Blame Culture

*potential trigger warning for sexual assault survivors

Jordan Davis was murdered for playing loud music.

A recent piece in The Root breaks from traditional black convention on “preparing young black men for the world”. In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s murder, the Rules of blackness are a much talked about rite of passage for black children with special emphasis for young black men:

•  When pulled over by the police, keep both hands on the steering wheel until asked for ID, then move slowly and narrate your actions
•   Pull your pants up and take off your hoodie
•  “Yes sir” and “no sir”, politeness to the extreme is essential not a nicety.

This list is not exhaustive but you get the gist. The piece inspects these “protective rules” and finds them lacking. At the heart of these rules, she maintains, is teaching young blacks to submit. 

Submission is a heavy word. Submit to some unspoken but innately understood idea of what a threat is and contort yourself in an attempt to avoid being that. 

If only he’d taken off his hoodie, hadn’t had tattoos, hadn’t been playing loud music…then he’d be safe and alive and wouldn’t have looked suspicious, would have celebrated his birthday last week, wouldn’t have been murdered in a parking lot. 

Seldom do we question the faulty premise. Florida’s flawed “Stand Your Ground” law and repugnant acquittal by a jury didn’t push the issue. Didn’t stop blaming the victim long enough to prosecute his murderer. 

My sister was conflicted by the Root’s article. I think the troubling part was theory vs. practice. A black man should be able to don a hoodie and go for a run. He should. But who volunteers to test that theory? Do you want your loved one to push that issue?

Surviving a racist society as a black person is parallel to surviving rape culture as a woman. They aren’t the same but they have common threads. 

“Why was she there?” I, and the rest of my classmates, asked. 

The Sociology of Deviant Behavior class was discussing a hypothetical rape at a fraternity party. “Where were her friends?” “She had to know being there wasn’t safe.” Our minds churned out questions thinly veiling blame…of the victim.

I cringe to think of it now. I am horrified to remember how entirely and obliviously I was entrenched in the assumptions of rape culture, in the blame of rape survivors (mostly women, although not entirely) for the abuses heaped upon them. In that moment I didn’t see anything wrong with our line of questioning or the way we were considering the situation. Our discussion mirrored every discussion I’d ever heard on the subject, directly or indirectly, on television, informally in high school and now my early years in college.

And then Prof. Hunt asked, “Why are you focused on the perceived faults of the victim? If I told you she was robbed would you ask the same questions?”

I wracked my brain, turning over what he’d asked and trying to find absolution for my views. But I couldn’t. I was a part of the problem. In that moment my freshman year in college, I began to reorient my thinking. No more double standards for victims or thresholds of blame. A rapist was a criminal, not the raped. 

That conversation spurred me to be vocal, to question the narratives surrounding rape and behavior. I remember a close friend of mine comfortably assured that victims of rape were responsible for what happens to them.

“What if it were your sister?” I asked.

“I don’t have a sister?”

“What about your favorite cousin?”

“She wouldn’t be stupid enough to be in that situation.”

He was adamant in his understanding of rape and I was just as adamant in trying to dismantle it. Adamant in trying to bring about that moment of clarity I’d had in Prof. Hunt’s class years earlier. I’m not sure I was successful but I’ve never stopped having that conversation. Never stopped asking how a victim is somehow to blame for her/his attacker. 

If we hold to that logic of victim blame then robbery victims are to blame for having stuff worthy of stealing and murder victims for having a life to take in the first place. It becomes a theater of the absurd.

I still didn’t go to frat parties alone. I am still mindful of where I walk (my sophomore year I didn’t argue with my boyfriend when he’d send a cab for me instead of walking the short distance home from campus when I worked late at the paper). I do not see culpability in someone who doesn’t take those precautions but I haven’t removed them from my arsenal. 

Ultimately, the rules we put into place are a mental protection. We blame the victims because it gives us a sense of control where, in fact, we have very little. If she was raped because “she looked slutty” and he was shot because “he looked like a thug” then if I dress a certain way, if my children are dressed a certain way, we are protected. The reality that some people walking around are rapists and gun-toting racists is too scary and dis-empowering to contemplate.

If I had children, no doubt, I would share the Living While Black rules with them as well as all the rules I navigate my world with as a woman, because who wants their child to face danger because in theory they should be safe. 

But you can’t change an inherently racist and sexist system by altering one person's behavior. Altering individual behavior is a survival mechanism for the moment- for the individual. To change a culture of sexual and racial oppression we have to have conversations that extend beyond rules and incorporate race and gender and privilege and entitlement as well. We have to be bold and confront fallacies of blame passed off as truth so that discussions of murder place blame on those doing harm and we can stop pretending that rules stops bullets.