Ashley Judd is a very courageous woman. I am not referring to her work as a
global ambassador for YouthAids, or her efforts to end poverty and sexual
violence in underdeveloped nations overseas, or even her journey here in
America as an actress, mother, daughter of a country music star, and avid
supporter of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, animal rights, and
equality for women. No, none of that.
Ms. Judd is fearless because she wears her life and her feelings on her
chest, bare, in plain sight, and has written a stunning new memoir, “All
That is Bitter and Sweet,” which discusses, with rawness and candor, her
being sexually abused as a child by a grown man. We as Americans are
deceiving ourselves if we do not think various forms of gender violence
against women and girls is not at epidemic proportions, because it is. Just
ask your mother, grandmother, sister, niece, aunt, female friends, women
co-workers or classmates, girlfriend, wife, or partner, and I guarantee you
someone in that group will have a story similar to Ashley Judd’s either as
girls, or during their adult years.
It is for this reason alone that Ms. Judd’s new book is so timely, and so
necessary. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month in America and, sadly, as
I do a quick scan, right this moment, of New York headlines just from the
past 2-3 days, there is the Manhattan man who stabbed his girlfriend to
death, and the Brooklyn man who choked his girlfriend until she likewise
died. Simply imagine the reported and unreported tales of American women and
girls being abused, molested, stalked, street harassed, raped, beaten,
choked, stabbed, shot, set on fire, or murdered each and every single day.
Then imagine these same acts in nations across the globe, each and every
single day. Thus, Ashley Judd’s very personal saga is for women and girls in
America, overseas, everywhere, whose voices have not been heard. Or roundly
dismissed or ignored.
As a writer myself, I know that the telling of one’s story is about healing,
and transformation. And making a pact with one’s self not to tolerate
certain kinds of abuses or behaviors ever again. And if one has been
wounded, the way Ms. Judd was badly wounded as a child, one will, in
adulthood, once one has found one’s voice, become a drum major for justice,
a truth-teller. Which easily explains why Ms. Judd has crisscrossed America,
and many a foreign country, taking on the difficult causes of everyday
people. She is that everyday person herself in so many ways, from the sexual
assault as a child, to the constant moving about (she literally attended 13
different schools by the time she graduated from high school), to the
splintered relationships with her parents. Her story is our story and we
know it well.
Unfortunately, that Ms. Judd is a famous Hollywood actress today means that
a different kind of attention is being paid to her memoir. The good part is
that she has an instant platform to discuss topics like gender violence. The
bad part is that, in our very dumbed down, social network-obsessed society,
it becomes quite easy and convenient for words to be taken out of context
or, worse yet, not read at all, and just passed around, one tweet and
facebook post at a time, until what Ms. Judd wrote very eloquently in her
memoir is completely distorted.
Case in point are the very heated attacks Ms. Judd has received for saying,
in her book, that “most rap and hiphop music—with its rape culture and
insanely abusive lyrics and depiction of girls and women as ‘ho’s’—is the
contemporary sound track of misogyny.”
If anyone had bothered to read pages 58-62 of Ms. Judd’s memoir, then they
would know she put into context not only how she was asked to be a part of
YouthAids, where hiphop icons P. Diddy and Snoop Dogg were serving as
spokespersons, but you get her evident grappling, as a sexual abuse
survivor, as a feminist, and as a human being, of making peace with working
with them, and 50 Cent, too, in spite of her real and righteous feelings
about gender violence. And why wouldn’t she? For example, besides a career
weighted with lyrics calling women all sorts of derogatory terms, Snoop once
showed up at the MTV Video Music Awards with two women on dog leashes. What
woman, with any level of self-respect, would want to be associated with that
definition of manhood?
Instead what we who call ourselves men, or hiphop heads, or whatever, have
done is myopically label Ashley Judd as “racist,” “a dumb White woman,” and
other terms which are simply not printable in this space. As a man, as a
Black man, as a heterosexual Black man, who has been deeply involved in both
hiphop culture and the hiphop industry for 30 years, I was not offended by
Ms. Judd’s words.
That’s because I believe in speaking the truth always: America in general
has always been a male-dominated, sexist nation. This is nothing new. Hiphop
did not create sexism, misogyny, abuse, disrespect, a culture of rape, or
violence against women. No. Those behavioral patterns go back to the days of
the Pilgrims, the so-called founding fathers, and slavery, as if we are to
be historically and culturally accurate.
But because hiphop has been the dominant cultural expression since at least
the 1980s, in America, in the world, it has also come to embody many of the
worst aspects of male privilege and domination. In other words, if you are
born a male in this nation, unless there was some sort of intervention at
some point in your life teaching you that women and girls are your equals,
that love is preferable to hate, mindless ego, and reckless competition,
that nonviolence trumps violence and warfare any day, guess what kind of man
you, we, are more than likely primed to be?
Moreover, given that hiphop was created by working-class Black and Latino
urban males, we have been the face of this cultural juggernaut in spite it
being embraced by multicultural people worldwide (and barely controlled by
us in terms of the mass production and distribution of words, sounds, and
images). So when Ms. Judd declared hiphop had a “rape culture” many of us
went off, because our interpretation is that she is saying Black and Latino
males are the ones doing this to women and girls. Of course that is not the
case.
And that is precisely where the thorny dynamic of White folks and Black
folks in America once again crashes into that concrete wall called American
history. We each bring to the table an airport full of baggage and what
should be routine conversations and the exchange of ideas turn into
mean-spirited broadsides with folks puffing out their chests and declaring
beef over here! The result, ever more, is we surely cannot hear nor decipher
what the other is saying. And while race takes center stage once again via
the Ashley Judd episode the matter of sexism, of violence and reckless
disregard for the female body, is tossed aside as if it is a non-issue. Yes,
once again, the views of a woman does not matter is what we are essentially
saying by responding as we’ve done on the internet. It is not just because
Ms. Judd is White, either. I have seen the same harsh reactions to Black,
Latina, and Asian women who would dare offer a critique of sexist behavior
in a public forum.
And I seriously doubt Ashley Judd has spent so much time, energy, and a good
deal of her own resources in Africa if she were, indeed, a card-carrying
racist. She is not. She is a genuinely caring human being as evidenced by a
life dedicated as much to public service as it is to her acting career. I
think the only thing Ms. Judd is probably guilty of here is being an
outsider and not understanding the totality of hiphop, its mores, its
customs, its defiant swagger. Particularly that of us Black and Latino males
for whom hiphop is everything in a world where we feel we are forever
battling for our identities and our pieces of the American dream, real or
imagined. But you do not move to destroy someone because of what they may
not know. You take the time, if you have any sense of humanity, to teach.
Always.
I am a hiphop head for life, since my days dancing on streets and at clubs
and writing graffiti on walls; to my days as a writer for Vibe magazine and
curating the first exhibit on hiphop history at the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame; to my current task of writing a biography, the next several years, on
the life of Tupac Shakur. So I know there is a difference between hiphop
culture, which I represent, and the hiphop industry, which is what Ashley
Judd is referencing in her book.
And we’d be lying to ourselves, hiphop heads or not, if we actually could
say, with straight faces, that hiphop culture has not been severely
undermined, turned inside out, and made into an industry that promotes some
of the most horrific images of women and men, that encourages
oversexualization and materialism, that pushes anti-intellectualism and a
brand of manhood that seems only to exist if one is engaging in the most
destructive forms of violence and degrading of one’s self, and of others.
That is not hiphop. That is called a minstrel show, circa the 21st century.
And if you really love something the way I love that some thing called
hiphop, then we would be honest about it and not go on ego trips attacking
an Ashley Judd for having the courage to say what we should be saying
ourselves.
That enough is enough of this madness, that it is no longer acceptable to
say our culture is just reflecting what is going on in our communities. Art
is not just to reflect what is happening. Art, at its best, is also about
dialoguing about and correcting the ugliness in our communities. That will
not happen if art is just as ugly as real life, if we are at a point where
we cannot tell real life from the staged life.
For sure, Ms. Judd mentions this in her book when she talks about 50 Cent
offstage, how professional and polite he was, then the moment he took the
stage out came the hyper-masculinity, the bravado, the posturing, the
manufactured character. Rather than curse out or disparage Ashley Judd, I
think we should instead ask ourselves who we are, truly, in these times, and
why so many of us continue to have our identities programmed and directed by
record labels and radio and video channels under the illusion of keeping it
100 percent real? Real for whom, and at what cost to our communities?
Back in the 1990s, when I was writing for Vibe, I did an interview with the
late C. Delores Tucker, an older Black woman who led a crusade against what
she thought were indecent rap lyrics. I was so much younger emotionally and
in terms of basic common sense, and did everything I could to make Ms.
Tucker look like a buffoon in the printed interview. I really regret that
because these women, the real leaders on our planet, are right. Why should
it be acceptable to tolerate any culture, be it hiphop, rock, jazz, reality
tv, video games, or certain kinds of Hollywood films, that create a space
that says it is okay, normal, to denigrate women and girls with words and
images?
To his credit, hiphop mogul Russell Simmons provided Ashley Judd a space, on
globalgrind.com, to squash any so-called hiphop beef, a term I wish we
hiphop heads would discard once and for all. Ms. Judd apologized for not
choosing some of her words better, but she held firm, as she should have,
around the issue of violence against women and girls.
On his Twitter feed Russell said “Real talk, if women were empowered we
would protect the environment, the animals and have much less war.” But
women’s empowerment, Russell, and the dismantling of male domination, will
not happen if we men and boys do not become active agents in ending any
behavior that blocks and destroys the natural evolution of girls into the
powerful women they ought to be. And, Russell, as you say elsewhere in your
Twitter feed, it is not an argument on whether rappers are less or more
sexist than their parents or ministers. The issue is that sexism, period, is
wrong, and we need to put as much vigor into ending it as we do in battling
racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, classism, religious intolerance, or any
other kind of oppression and discrimination. Debating degrees of something
is just not the way.
Furthermore, any males out there who have a daughter or daughters need to
ponder this very seriously. Even if you are not the kind of man who engages
in foul language or abusive or violent behavior toward women or girls, do
you say anything when it is happening around you, by your male friends or
colleagues or family members? And how would you feel if these kinds of
things were being said or done to your mother, to your daughter?
We need to understand, finally, that Ashley Judd was someone’s daughter,
too, and but for the grace of the universe, some serious healing work, and,
again, an insurmountable desire to live, and be, she is able to tell her
story and help others. The worst thing we could ever do, as men, as human
beings, is to not listen when someone is telling her or his truth.
For in one’s personal truth are lessons for us all.
Kevin Powell is an activist, public speaker, and award-winning author or editor of 10 books, including Open Letters to America (essays) and No Sleep Till Brooklyn (poetry). Kevin lives in Brooklyn, New York. Email him at kevin@kevinpowell.net or follow him on Twitter @kevin_powell
