WHO WE ARE-Is there no place to be carefree and safe, both black and a woman in America?
Late last week, Danièle Watts – best known for her role in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained – was detained by the Los Angeles police department on the suspicion of being a prostitute ... for kissing her her husband in a car.
Watts, who is African American and married to a white man, took to Facebook both to describe her ordeal and assert her humanity.
Today I was handcuffed and detained by 2 police officers from the Studio City Police Department after refusing to agree that I had done something wrong by showing affection, fully clothed, in a public place.
Her husband, the chef Brian Lucas, was less kind in recounting the incident.
If you trust the images projected in the media, then it is easy to believe the narrative of the inherent criminality of black women: that we are thieves and whores; that our sexuality is only palatable to white men under the cover of prostitution. If you buy into the stereotypes that all black women are single, or unmarried, to the idea that black women are the least desired, then of course you could never look at Watts and her husband and see a couple in love.
You could believe that no one loves a black woman. You could believe that a white man is an innocent bewitched by a gold-digging, hyper-sexed black woman. You could believe that we are black first, criminal second and women only later.
In the inscription to her photo series, “Peaches, Liz, Tamika, Elaine”, American photographer Carrie Mae Weems wrote, “The construction of black women as the embodiment of difference is so deep, so wide, so vast, so completely absolved of reality that I didn’t know it was me being made fun of.”
It’s all fun and games until aspects of our physicality are co-opted and declared a beauty standard for white women in fashion magazines.
Watts told BuzzFeed that she and her husband were kissing and “a man from a nearby office came out and asked Watts and Lucas to ‘stop putting on a show’”. Watts emphasized “that she and Lucas were fully clothed and only kissing”, but they stopped anyway.
That anonymous tipster in Studio City last week is a modern incarnation of the same hate that – eventually – forced states to nullify their laws against interracial marriage. Back in 1958, another unnamed onlooker tipped off the Virginia police that Mildred and Richard Loving were living as a married couple, prompting a raid on their home that led all the way to the US supreme court.
The Lovings were sleeping when the county sheriff and two deputies burst into their bedroom, shone flashlights in their eyes and demanded, “Who is this woman you’re sleeping with?”. Richard Loving pointed to the marriage certificate on the wall, to which the sheriff responded, “That’s no good here.”
The Lovings were charged with violating the Racial Integrity Act and sentenced to one-year prison sentences, suspended on the condition that they leave Virginia never to return together. It took until 1967 for the high court to declare that anti-miscegenation laws in Virginia – and all of America – are unconstitutional.
Since then, according to 2012 report by the Pew Center, at least 15% of new marriages are interracial – but, according to a 2013 Gallup poll, only 87% of Americans are actually cool with it. (Though, if an actress in an Oscar-nominated movie can be handcuffed and detained by police for engaging in public displays of affection with a white man, perhaps it is an underestimation that only 13% of Americans reject interracial relationships.)
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It all goes back to the deeper point about the perception of black women in America, how deeply embedded the social conditioning is that presumes our guilt. Certain women are permitted, and others are presumed desirable; certain women are valued and others are automatically wanton; only certain women are debased and objectified.
What was so repugnant to the anonymous tipster that merited a phone call to LAPD? Why would police officers assume that a passionate kiss between a black woman and a white man must mean that there was money exchanged – and that it wasn’t possible that love was present?
That is a scenario played out more often by police in the absence of cameras and social media: individuals are detained and falsely accused of crimes because they are black, because their descriptions fit an archetype of black criminality.
What rankles to the very core is that no matter what black women do in America – whether our bodies are moving free or in distress – the machinations of white supremacy keeps its clammy grip on our freedom and our right to be equally protected under the law.
Watts, in her Facebook statement and under a picture of her face contorted in pain, asserted her full humanity in a world that seeks to negate it:
In this moment there is a still small voice whispering to me. It says: You are love. You are free. You are pure.
You are. We are.
(Syreeta McFadden writes for The Guardian… where this column was first posted.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 75
Pub: Sep 16, 2014
