Megan Thee Stallion Got Shot and Mocked

Black men — are you listening?

The treatment of Black women within the Black community is worse than I ever wanted to admit. I wanted to believe that Black men had our backs, that we were in this together, and that we understood the importance of dismantling white supremacist ideology that harms Black people. While it is true that many Black men support Black women, misogynoir reasoning thrives within the community. If you ask a Black man if he loves Black women, he will tell you, “yes’.” He may say that he has daughters, sisters, or mother. However, that is no different than when a low-key racist person says, “I have Black friends.” Just because you know people in a marginalized group does not mean that you care about them.

Black men, on social media, consistently call Black women manly and ugly. Many will call women ugly as an excuse to treat them lowly. They called Kamala Harris every name in the book, described Black women like Megan Thee Stallion and Serena Williams as manly. In a meme, their pictures stood side by side. To call a woman manly who does not see herself as such is to slight her womanhood. It is a cruel way of saying — you are not a woman worthy of consideration. The insults from these men communicate that if a woman is not conventionally attractive, she loses value and, in turn, her humanity. These Black men will be the first to tell you that sexism does not exist. They claim that gender is not a factor in our lives. However, Black women suffer the most from discriminatory practices. As a group, Black women make less money, have less access to investment capital, die from maternal mortality at outrageous rates, are were the last group of citizens given the right to vote.

While it is true that not all men or even the majority of men hold these views, the good ones do not speak up and retort the negative description and attacks on Black women vehemently enough. In a Black Power group, Black men unified to denigrate her. How can this group be a safe place to share ideas on dismantling white supremacy when women are bashed in the group every day? The fact is that it cannot.

When Megan announced that her shooter was Tory Lanez, many men commented that we do not know the whole story. One of my good friends responded, “Do you know who you sound like”? I knew exactly what she meant. These men sounded like the white supremacists who made excuses for George Floyd’s killers. They desperately wanted to believe that the cop was innocent even as he squeezed the life out of George Floyd on camera. Megan is not alone. She has a witness so that the truth will come out. However, we know that Megan was unarmed that day and shot her in both of her feet. He did not issue any denial of shooting her. His defense seems to line up with — she had it coming.

“She said two others were in a vehicle with her and Peterson on July 12 — a female friend of hers and one of Peterson’s security guards. Pete was sitting in the front seat, and Peterson was in the backseat, with everyone in the car arguing, she said.

“I get out the car, I’m done arguing. I don’t want to argue no more,” she said. “I’m walking away.”

Peterson then shot her from the backseat of the car, she claimed.

“You shot me,” she said.

Police said in a July 15 news release that officers responded to a report of shots fired at a residence in the Hollywood Hills on July 12 at approximately 4:30 a.m.” (Griffith, 2020).

An unarmed Black woman, shot by a Black man, was then mocked by that same group that purported to empower all Black people. One man even commented that he shot her because she was mad at being called a man. To be clear, no one except those at the incident is aware of why the argument started. Furthermore, this further perpetuates the negative personification of her as a man. Megan Thee Stallion is not a small, petite woman. She is tall, voluptuous, and beautiful.

Bashing her feeds into white supremacist ideology in which Black women were good enough to have sex with, but not good enough to honor as entirely human. Slave owners habitually raped Black women and felt very attracted to them. Their views of beauty involved European standards, so they also denigrated these women by raping them, beating them, and taking their children away from them. Their justification was that these women were not white, not beautiful, not dainty, and therefore undeserving of the treatment white women receive.

When Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B released their controversial hit WAP, many Black men expressed outrage at the sexual, provocative lyrics. They did not want to hear these Black women talking about sex from the perspective of women. For centuries, men used the word “hoe” to judge and hurt women. When some Black women start dancing around and laughing at the term, some of the stings subsides. Growing up, I heard men talk about sex through music, how they wanted it when they wanted it, and who was worthy of marrying and who was not. When Black women do the same thing, express themselves, the Black community condemned them as harlots unworthy of the success they received in their careers.

“Black women have long occupied the front lines on matters of race and gender. But when we fight for increased visibility in the fight against state-sanctioned violence, systemic oppression, or the risks that we face in our homes, we can be accused of being divisive and setting back the movement” (Meadows-Fernandez, 2020)

Many Black men voiced their disdain for Kamala Harris in this same group. One man posted an image of her and said, “Describe her in one word”. In this environment, putting Black women down became a parlor game. The comments were unbefitting of the movement. It is one thing to have policy disagreements about her platform or her history as a prosecutor. It is another thing entirely to dehumanize her. These same groups spread homophobic messages, accusing those in the LGBT community of destroying families and promoting pedophilia.

Unfortunately, this group was not an outlier. While these groups acted as a haven after George Floyd’s death, they are now too hostile for a young, Black woman activist like me. Before giving up on the group, I posted a message asking, “Will the women’s liberation movement truly be accepted in the Black power movement”? Now, I became the target- called all types of profanities, the Black men in the group said I was encouraging division, that I was a no-good feminist, that no man would ever love me, and they accused me of hating Black men. I then posted another post saying, “Uplifting black women does not mean putting Black men down.” I wanted to put it out there- that we can make the world more just for girls and women and that men did not have to be worried that we would cast them aside.

The cruelty of these insults after an unarmed Black woman got shot is disrespectful, but there is not a word efficiently to describe the pain of being disregarded by those you love. The pure misogynoir critiques are disappointing coming from Black men because as unity should be the goal. The Black power movement cannot progress while oppressing Black women. We cannot pretend that in talking about Black women in a derogatory manner does not impact young girls and women, who desperately try to live up to other peoples’ standards of beauty. If Black men are in this with us, then it is time to speak up against the demeaning treatment of Black women. Only then can we be unified. Only then will the lives of Black women matter.

References:

Griffith, J. (2020, August 21). Megan Thee Stallion says person who shot her is Tory Lanez. Retrieved August 22, 2020, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/megan-thee-stallion-says-person-who-shot-her-tory-lanez-n1237668

Meadows-Fernandez, A. (2020, July 29). Who Will Protect Black Girls? Retrieved August 22, 2020, from https://www.teenvogue.com/story/black-women-safety-and-protection