BLACK WOMEN NEED HEROES TOO

by the Spin Team

I am a huge fan of movies and serial TV shows.  I like to sit and binge watch a really good series.  These days I go for shows that feature strong female leads. I also enjoy watching documentaries, especially those that feature different cultures, etc.  One of my favourite docu series on Netflix is Flavourful Origins.  If you have not yet tuned in to watch that particular series, you should check it out.  

This article, however is not about binge watching series.  It is about rape.  It is about saving women and it is about the perceptions around black women in movies and tv shows. 

There is a documentary/movie currently on Netflix called Joy.  It tells the story of a Nigerian woman who has found herself in Europe (Austria to be exact) where she is working as a sex worker.  She has taken under her wing a young woman named Precious, who looks to be about 16 or 18 years old and who is clearly uncomfortable with life as a sex worker.  

 The women have to pay the Madam (who is also Nigerian) 60,000 Euro, possibly over a period of time.  Poor Precious, who can barely figure out how to navigate life in Europe, pays over 200 Euro to the Madam who decides to give her a lesson by having her 2 hench men repeatedly rape her.  I don't know how this docu/movie ends, as I turned off the TV.  This is as a result of my taking the stance to no longer watch movies or tv shows that feature rape scenes. 

 In many movies/tv shows that feature rape scenes involving white women, there is always a man who helps that woman to empower herself.  I am not quite sure whether it is lost on the director/producer of these shows that a woman who has been made to feel less than by a man is now being empowered by another man. It is for me the very definition of irony.  In the case of white women being raped, they are often then taught to fight, to use a gun, or to seek revenge against the person who violated them. White women are given permission to seek justice as a sign of their own power. Like their white men, it is their duty to exact vengeance on the person that has wronged them.

In contrast, for black women who experience harrowing and gruesome rape attacks in movies/tv shows, it is usually other women who come to her rescue and nurse her back to health. The focus is on being healed or getting better through her sisterhood with other women. She doesn't get to seek out justice.

As I listened to the screams and cries of Precious in that movie, which were disturbing for me to hear, the question that reverberated in my head was where are the men who will save these women?  It is not going to be her black fathers and brothers because they are the ones who are holding her down and violating her. It is not the Shaman who at the start of the movie was casting spells over her body to protect her, knowing full well what she was going to be experiencing.  It is not the black men who are in leadership positions who will come forward and say no, I am not going to be a part of this. In the movies, black men are seen only as participating in the rape of Black women. They are not seen as rescuers like their white counterparts in movies. 

Is that a reflection of how things play out in real life? I have found that our black brothers do not protect their black sisters in the way that they should.  In the Caribbean many women lose their lives because men don't know when to accept that a relationship is over. While it is clearly not unique that men of all races violate women, I do notice that in movies and tv shows, white men are portrayed as both rapists and saviors. So, while all women may get raped by men of own their race in real life and in movies, white women are portrayed as having a possible white male savior to come to her rescue. What does it mean for white women to see on screen that someone will look out for them or have their back? Why aren't Black women afforded saviors? Do we not deserve that in our stories on screen? Maybe it's because of the stereotype that black women do not need someone in their corner. As a regular TV watcher, I want to see our sisters getting rescued too. Some may say it's not realistic but I suspect it's not all that realistic for white women either, yet I see it often on screen. Black women deserve their hero on screen as well. 

I am interested to hear people's thoughts on this so feel free to sound off in the comments.