African Genesis
Pictures by CNN and the Palmer Theatre at Penn State
The O.J. Simpson story is about a troubled Black youth's rise to fame only to fall to shame and disgrace. His stardom, obsession with "beautiful white women" and marriage to Nicole Brown Simpson, epitomized what a white female psychiatrist described as: "a young boy from the ghetto who makes it all the way to the top. ... He was a giant of a man." She continued. "He was like a caged animal, lost and trying to find his way." The analogue of the caged animal is rooted in the classic sexual symbolism of Beauty and the Beast, King Kong and the white, blue-eyed blond.The movie "King Kong" is symbolic of the plight of Black people. Captured in Africa, chained and bound in the hold of a ship, he was brought to America. Obsessed with the alluring white woman, he escaped his bondage and scaled New York City's Empire State Building.
My interpretation is not a condemnation of Black men who chase white women. All of this is symbolic. America's materialistic values and entrapments are interpreted as beauty. Kong is not chasing the white woman, he is pursuing the elusive American dream. To scale the Empire State Building is to climb the corporate ladder. However, he was shot down. No matter what the Black man accomplishes, he must be destroyed. As the movie ends we are told, "It was beauty that killed the beast."
The media portrays white women as beauty and the Black man as the beast. They are opposites that frequently attract. Both the beauty of the classy starlet and the beastly violence of the athlete are nurtured and even worshipped. For many players and spectators, sports are forms of sublimation—psychological means of diverting aggressions and emotional tensions to forms that are considered more socially or culturally acceptable.
0.J. Simpson married his Black high school sweetheart, Marguerite Whitley, the same year he entered USC. He won the Heisman Trophy, signed with the Buffalo Bills, and became the first player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a single season. He was perceived as a powerful Black man, a trophy for the dis-empowered white females who pursued him.
The book "The Superwives" quoted Marguerite Simpson's complaints about being disrespected: "I have been shoved out of the way, pushed and stepped on by more than one beautiful woman."
Marguerite and 0.J. Simpson had three children. However, his addictive obsession with stardom led to the neglect of his wife and family. When he divorced in 1979, he proclaimed that his career dictated a different lifestyle, one Marguerite was not suited for. He left his Black woman in a narcissistic search for himself.
Most Black men are made to feel inadequate and seek to prove their worth. 0.J. Simpson is no exception. His movie career ended with him playing the buffoon. Instead of self-acceptance, 0.J. found more confusion, rejection and anger.
Many Black men have accepted the myth that the sexy white woman is the ultimate high. Likewise, many white women see the Black man as the ultimate trophy, <->a living symbol of rampant masculinity<->. The stereotype is that once the white woman has been with a Black man she will never return to a white man. But, what if she does? Her desire is to flaunt the powerful Black man before the white man and, ultimately, her father, neither of whom gives her the attention she desires. White men secretly detest, rebuff and reject her as the weak and vulnerable side of them.For the white woman, possession of the Black man subconsciously serves to commemorate the defeat of the white man's mortal enemy. The object of her true love and desire is the white man. Once the Black man submits to her she sees him as weaker than the white man, who will never submit to her. At this point she taunts the Black man with the white man.
The impact on the narcissistic Black ego that has used the white woman (instead of God) to compensate for his underlying feelings of inadequacy is to increase his sense of rejection and associated rage. What manner of conflict occurs when one worships what one despises? The prized athlete has been trained to resolve conflict with violence. His only sense of worth has been achieved in the violent world of sports and he turns to violence.
The irony is that in the end he sought to return to the original woman in his life, his mother. Perhaps it was this desire that kept him from physically killing himself. However, 0.J. suffered a spiritual death.
Our Black youth are killing each other daily. Virtually no one is studying this phenomena. Now that celebrities are involved perhaps we will examine the causes of violence.
Dr. Harry X. Davidson.
Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist
practicing in Kansas City, Missouri.)
Source: The Final Call
The White Witch
by James Weldon Johnson
Robin Morgan, in The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism, delves into the attraction of "bad boys" - yes their sex appeal to women, too!
"Interracial" RacismRobert Jensen, following Gail Dines and Andrea Dworkin:Contemporary pornography is not only sexist but also racist, in a distinctive manner. Most people recognize that even with the gains of the civil rights movement of the last half of the 20th centur, racism endures in the United States and that the reproduction of that ideology through the media is a problem. Race still mattes, and the media depictions of race matter. In mainstream movies and television, the most blatant and ugly forms of racism have disappeared, although subtler patterns of stereotyping continue. Pornography is the one media genre in which overt racism is still routine and acceptable. Not subtle, coded racism, but old-fashioned US -- stereotypical representations of the sexually primitive black male stud lover, the animalistic black woman, the hot Latina, the Asian geisha. Ironically, the term that the pornography industry uses for the category of overtly racist material is "interracial," which implies cross-racial understanding and bridge-building, but is something quite different. For example, the director of the Black Attack Gang Bang line of films explains: "My mission is to find the cutest white honeys to get Gang Banged by some hard pipe hitting niggas straight outa Compton." The racism of the industry is so pervasive that it is largely unnoticed. In an interview at the 2005 AEE, with Jon B -- general manager of Doghouse Digital, the company that produced Black Bro's and Asian Ho's -- he saw no racism in a film that depicted black men as sexually primitive stud ravishers and Asian (like white) women as made for sexual servitude. The dominant mode of interracial pornography is black men and white womenWhen I interviewed John E. Depth -- a black man who performs and directs for his own company, In-Depth Productions -- at the 2005 AEE, he said that he didn't really understand why white men like to watch black men having sex with white women in degrading fashion and could only speculate that white men are fascinated with the image of the black man as the "big buck" stud lover (bad boy image? a thug ravisher?) and are hoping for some thrill from the rampant sexual prowess of a real man.Gail Dines concludes that interracial pornography of this sort is a kind of "new minstrel show" that functions as a peepshow for white men into what they see as the authentic black life, not on the plantation [or deep in the jungle] but in the "hood" where all the conventions and inhibitions of white civilized society cease to exist. The "hood" in the white racist imagination is a place of pimps, hos, and gangbangers, generally uncontrolled black bodies, and the white voyeur is invited, for a fee, to slum in this world of debauchery. In the "hood," the white man can dispense with his whiteness by identifying with the black man, and thus become as sexually skilled, sexually manly, and sexually out-of-control as the black man. Here he does not have to worry about being big enough to satisfy the white woman, nor does he have to concern himself with fears about poor performance or "weak wads" or cages like poor hubby in Blacks on Blonds [an interracial film in which the white husband is literally in a cage while watching black men have sex with his wife]. Indeed, the "hood" represents liberation from the cage, and the payoff is a satiated white women (hubby, too?] who has been utterly and completely feminized by being well and truly turned into a "fuckee." |
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