Tag: sexual assault

On the Record Attempts to Set the Record Straight for Black Women in Hip-Hop

This was originally published on June 11, 2020 for Pitchfork.

The documentary On the Record opens by asking a question: “What is missing from #MeToo?” In the nearly three years since the hashtag went viral, the phrase has become a de facto movement, a derisive verb, and a platform for high-profile survivors in the entertainment industry and beyond. But despite originating from Tarana Burke, a Black woman, #MeToo has failed to provide a platform for the unique circumstances of Black women who dare to speak truth to power. They are frequently silenced, dismissed, or ignored, either pressured into racial solidarity or stigmatized by a hypersexual jezebel trope that justifies a higher burden of credibility. As Burke herself readily admits in the film, “A lot of Black women felt disconnected from #MeToo initially.”

On the Record attempts to reconcile with that painful truth, honing in on the experiences of Black women in the nascence of the hip-hop industry, and the impresario at the heart of it all, Def Jam’s Russell Simmons. The film centers around some of Simmons’ many survivors—mainly A&R executive Drew Dixon, as well as journalist Sil Lai Abrams and rapper Sheri Sher—and their journeys to come forward with their stories in the press. Every exposé that emerges is the result of an arduous process of reopening painful memories, ceaseless vetting and verification, and devastating fallout for the survivors. Presented side by side with the rise of Def Jam and hip-hop, On the Record shows the emotional toll of Black women’s trauma being perceived as an accepted cost of doing business. While filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s ambitious attempts to address so many critical threads of conversation about sexual assault, hip-hop, and Black women leave some nuances better served than others, the introduction of this film into the zeitgeist is an essential and welcome addition to a long-overdue conversation.

There was a brief period of time when this story almost never made it to the general public. On the Record lost distribution with Apple TV+ just two weeks before its premiere at Sundance Film Festival this past winter, after executive producer Oprah Winfrey pulled her support. It was soon revealed that while Simmons had pressured Winfrey, she had her own apprehensions about the doc and Dixon’s story. The premiere went from a triumphant moment of acknowledgement for Black survivors into a fight to avoid obscurity and erasure. Had HBO—the same network where Simmons once aired his iconic Def Comedy Jam series—not selected On the Record for their recent HBO Max rollout, the documentary could have easily collapsed into an urban legend, sustained by a whisper network of participants and early viewers.

Drew Dixon anchors the film as a former A&R executive who quickly rose in prominence during Def Jam’s early ’90s heyday. She played a fundamental role in amplifying artists and staying on the vanguard of trends at Def Jam, reshaping Method Man’s “All I Need” into a groundbreaking duet with Mary J. Blige. After her alleged 1995 rape at the hands of Simmons, she almost immediately moved over to Arista Records to work under the mentorship of legendary music exec Clive Davis, only to be sexually harassed by his replacement, L.A. Reid. She was trying to sign John Legend and Kanye West to Arista when her relationship with Reid completely deteriorated, after she continually rebuffed his advances.

As Dixon details her rise and fall in the industry, a familiar narrative comes into focus: her seat at the table came with the proviso of a heightened threshold for indecency, an expectation that she compartmentalize and minimize incidents like Simmons repeatedly exposing himself to her. It was an environment where women’s boundaries were not respected, and ultimately Dixon’s assault and harassment caused her to leave the industry altogether. Now it is difficult for her to disentangle music from trauma; she avoids engaging with some of the songs she helped make into hits. In the film, after her story becomes public in The New York Times, she nervously sits with her daughter waiting to hear what the (noticeably measured) response will be on Hot 97. “For 22 years, I took it for the team,” she says, adding, “I loved Russell, too.”

Since On the Record closely follows Dixon’s journey to come forward, Sheri Sher and Sil Lai Abrams don’t receive nearly as much screen time as they should. Sher, a member of the first all-female rap group, the Mercedes Ladies, only has around five minutes of screen time despite her crucial perspective: that of the women artists who fought for respect for their skills, only to be dismissed and treated as sex objects by the industry. Similar to Dixon, there’s an implication in the film that Sher’s alleged 1983 rape by Simmons and subsequent diminishment in the field represented a loss for the music world: Despite being hip-hop pioneers in the South Bronx, the Mercedes Ladies never released any official music or got a record deal.

For her part, journalist and activist Sil Lai Abrams offers a brief but agonizing account of the spiral that followed her 1994 sexual assault, when she was still working as a model and enmeshed in the music industry. Abrams first told The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 that she’d had an intermittent sexual relationship with Simmons that she clearly ended before her alleged rape, but On the Record doesn’t properly delve into the nuances of the situation, or the disorienting nature of sexual assault at the hands of a past intimate partner. Detailing a complicated survivor story is brave in and of itself, but as many Black women implicitly know, the mere allusion to a survivor’s sexual desires is often exploited, used to subtly reinforce a pervasive subconscious notion of the “cultural impossibility for Black women to be raped,” to quote seminal hip-hop feminist Dr. Joan Morgan in the film. Parsing all that out would have brought valuable new depth to the conversation.

The end of On the Record includes brief vignettes of other women’s stories, faces that fade into each other and echo fragments of the previous person’s trauma. The segment effectively highlights the magnitude of Simmons’ reach and harm in his heyday; there are women in fashion publicity, screenwriting, and modeling who detail various degrees of sexual and physical assault at his hands. In merely chronicling the scope of these allegations, the film’s focus shifts away from Black women in hip-hop. There is no easy choice to make here: A documentary that is tasked with accomplishing so much in the way of investigative, emotive, and pedagogical work, that is inherently intertwined with Simmons’ vast legacy, will have more to untangle than can easily be accomplished in just 95 minutes.

Along the way, experts and academics bring context to the overarching issue of misogynoir in hip-hop culture. Though misogyny against Black women is historically tied to the genre, its transition from a subculture to a mainstream market in the ’90s was accompanied by its aesthetic shift—a hypersexualization of Black women that hadn’t been as dominant in rap visuals previously. As the film draws connections to women who’ve dared to accuse Black men in the public eye, from Anita Hill to Desiree Washington, a robust picture emerges of how a white supremacist patriarchal construct is absorbed, echoed, and distilled for entertainment purposes, with the full expectation that Black women in the space stand in lockstep. While a bit didactic, these historical threads serve as an important reminder that the toxic expectation of race loyalty persists in highly visible spaces across movements, industries, and generations. Solidarity with Black men is the name of the game, and yet again Black women are the collateral damage.

It would be a disservice to imply that the problems detailed in On the Record are contained to the early years of hip-hop. Just last month, Chris Stylezz, the host of the Roc Nation-affiliated hip-hop party D’ussé Palooza, was confronted with dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct and assault, resulting in his termination and a new wave of discourse about the industry’s exploitative, gendered power imbalance. Charlamagne tha God, who continues to be the face of “The Breakfast Club,” arguably hip-hop’s biggest syndicated radio show, previously admitted to domestic abuse and faces credible allegations of rape against him. (He was even allowed to help lead the first high-profile interview of Simmons in months.) Despite the collective efforts to #MuteRKelly, not to mention the 22 federal criminal charges against the singer, his musical legacy still looms large in certain spaces, like on the popular Verzuz Instagram Live series. The calculus of acknowledging the pain of Black girls and women is still determined by how much it offsets the accepted threshold for collective sacrifice. As long as a legacy is critical enough to “the culture,” mechanisms are in place to protect abusers—positioning them as the victims, and the victims as living crime scenes.

Currently, Simmons resides in Bali, which does not have an extradition treaty with the United States. With the full support of his family, he has been engaging in an exculpatory tour of self-promotion via his unfettered social media presence, flipping #MeToo into #NotMe and posting open letters decrying the willful assassination of his character. Just yesterday morning, he used his “Breakfast Club” appearance to gaslight survivors, call out “toxic femininity,” and namedrop famous Black women who’ve had positive interactions with him, in some veiled attempt to inoculate himself from claims of assault. “I really don’t think we should be relitigating 30-year-old stories that had never been told,” Simmons said. Despite stepping down from his companies and philanthropic endeavors, his presence online as a wellness guru remains more or less unchallenged, while various friends in entertainment have stuck by his side. Is the man who sold rap to the world too big to be canceled? The answer remains to be seen, but hip-hop needs this reckoning—not just for Simmons’ survivors, but for all the Black women who’ve silenced themselves for the greater cause.

Posted on by Shamira 0

The Bachelor Franchise Fails In Addressing Race and Consent

When ABC announced that they were selecting the first ever Black Bachelorette, several questions presented themselves. Some of those questions have already been answered , such as “what does that mean for the racial makeup of the contestants?” (The season ended up featuring more Black male contestants than ever before). However, one question continued to linger throughout the season like a precarious guillotine: will the Bachelor franchise make an attempt to address race in America, and if so, how? Presently, the answer is “not really, and when applicable, horribly.”

Discussions around racism in the Bachelorette have been largely constrained to the farcically portrayed machinations of the season’s clear villain in country singer Lee Garrett, with the production team choosing to inexplicably keep Rachel isolated from the inner details of the situation while simultaneously treating the racist behavior with the gravity of a comical B-plot, forcing the Black male contestants to endure a series of microagressions at a near nauseating clip. In a methodical fashion, Lee invents tensions between several other black male competitors, branding them with the label “aggressive” when challenged, all with a malicious twinkle in his eye. When forced to contend with the historical context of a white man inflammatorily referring to a black male as aggressive, Lee dismisses the conversation by invoking the insulting allegation of a “race card”, a statement which came on the heels of derisively referring to black male contestant Kenny as a “stack of bleeding muscle” in the course of an argument. All of this is relayed to Rachel by Lee in a rather disturbing contortion of narratives; Lee portrays himself as an affable possessor of Southern genteel who is unjustly left at the mercy of the Black contestants’ violent inclinations.

Consuming all of this as a black woman has been a tough pill to swallow. Racism-as-entertainment-value commodifies centuries of pain and dilutes it down to the potency of a supreme annoyance, a conceit that is highly insulting to both the viewers as well as Lindsay, who becomes an unknowing accomplice in continuing the storyline as a result of being excluded from the context of Garrett’s scheming. In a landmark season during a time period where the gravity of the lived racial experience is as relevant as ever, ABC’s choice to dismiss nuance in favor of encouraging race-based gaslighting for ratings  has left a sour taste in my mouth for the past 3 weeks.

This series of events has dovetailed into the latest burgeoning scandal of the Bachelorette’s salacious  sister show, Bachelor in Paradise, whose latest season was intended to feature early-exit black male contestant Demario Jackson from Rachel’s season. However, taping was abruptly stopped approximately 3 days in for investigation of a potential sexual assault that may have occurred while filming, which, as more details were leaked, were revealed to stem from an incident between Demario and former Bachelor contestant Corinne Olympios. Over the course of the investigation, it was concluded that no sufficient cause for sexual assault; however neither Jackson nor Olympios will be returning to the show while the network “plans to implement certain changes to the show’s policies and procedures to enhance and further ensure the safety of all participants.”

The looming spectre over the entire series of events is, of course the very real and pained history of black men being falsely accused, imprisoned, and even murdered for being perceived as sexually domineering towards white women. This is a narrative that America is not all that removed from, and remains a consistent fear in many black men’s lives, as Demario has since stated in his first public interview since taping was halted. That lens cannot be ignored – black men, and black people in general are so rarely given the benefit of the doubt when attesting to their innocence or humanity, that the optics alone warrant a critical examination of the circumstances.

However, with the rights of  Jackson to be absolved come the rights of the victim to due diligence. The facts remain that Olympios was not the one to lodge any complaint about alleged misconduct during taping(and as of this moment, has yet to accuse Jackson of sexual assault), as it was two producers; couple that with Jackson’s own admission that Olympios was cut off from alcohol the next day and competing narratives from other contestants both on and off the record, and the circumstances warranted a proper investigation. There shouldn’t be any stigma surrounding thoroughness; however with ABC Studios and Warner Bros choosing to defer detailing any context around the circumstances, viewers of the show are instead forced to fill in the blanks to their own personal inclinations, doing a disservice to both Jackson and Olympios. For some, this means that the empirically pernicious context of black male and white women sexual interactions supersedes all; for others, it’s the reality that in modern-day justice systems and public opinion there is little to no value in falsifying accusations.

As a viewer who is not just black but also a female survivor of sexual assault, the overlapping of circumstances such as these immediately detail just how ill-prepared the Bachelor franchise was to handle complex issues of race and consent in advance of their landmark season. For a show that trades in the hazy magic of alcohol-fueled hookups, there seems to have been no clear plan in ensuring that all participants had unambiguous guidelines on what affirmative consent really means. Instead we are forced to deal with the weight of alleged sexual assault as a titillating storyline that leaves more questions than answers: if Demario felt uncomfortable immediately when Corinne made advances to the point of needing to engage in the sexual acts on camera, why did he proceed? If the unnamed sources of the crew were put off by Corinne’s inebriation in the moment, why wasn’t filming stopped immediately instead of 48 hours later? What procedures and policies are the studio ultimately reviewing if no misconduct was found? Why is the tape not being released? In a presumed effort to both protect the studios from liability as well as regroup the narrative construction in light of recent events, frank discussions about the topics of race, alcohol, and consent are lacking, ultimately doing a disservice to both Olympios and Jackson, who have their public lives excoriated without much to show for it.

I can’t say in good conscience that I plan on watching the upcoming season of BIP. Barring sincere engagement on the multiple layers of my identity – black, woman, sexual assault survivor – I’m not interested in participating in the ratings spectacle of scandal without substantively deconstructing the root of why these threads are so readily available to pull. Both black people and assault survivors deserve more than that. Peddling pain as entertainment fodder leaves everyone worse off, and if the show plans to substantively move forwards with a seemingly more diverse and multifaceted pool of Bachelors, Bachelorettes, and contestants, it would be well-served to treat critical issues as more than tools to prop up story narratives.

Posted on by Shamira 0