So what was in it for Blasey Ford? you might ask. I would say that the $647,610 raised through GoFundMe probably acted as some kind of inspiration, along with the lifelong backing and support of all future aspiring Democrats—indeed, which future Democrat would ever be able to turn down or say no to Christine Blasey Ford, the heroine of the Kavanaugh hearings? The last time I checked, Ford’s GoFundMe fund-raiser page had stopped accepting donations, with a message posted that stated, in part, the following:
The funds you have sent through GoFundMe have been a godsend. Your donations have allowed us to take reasonable steps to protect ourselves against frightening threats, including physical protection and security for me and my family, and to enhance the security for our home. We used your generous contributions to pay for a security service, which began on September 19 and has recently begun to taper off; a home security system; housing and security costs incurred in Washington DC, and local housing for part of the time we have been displaced.… All funds unused after completion of security expenditures will be donated to organizations that support trauma survivors. I am currently researching organizations where the funds can be best used. We will use this space to let you know when that process is complete.
It must take many months of research to be able to find those groups, because that was on November 21, 2018, and there has not been an update since. Maybe all those hundreds of thousands of dollars seemed too hard to part with after all.
From my standpoint, I watched in awe as liberal feminists rallied around Ford as she took the stand in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to recount the alleged assault. Here was a lynching being conducted in real time for us all to witness, simply on the basis of #BelieveAllWomen, judicial precedent, innocent until proven guilty, the entire premise of our common law system, and the Constitution were put on trial. Had Kavanaugh not been confirmed on the basis of Ford’s testimony, the founding premise of the Constitution would have required an amendment that read “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal under women.” How entertaining that modern feminists portray themselves as victims from The Handmaid’s Tale while at the same time working to achieve a legal standing that would have given them such unfettered dominion over the lives of men.
Of course, the whole affair was a sordid degradation of legal process that left me with a sense of unease. Unease at having watched women forcefully demand justice for Ford without a single shred of evidence.
Unease perhaps because, in an effort to stamp out their enemies, modern feminists are drawing upon the most ancient of southern racist tactics.
“BELIEVE WOMEN” VS. BLACK MEN
Emmett Till was just fourteen when he left his hometown of Chicago to spend the 1955 summer with family in Mississippi. Sadly, he would never make it back home. While visiting a local grocery store with a group of boys, Till was said to have whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a young white woman who co-owned the store with her husband. It was an unheard-of offense in the Jim Crow South, one that would cost Till his young life.
In the sixty years since Till was ripped from his great-uncle’s home, beaten, mutilated, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a seventy-pound fan tied around his neck, the exact events that did or did not transpire inside that store remain unclear. Till was accused of whistling at Bryant in an attempt to flirt with her. His mother would later say that her son stuttered and used whistling as a device to help him better pronounce certain words. What is clear, however, is the statement that Bryant made during the trial on behalf of the two men who were acquitted of—and then later admitted to—Till’s murder.
Bryant said that Till grabbed her hand and asked for a date, then slipped his hand around her waist and mentioned that he had had sexual encounters with white women before. The twenty-one-year-old said she was scared to death.
It was a shocking statement, considering that Till had been warned about the ways of the South by his mother, who had grown up in Mississippi. It was a shocking statement perhaps most of all, because it was not true. In 2007, Bryant admitted to Timothy Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till, that the physical and verbal advances from Till never happened. She also said that she could not remember anything else that may have happened on that hot August day, thereby calling into question whether Till had ever whistled at her at all.
Bryant’s admission was a momentous occasion for a black community that was still struggling to make sense of the unspeakable trauma that was inflicted upon Till’s young body—a confirmation of what many had always believed to be true. But the damage, of course, was already long done.
For many years, the tragedy of Emmett Till served as a reminder to Americans of the danger of unchecked allegations. Sadly, his case is far from an anomaly. There are countless historical examples of black men who have been wrongly arrested, jailed, or killed because a woman’s word was blindly believed. Yet while people on both sides of the political aisle will agree to the horror of past incidents, Democrats are loath to admit that today all men (no longer just black men) are in as much danger of being falsely implicated as they were in days past.
Take for example the case of Malik St. Hilaire: Malik was a black man and Division I football player and student at Sacred Heart University when another student, a nineteen-year-old woman named Nikki Yovino, accused him and one of his teammates of sexual assault in the fall of 2016. Yovino claimed that St. Hilaire and his teammate pulled her into a basement bathroom at a house party thrown by the football team. While St. Hilaire and his friend both admitted to having sex with her, Yovino claimed that they forced her into the act.
The next two years were a wild ride of emotion and devastation for the two men. They were kicked off the team, their scholarships were revoked, and they were expelled from school. And this, of course, says nothing about the shame and embarrassment they had to endure as a result of Yovino’s claims.
Yovino, meanwhile, was on her own roller coaster. Three months after the initial investigation, she admitted that she had lied to police about the assault because, according to the arrest warrant affidavit, “It was the first thing that came to mind and she did not want to lose [another male student] as a friend and potential boyfriend.” Yovino also believed that “when [her potential boyfriend] heard the allegation it would make him angry and sympathetic to her.”
Despite her admission, the investigation continued and ultimately went to court, but during a pretrial hearing, Yovino changed her story once again. She went back to her original version of events and stated that she was, in fact, raped. Ultimately, however, Yovino pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree falsely reporting an incident and one count of interfering with police, and was sentenced to one year in prison.
Judge William Holden, who presided over the trial, did not mince words when he convicted the unapologetic Yovino. “I just hope you spend the time reflecting on what you did,” he said. It was an appropriate statement given the events, but as was the case when Carolyn Bryant admitted to lying about what happened between her and a teenaged Emmett Till, considerable irreversible harm had already been inflicted. St. Hilaire made this clear when he made his statement before the judge and jury.
I went from being a college student to sitting at home being expelled, with no way to clear my name. I just hope she knows what she has done to me. My life will never be the same. I did nothing wrong, but everything has been altered because of this.
Yovino’s actions so perfectly encapsulate all that reeks about modern feminism.
Something ugly festers beneath the surface of this social movement, something that makes the Jim Crow–era witch hunts all too relevant again: today we see instances of rape being conflated with instances of shameful regret, and consensual sexual interactions labeled as assaults. In the process, we watch good men smeared by the court of public opinion, their reputations permanently marred.
Jeremiah Harvey was only nine years old when he was accused of touching fifty-three-year-old Te
resa Sue Klein inappropriately. They were in a Brooklyn bodega at the same time in the fall of 2018; Harvey was shopping with his mother and younger sister when his backpack brushed Klein’s backside as he walked past. Klein felt the contact and immediately assumed predatory intent. “That’s right. Her son grabbed my a—,” Klein told a 911 operator. “And [then his mother] decided to yell at me. There are security cameras in this bodega,” she further indicated.
Klein was right about the cameras in the bodega. She was wrong, however, about Harvey’s actions, and the camera footage immediately disproved her claims. With no charges to file, Klein apologized to Harvey but as always is the case, the damage had already been done. Harvey was humiliated by Klein’s outburst and accusation, and further traumatized by the concept of his arrest for an offense he never committed.
FEMINISM, FOR WHOM?
In my travels across the country, liberal women often tell me that I would have nothing if it weren’t for feminism. They are shocked at my refusal to accept the “feminist” branding. I too am shocked, but only by their “all-inclusive” reimagining of what the first-wave feminist movement was all about.
Despite the popularization of the modern phrase “feminism is for everybody,” it clearly is not for men or for conservative women today, and it certainly was not for black women in the past.
Segregation produced psychological changes. The savage pursuit of black men in the South on the mere basis of an allegation can be largely attributed to the operating belief at that time that white women were vessels of purity; they were to be protected at all costs, especially against the savage instincts of black men who (by their view) would naturally look to defile them. It was deemed a grave sin for a black man to even look at a white woman with interest, graver still if he ever worked up the nerve to touch her. And it was white men—southern Democrats and their Dixiecrat descendants in particular—who committed themselves to ensuring that such sins against their women were never committed, lest the perpetrator wish to play Russian roulette with his own life.
Of course, black women were never held in such high societal regard in those early days. Even in instances when white men were known to have raped or assaulted black women, they were rarely, if ever, held accountable for it. The natural result was that with time, white women—even those who deemed themselves to be “progressive” or “allies”—subconsciously began investing in the concept that they were better than, and somehow separate from, black women.
After the Civil War and through the Reconstruction period, newly freed black Americans began the long-haul battle for equal rights under the law, with the aforementioned support of the Republicans. Black women began engaging politically in the lobbying effort for suffrage. They understood that real power would come only with their right to vote, granting them the ability to elect leaders with their interests in mind. And although some decried the idea that black men might be given the right to vote before them, other black women understood the greater focus should be on the advancements of their community as a whole. They were happy to place the primary focus on the effort for black male suffrage, because unlike white women whose husbands, fathers, and brothers had always held political power, black women had no one to cast a ballot on their behalf.
The set of challenges facing black women was therefore unique and required thoughtful strategy, as Republican Party leaders feared that pushing too forcefully for women’s suffrage might indirectly hamper their efforts to enfranchise black men.
Suffragists like Susan B. Anthony, though purportedly committed to racial equality, disagreed vehemently with the notion that white women should have to wait until after black men for their right to vote. In the end, the women’s movement resolved to split, with white suffragists distancing themselves from black women whose advocacy was tied to the black community at large. Ultimately, this worked in favor of white suffragists; southern Democrats would more readily consider their push for women’s enfranchisement if they needn’t worry about consequential black empowerment.
Rebecca Latimer Felton was a vocal advocate for women’s rights, a prominent member of the women’s suffrage and progressive movements, and the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. She was also an unapologetic racist, who held deep notions of white supremacy. Felton believed that no black person, man or woman, should ever be granted the right to vote, a view likely attributable to the fact that the Georgia resident and her husband owned slaves. Never dialed into her own hypocrisy, Felton’s suffragist approach was to openly criticize southern men for failing to protect their wives and daughters by ensuring their equal rights. Her calls for equality were somehow separate from her belief that the lynching of blacks was a necessary way to protect oppressed white women. “If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from the ravening human beasts,” Felton said in August 1897, “then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.”
Modern feminists may not believe they have much in common with their racist forebears, but I’d beg to differ. Like their ancestors before them, their interest in the fight for equality extends only as far as their political aspirations.
A FRIEND OF THE LIBERAL FEMINIST MOVEMENT IS NO FRIEND OF THE BLACK COMMUNITY
To black America, I simply ask that we consider liberal feminism in this truer context of our history. Because this increasingly radical demand for by-any-means feminism seems to me to be but a self-serving ploy by progressives in their all-too-familiar pursuit of power.
Movements like #MeToo provide little more than political advocacy for their wealthy liberal sponsors. Actress Jane Fonda acknowledged the inherent privilege of the movement in an episode of All In with Chris Hayes back in October 2017. Speculating as to why #MeToo had suddenly gained so much momentum, she remarked that it was “too bad that it’s probably because so many of the women that were assaulted by Harvey Weinstein are famous and white and everybody knows them. This has been going on a long time to black women and other women of color and doesn’t get out quite the same.”
Though conceding that black women were largely being left out of the conversation, Fonda later remarked that she believed the movement had the potential to effect real change in the lives of all women. “It feels different,” she said. “It feels like something has shifted.”
But my question is: Whom has it shifted for?
With phrases like “toxic masculinity” and coordinated witch hunts at the drop of an allegation, the apparent goal of feminism seems to be to remove the concept of masculinity from the Western world entirely, making all expressions of manhood obsolete, and all expressions of womanhood guiltless.
The bigger issue is that if manhood becomes obsolete, so too will the family unit. And as we’ve already discussed, when our dependency on family decreases, our dependency on government increases tenfold.
For black America this hypothesis has been tested affirmatively and conclusively. Truly, no friend of black America is an ally of this perversion of a feminist movement.
4 ON OVERCIVILIZATION
Ruby Bridges was just two months shy of her sixth birthday on November 14, 1960, when she became the first black student to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. As a first grader, she did not understand the gravity of this simple action, nor could she even begin to comprehend its watershed implications, which would come to forever be remembered in the pages of American history. During an interview with PBS NewsHour thirty-six years later, Bridges remarked that her parents had intentionally kept many of the particulars of that occasion a secret, a decision that Bridges was ultimately thankful for.
“It would have been very frightening for me as a six-year-old to hear what I might actually see once I got there,” she said in 1997. “Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.”
November 2020 will mark the sixtieth anniversary of Bridges’s pioneering efforts, and for the first time in decades there is a debate surrounding black integration again—and it is not coming from white people. Today, some black people are choosing their segregation, as a token of their own self-empowerment. Suffice to say that not even in the wildest dreams or the darkest nightmares of our ancestors could this predicament have been imagined,
Take the case of Williams College, for example. In November 2018, the black student union held a town hall for “students, particularly black students, to reflect on recent events and the general student experience here” and “to voice concerns and work towards solutions.” Of most pressing concern during this town hall was the purported “token-ization” of black students in mostly white spaces, or more specifically, the idea that first-year students felt burdened by the process of acclimating themselves to the white institution. Their proposed solution? Affinity housing or dorms that would accept black students only. Remarkably, these students believed the way to address the issue of their discomfort was by segregating themselves from the rest of the student body—by choice. Not because they had to, but because they wanted to.
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