Professor Susurro has an excellent post up on the Antoine Dodson internet “meme” that I think is an absolute must-read. To wit:
In the midst of this institutional racism are the actions of three groups that cannot be ignored:
1. the viewers and listeners who openly mocked Dodson, completely ignoring the rape survivor narrative embedded in his story
2. the white middle class hipster-nerd comedy troupe that made money off of the rape and attempted rape of poor black women and girls and the one man willing to stand up for them
3. the mainstream feminist blogs and feminist communities who have remained largely silent on Dodson’s sister despite the core issue of rapeThe multi-racial viewers and listeners spent their time laughing at Dodson and mocking him and his sister in print in the youtube comments for days. The video received some of the largest hits of the week when it first went up. The auto-tune version played black radio stations and a black marching band even set did their own rendition, laughing at the “ghetto” in ways that I personally cannot excuse as black humor as survival but rather black humor as classism and internalized hate. Amongst the 100,000s of people commenting on Dodson or the autotune song, very few talked about the heinous act of rape, the existence of a serial rapist in the area that had gone unchecked for an unspecified amount of time, or the engineered tragedy of the state’s willingness to abandon poor women and girls to predators. In other words, the chance to mock an uneducated black man was more enticing than the fact of violence against women and girls. The very thing that allowed systemic racism, classism, and sexism to do nothing about a serial rapist in state owned low income housing was manifesting in individual viewers of Dodson’s story.
great post
This whole business has escaped my notice. What an ugly mess.
It’s been clear to me for a long time that mainstream feminist groups have a very hard time seeing past their own immediate interests. Granted, equal pay, family leave, workplace harassment, and so forth are problems that affect all women. But these groups are run by upper class, white, educated, professional women, and those are the women about whom they are most concerned. We owe these groups a lot. But I have never understood why it’s been so hard for them to extent their reach to women unlike themselves-women of color and poor or working class women in particular. It should be a mark of shame to NOW, Feminist Majority, and others that many black women have rejected the feminist label altogether.
If the victim’s brother was the only one who cared enough to speak up for her, calling that patriarchal behavior is extraordinarily insulting and insensitive. Good for him. And for shame, white hipsters. For shame.
The mocking of Antoine Dodson really set my teeth on edge…for all the reasons Prof Susurro mentions but because, first and foremost, RAPE IS NOT FUNNY.
I have to say I never even thought twice about his outburst (except: he seems fed up who could blame him?) until it started making the internet rounds as “hilarious.”
However a question. What of the fact that Antoine Dodson himself has been able to parlay this internet fame into a way to make money? I find it hard to begrudge him (and his family) that, so perhaps a small silver lining?
Bizarre to me that this incident, and Dodson’s reaction, were funny to anyone, anywhere. It was serious and Dodson’s outrage warranted and proportionate — for once! I did notice the erasure of the victim but considered that it may have been her own choice to avoid the limelight given what she’d been through. I appreciated that there was an element of genuine admiration and hero worship to the video making the rounds, but it is always hard for me to read where peoples’ reactions are coming from, because I am operating from a pretty idiosyncratic perspective, it seems, compared to the average YouTube viewer.
bluebears — love that he turned it around and refused to be revictimized. I think he really took control of the narrative and respect him a ton for it.
compared to the average YouTube viewer.
Yeah. I don’t know what to say about them.
I pride myself on being honest, so here goes. I saw the auto-tuned remix, and I laughed; though it definitely wasn’t as infectious as the friends who showed me thought. Then we watched the raw news report, and the main thing I gleaned from that was…the forensics team was one guy with a walkie talkie? In what little defense of the remixers as I can muster, from what I remember, they went out of their way to remove references to rape. Conceivably because they would agree that rape isn’t funny. Now, is taking it out of context what makes it funny? Or is removing the context just another horrible example of our incessant demand for more shocking dehumanisation of anyone other than ourselves?
I don’t know. Rape is not funny, but much humour can be derived from situations which are otherwise tragic. For example what That Was The Week That Was did in response to the civil rights movement. (I can’t find a useful link.) Not to say that bedroom intruder is satire, but it is something of and for the time.
AE, I don’t know exactly what remix you are talking about, but I guess the question might be if you aren’t laughing at the rape part, maybe you are laughing at some class or race issue, although I also leave room for legitimate and non-patronizing joy in the variety of human expression, which is where I assume your laughter was coming from.
@JD Regent: Thanks for the benefit of the doubt, and I like to think the source of all comedy is “legitimate and non-patronizing joy in the variety of human expression,” except that whenever you laugh at someone, it does tend to be patronizing, even if it is a legitimate response to the variety of human expression.
(And I’m going to have to steal this phrasology [because if I use words like phrasology, you know I need more better ways to talk.])
Is it far too generous to assume there are feminists who are laughing *with* Dodson? His passionate contempt for the scum who attempted to rape his sister was warranted, brilliant, and almost hilariously well expressed. He openly mocks the would-be rapist several times both in the remix and the original interview and the “we will find you” chorus is very much anti-rape and anti-rapist. It’s possible to read it so that the victim isn’t being laughed at, and I do think laughter at the stupidity and moral vacuity of rapists can be hugely empowering – but not, of course, laughter about rape.