“Y’all Celebrating Black Men in Prison”: Black Feminist Abolitionists and Intracommunal Violence

“Y’all Celebrating Black Men in Prison”Black Feminist Abolitionists and Intracommunal Violence Fania Noel (bio) As a Black feminist scholar and organizer, I often use news items to analyze misogynoir1 violence and exemplify the need for abolition. Here, I want to talk about two news items, going back and forth between the US and Europe (and more specifically France), as well as the digital space. Between November 2022 and January 2023, two highly mediatized affairs happened in the US and France. They each had at their center two Black male celebrities accused of violence against women. In the US, the Black Canadian rapper Tory Lanez was tried on charges of shooting the rapper Megan Thee Stallion in front of a Hollywood Hills house. In Europe, Benjamin Mendy, a Black French football player who plays in the UK, was tried on six counts of rape. Lanez was found guilty in December, whereas Mendy was partially acquitted on six counts of rape but still faces prosecution for two others. In both cases, their respective trials and verdicts generated major debates and confrontation on social media. They also put abolitionists and radical Black feminists on trial for different reasons. I would like to discuss how radical Black feminism—and here I use Black feminism with a capital B as a generic term to encompass feminism by Black women like Afro-feminists and Black feminists in the US—is used both as a site of extraction of labor and as a site of antagonism that has a photophobic object, to use the feminist term. In France as in the US, Black feminists and Afro-feminists are constantly facing unspoken and sometimes spoken blackmail, where they are asked to contribute to the rehabilitation of Black masculinities or at least to not be opposed to a political agenda that wants to undertake this rehabilitation. They have to be their brother’s keeper or else they are accused of playing into White supremacy’s state agenda. And, as [End Page 82] in the capitalist theory of trickle-down economics, the idea is that Black men’s liberation is supposed to lead to the liberation of all non-men and they will be able to extend the full protection of manhood to all the Black community. As many Black feminist theorists, such as Sylvia Wynter and Toni Cade Bambara have explained, this vision is rooted in an imaginary of the permanence of patriarchy and gender, of gender as we know it. It is a political project that is far from freedom and liberation for all, offering instead insertion into hegemonic masculinity as it is displayed, coined, and conceptualized by White supremacy. The space for political action based on a critique of patriarchy is limited to two positions for radical Black feminists who aim to escape potential co-optation: silence or expression of solidarity. Therefore, Black feminists, on both sides of the Atlantic, are accustomed to the contradiction in our politics when we turn to the justice system to support Black women who are victims of patriarchal violence. The same people who judge radical Black feminists as politically immature idealists for their abolitionist politics toward patriarchy, prisons, and the police, also judge radical Black feminists as incoherent when they do not support the freeing of Black male abusers or when they support female victims during legal trials. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. In their book, The Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness Da’Shaun L. Harrison writes: Black women, while mostly described as “strong” and thought to not be able to experience pain, are still oftentimes viewed as “vulnerable” and “weaker”—the latter most often being what informs the former. They are weak because they are strong; they are strong because they are weak. They are assaulted because they are strong; they are weak, and therefore, they are assaulted. They are fast until they are slow; too slow until they’re fast. They are girls until they are women; they’re always women, even when they are girls. Cisgender men, and the way they rationalize these violences against so many bodies, are walking...

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