Regarding my tiff with Menelik Charles and my ban from Abagond...



by Thaddeus

Several folks have commented on my recent banning from Abagond, so I feel I should put some thoughts down regarding that situation. The following is unpleasant and somewhat personal, so those of you who don't like intertubes drama should stop reading here.

I was a prolific commentator on Abagond's blog for almost exactly a year and was recently banned there for getting into a hissy-fight with an exceptionally sexist poster who goes by the handles of Menelik Charles and Malarki5. In real life, this active blog commentator is reputedly a 40 year old Trinidadian-Brit and, apparently, an ex-employee of the Headstart Bookshop, a now-defunct outlet for Pan-Africanist products and publications in Tottenham in London. For a couple of years now, he's been stalking young black women on the internet, paying particular attention to those who defend the idea that black women should date white men if they feel like doing so (i.e. so-called "swirling"). Charles has relentlessly harrased these women, calling them "insane" and far worse. Ironically enough, a couple of the women Charles routinely harasses (who also post on Abagond) are people who dislike me and whom I find to be what we in Brazil would call "excepcionalmente levianas". But hell, they are undergrads just out of their teens! They're SUPPOSED to be "leviana". Lord knows I was. That is no cause for some frustrated, aging black nationalist to call them names.

Charles is smart enough to normally keep his comments within bounds on Abagond, but he's engaged in a stalking campaign on other black and anti-racist blogs, following young swirlers around and publicly chastizing them. To make matters worse (and even more creepy), he routinely comes on to black women who agree with him that "swirling" is a bad idea. I think that the front page of his Youtube channel gives a pretty good idea of where Menelik Charles is coming from when he talks about his undying respect for black women...

Menelik Charles' (AKA Malarki5) Youtube channel. Dedicated to taking on The Man and providing the internet with crotch shots of scantily dressed young black women.

Menelik's main theory seems to be this (taken from here):

"I think if we're being fair, many Black men are tired of dealing with women who aren't particularly feminine. Sure, most Black women are emphatically female-looking (even the ghetto/hoodrat types)but whatever the class of sister, it's not common they'd be feminine.

Maybe something to do with female-dominated homes...even when a man is present."

In short, Menelik blames overly-strong black women for de-masculinzing the black household. These black matriarchs, in turn, raise man-hating daughters who perpetuate the cycle, pushing "good, upstanding brothers" like MC away from the family. It's interesting to point out in this context, based on what MC has written around the net, that his mother lost her husband when Charles was a boy and that he was raised by a perfectly acceptable step-father. It's also interesting to note that Charles has a young daughter himself and is separated from her mother. So this man who blames the so-called "death of the black family" on women is himself the product of a non-traditional family and is raising his daughter in another non-traditional family.

MC and I got into the shit several times over at Abagond, but what really twisted my titties about Menelik Charles were his attempts to intimidate me by claiming that he could "beat six types of shite" out of me because he's a boxer. (Internet tough guy syndrome, anyone?) I welcomed him to go ahead. I mean, it's not like I'm anonymous or anything: that's my photo and real name down below, there. If he wants to crawl over my DSL cable - or even buy a plane ticket to Rio - in order to commit felony battery on my person, hell, who am I to stop him? I pointed out that I was posting under my real name while he was hiding behind an alias and that this was hardly courageous behavior. Charles then claimed that he was posting under his real name and identity and had no problems with being "outted" on the internet.

At that point, it seems that MC jumped the shark as my mailbox started filling up with people dropping docs on the man, including photos, real name, current address in Islington... the works. I did my part to help spread this information around to some of the women he was stalking. Shortly after this, the man started losing his cool on Abagond. Tempers flared, Chuck went nuclear and I just couldn't resist one last dig under his short ribs, in spite of a warning from Abagond to cool it.

So I got banned.

Now, Abagond runs his show the way he wishes and, in spite of my being banned from his blog, I have quite a lot of respect for the man. It is almost impossible to find anti-racists who are willing to listen to anything but the most dogmatic of views on race and repression and Abagond gets full marks from me for being one of these.

I think the major tiff between Abagond and myself has to do with the fact that I tweaked him about his sexism and Catholicism on several occasions, particularly with regards to the fact that he's separated from his wife (we'd just say "divorced" here in Brazil). The way Abagond describes her, she was quite a piece of work and I'm sure he has good reasons for not being with her anymore.

Nevertheless, I always found it odd that someone who was so willing to parse any statement into tiny little pieces in order to perceive its racist foundations could be so blind with regards to his own sexism and homophobia. And then there's the Catholicism. Abagond is a merciless and generally correct critic of "white" power structures but he gives a pass to the Church, which any historian of slavery and race will confirm as one of the most enduring of those power structures, one which played more than a small role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Many times on Abagond, I was struck by the fact that, as a white, heterosexual male, I had been socialized to critique my presumed identity along several axises - gender, sexuality, race and class. Meanwhile, many of the black, het males on Abagond - including the blog's owner himself - seemed to be rather complacent with regards to any privilege other than that created by race.

And, unfortunately, their blindness is often transformed into chauvinism.

Tweaking Abagond about his beliefs regarding religion and gender was probably, eventually, going to get him very angry. I thought it would be a useful excercize because Abagond seems to feel a certain mercilessness when it comes to tweaking white people about their beliefs regarding race and yet has enormous blind spots of his own. Given my tweaks, however, it was a matter of time before Abagond would use the first convenient excuse to ban me and he did indeed give me fair warning.

My year-long experience as a commentator on Abagond has underlined, for me, why critical race theory has become increasingly detached from reality as it's really lived. While we were discussing to what degree today's whites were responsable for the crimes of the whites of the 16th century, or whether or not "swirling" was an appropriate black female response to black male chauvinism, the Tea Party came along and blind-sided America, with hardly any commentary at all by the people who make up Abagond's blog.

As someone who was brought up in a midwestern, white, working class community that voted heavily for Obama and also heavily for the Tea Party, I feel that the "Let's shame whites into critiquing their privilege" strategy engaged in by people like Tim Wise and bloggers like Macon and Abagond is extremely short-sighted and is based on an erroneous reading of social repression that focuses exclusively on race. The white poor and working class do not like being talked down to and they understand, very clearly, that they are not the people who have created the current situation in the U.S. By casting white history as hegemonic, effectively homogenous and unrelentingly privileged, people like several of the commentators on Abagond end up destroying any possible alliance with white groups or individuals unless these groups or individuals are willing to ignore any factor, other than race, as having significance in social and political relations.

In short, many anti-racists tend to end up painting themselves into a corner by presuming that any white person who disagrees with them about anything needs must be effectively the same sort of person as a member of Stormfront or the KKK.

Sorry for the longwinded post, but a couple people seem to feel I need to say something about Abagond and my year there, so... Abagond's blog will continue to be linked here as I still consider it to be a very worthwhile forum - just don't poke your fingers in the owner's sensitive spots if you want to continue commenting there!

As for Menelik Charles, the gentleman who was the proximate cause of this feud, a bit of advice: I suggest that you use your 'l33t boxing skills to work out some of that aggression towards assertive black women that you're carrying around on your shoulder. Nothing on the internet ever really dies and 12 years from now, your daughter is going to have access to all of these comments you're making regarding black women. Something tells me that she's going to be less than impressed, Menelik.

Black women and white men

by Thaddeus
A recent trip to the U.S. really brought home the bi-racial dating issue to me. On our last three voyages to the U.S., Ana and I've noticed quite a few bi-racial couples, but always and without exception white women with black men. On this trip, we had a 24 hour layover in Atlanta and went out to see the city. Returning via MARTA to the airport after a long day, I leaned up against Ana, laying my head on her shoulder and closing my eyes. 10 minutes later, when I opened them again, the entire car was scowling at us.

It freaked Ana out more than me, to be sure. And what really freaked her out was the fact that all the passengers were black: "It was as if I was betraying the race," she said. "And yet I never see those kind of looks directed against black men - white women couples. What, because I'm a woman I can't sleep outside the race? Is that the deal here?"

Ironically enough, I'd just bought a library's worth of books about miscegenation, black women and interracial relationships in the U.S., so I've been reading up on this topic. Furthermore, Ana's recent line of research at USP ("What is it about Brazilian women?") touches on this point as does my on-going work with prostitutes and clients on Copacabana.

To put it simply, many authors have noted that one of the main differences between the Brazilian and American flavors of race relations is that heterochromatic relationships have traditionally encountered more (though far from total) acceptance in Brazil. This has led many Brazilians to conclude that Brazil is "less racist than the U.S". Meanwhile, Americans - and especially Black Americans - often feel that Brazilian tolerance of heterochromatic sex and marriage is, in fact, an expression of deepset and unchallenged white supremacist values. One can easily see these positions illustrated when one looks at both countries' literature, cinema and T.V. programing. Regarding sex between white men and black women, almost every single pop source I've ever seen in the U.S. situates these in a context of rape or extreme sexual exploitation. Meanwhile, Brazilian pop sources generally understand the same thing to be an expression of love which radically transcends the social limitations imposed by racism.

My view of the subject has yet to jell, but I feel I know enough to conclusively reject both the common American and Brazilian views regarding sex between black women/white men to be so much myth-making bullshit. Obviously, unequal power relations in both countries during and after slavery created massive opportunities for sexual exploitation and violence and just as obviously, the history of sexual and affective relations between black women and white men cannot be reduced to an unending sequence of rape and prostitution.

I`ve just finished reading J.W. Cash`s The Mind of the South (1940) and have found his views on the south's "rape complex" to be very illuminating and I can't help but wonder if this doesn't somehow play into current American views on sex between black women and white men. Basically, Cash takes a look at the claims and counterclaims regarding supposed black rape of white women in the south (remember that he was writing in 1940). While basically believing that such rapes were very few in number, Cash artfully sidesteps the whole issue by focusing on another point entirely. According to Cash, though "the actual danger [of black on white rape] was small,  it was nevertheless the most natural thing in the world for the [white] South to see it as very great, to believe in it, fully and in all honesty, as a menace requiring the most desperate measures if it was to be held off". This because, again according to Cash, the idea of virginal, pure, white southern womanhood was central to the notion of southern identity and "with this in view, it is obvious that the assault on the South would be felt as, in some true sense, an assault on her also."

We strike back to the fact that this Southern woman's place in the Southern mind proceeded primarily from the natural tendency of the great basic pattern of pride in superiority of race to center upon her as the perpetuator of that superiority in legitimate line, and attached itself precisely, and before everything else, to her enormous remoteness from the males of the inferior group, to the absolute taboo on any sexual approach to her by the Negro.... If it was given to the black to advance at all, who could say (once more the logic of the doctrine of his inherent inferiority would not hold) that he would not one day advance the whole way and  lay claim to complete equality, including, specifically, the ever crucial right of marriage?

What the Southerners felt, therefore, was that any assertion of any kind on the part of the Negro constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the Southern woman. What they saw, more or less consciously, in the condition of Reconstruction was a passage for her as degrading, in their view, as rape itself. And a condition, moreover, which logic or no logic, they infallibly thought of as being as absolutely forced upon her as rape, and hence a condition for which the  term "rape" stood as truly as  for the de facto deed. (Cash, 1940: 116)

Now, what I'm wondering is if something like this isn't what's currently operating in the U.S. today when we turn to black women and white men dating.

I do not wish to claim that Black American notions of peoplehood are simply a rerun (or a photo negative) of Southern White notions of the same: there are obviously many differences. However, it seems to me that there are certain general continuities between the two which might usefully illustrate the topic at hand. First and foremost, Black Americans' notions of identity are generally American concepts and by this I mean that Black Americans have not escaped from belief in  blood, heritage and purity which have traditionally informed American notions of self and Other. More importantly, it seems to me that Black Americans have deeply imbibed from the well of American belief in exceptionalism and manifest destiny.

In short, like their Southern White cousins, Black Americans have a tendency to see themselves as a people marked by an essentially homogenous past and set of experiences which transcend class, region and even history. Furthermore, this sense of "peopleness" is characterized by a belief in the blood transmission of said identity. Finally, like Americans in general, Black Americans tend to believe that, as a people, they have a  special relationship to God or Destiny - that they are a chosen people, in other words.

(I should take a moment here to point out the obvious: I am speaking in generalizing terms here, creating ideal types which might help us to discuss large-scale social phenomena. I am most emphatically not saying that everyone of such and such a type or nationality or whatever behaves in such and sort a way. I'm talking here about patterns and trends, not determinist laws. What I think we can say is that when you see a theme repeated a gazillion times in T.V. sitcoms, paperback romances, or on Oprah, one can say that it's a theme that has a certain impact on a given society, whether or not every single individual within said society agrees with it.)

Given all this, it seems to me that one of the things that makes black women's relationships with white men a relatively taboo subject in the U.S. is this abiding belief in Woman as the Mother of the Race, a belief whose ultimate matrix is precisely that southern enobling of womanhood as the centerpoint of racial identity that Cash talks about. Now, as far as this goes, this isn't such a peculiar thing: many anthropologists, after all, have pointed out that women are understood to be the "womb of the people" the world over. However, it seems to me that what gives this question a particular vehemence in the U.S. is the generalized American belief in themselves as an expansionist people with a particular covenant with God. In this sort of situation, marrying or dating outside of one's race can never be seen as a personal choice, but as an act which materially decreases the possibility that God's People will finally encounter salvation through the creation of heaven on Earth.