotypes that have rebranded for our current time.

I think we should refuse the shame, and place it where it belongs.

If someone wants to claim that an educated, intelligent, and hard-working woman is where she is because some man insisted she have sex with him, that’s a shameful and small imagination that should be pointed out.

If someone wants to pretend that four centuries of abuse and rape of specific women in this country has no bearing on how we still see those women, that’s being being willfully ignorant of reality and mean.

If someone is okay with asking women to bear the shame of an alleged job system in which they only advance because men coerce them into sexual relations, a nasty and sad system to defend. Where is the rage for the men who make that a reality?

Ida B Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, and the thousands of women who gathered around them ushered in a time where a Black woman could vote, own property, make decisions, and live as a full human being despite the original founding fathers’ limitations and legalities.

That time is now. That time is new. That time is threatening to people who have not examined the stories their people and their culture passed down to them - subtle and ugly- about people who as recently as the 1900s became free. So it is no surprise that the old stories that worked and the old shame that once sent women scurrying and bowing their heads to not be seen is back.

And to that, dear reader, in the words of Taylor Swift, I say I think we’ve seen this film before, and we didn’t like the ending. In the tradition of the founding mothers like Ida and Anna and Mary, go forth and change it.

And in the spirit of the great cloud of witnesses, of the women who stepped forward with their stories, their ideas, their hopes, their ambitions, and their convictions, and in the words of some Vice President’s niece: We in here now.

These kind of accusations have held power once, but they don’t have to anymore.