The Myth of Black Women’s Progress

This is an interview which is much needed, and generating a lot of buzz over the internet with Black lesbian filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons, best known for her groundbreaking documentary, NO!

The interview was conducted by Tamara K. Nopper, for the newly formed Black Agenda Reports, which was formed by much of the Black staff at Black Commentator.

One section that I found particularly interesting was about how the progressive left was invested in a kind of Black male as victim, and react to her film about Black male rape and sexual violence against Black women with the excuses about Black male oppression…

“Yes, Black men are definitely victims to a white supremacist society but at the same time they’re perpetrators in a male supremacist world. But white folks and just folks who are not of African descent, they don’t want to see this, they don’t want to deal with that. They kind of go, “Well, you know, Black men are in jail, disproportionate amounts of percentage of men are in jail or are Black.” And yet most Black men who are in jail are not in jail for raping Black women.

And I want to be explicitly clear: I oppose the herding of Black men into prisons, I’m very opposed to the criminal injustice system. But I really get tired of how that gets used in this kind of discourse.”

For me, this raises a really important question about the status of Black women in our society (and arguably, globally). In a nation that imprisons Black men at the rate that it does, for virtually anything and everything, what does it say about the status of Black women that acts of rape and sexual violence committed against them, are a virtually unpunishable offense?

Without further ado, The Myth Of Black Women’s Progress.