First, here's the link to the Change.org petition:
https://www.change.org/p/gov-mary-fallin-revoke-the-bail-for-accused-serial-rapist-daniel-holtzclaw
With great thanks to Son of Baldwin: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SonofBaldwin, Tumblr: http://sonofbaldwin.tumblr.com/.
A few thousand more signatures will make a difference. So please share the Change.org link via Twitter and other social media. Thank you!
From Change.org's petition page:
Revoke the Bail for Accused Serial Rapist Daniel Holtzclaw
Petition by
Son of Baldwin
Dear Governor Fallin:
We are outraged that Oklahoma City District Court Judge Timothy Henderson saw fit to offer bail to accused serial rapist (and possible murderer) Police Officer Daniel Holtzclaw. Not only did the judge offer an initial bail of $5 million, but REDUCED it to $500,000 for the sole purpose of allowing Holtzclaw to obtain his freedom. We believe the public safety is at risk for as long as Holtzclaw is allowed to remain outside of prison.
Holtzclaw has been accused, by EIGHT WOMEN, of abusing his power and resources as a police officer as a means to rape them without consequence. These testimonies, given by women who do not know one another, are remarkably consistent and credible and, in the interest of social justice, we demand that Holtzclaw's bail be revoked so each of these women, and every other woman in the community, can be assured that Holtzclaw, through his considerable connections through the Oklahoma City Police Department, will not be able retaliate or enact some sort of revenge against his accusers.
Anything less than that does not serve the public interest and will not only seem to be a suspicious and concerted strategy on the part of the local government to protect one of its own, but also an attempt by the local government to perpetuate institutionalized and systemic racism and sexism, as all of Holtzclaw's victims are black women.
So much sympathy and concern have been placed with Holtzclaw and his family. Well, what about the victims and THEIR families?
We cannot imagine a single American agency allowing Holtzclaw mercy, much less bail, if he were black and his victims were white.
Please join us in our efforts to show the world that the United States of America is not a rape culture where rapists are protected and excused. Please show the world that the lives of black women do, indeed, matter. Instruct Judge Henderson to revoke Daniel Holtzclaw's bail.
Signed,
The Concerned Citizens of the World
To:
Gov. Mary Fallin, Oklahoma-05
Gov. Mary Fallin, Oklahoma-05
Revoke the Bail for Accused Serial Rapist Daniel Holtzclaw
Sincerely,
[Your name]
[Your name]
To Julian,
ReplyDeleteI just want to say thank you for showing concern for the Black women who were raped by that policeman in OK. Mainstream news media made him out to be a "nice All-American boy", overlooking the fact that he is a serial rapist. The victims are negatively portrayed as "druggies" and "prostitutes".
While mainstream media pretends to care for domestic violence, i.e. Ray Rice, they purposely overlooked this case. I'm not sure that OK Gov. Fallin is going to do anything about this because she's in league with racists/sexists in power and very right-wing.
What are your thoughts?
S.B.(La Reyna)
Greetings, La Reyna!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad we're engaging on this in a serious way and hope many privileged people are as well. It's a perpetually ignored dimension of a larger atrocity. And to whatever extent it threatens to become front and center in corporate media, that will only happen with colonial and hegemonic narratives woven through the stories. Even with the stories on the margins of the margins, those narratives must be layered in.
Here's one view:
There's only one or two degrees of removal from the most privileged women that results in invisibility. With the most privileged women, dominant society pretends to care. The person victimised might just get to be seen as a victim.
So, for example, in my experience of viewing major media, the story of a young or not-old blond thin white U.S. woman who is abducted, battered, raped, or murdered, or whatever other horrors happen to women ubiquitously, gets media recognition but sort of as an episode of CSI. Rarely is a person so harmed seen as a particular human being. Only when feminists point out she was harmed because she's a woman do the patriarchal tyrants respond that the crime was particular to her. To say oppressor classes want it both ways is sometimes to miss they want it--and get it--in every way.
So such stories become entertainment for the week until the next story is unfolded--and of course there are always plenty of true stories of misogynist violence. But the story-telling most likely spares the viewer of the kind of stereotyping that few to no Black women escape, as druggies and prostitutes. (There's a problem there beyond the most obvious one, brought to my attention by a colleague, which I'll attempt to address below.)
It's not only the issue of which women get the exploitive media attention and which don't. As you know all too well, women marginalised by race, ethnicity, age, class, ability, sexuality, will fall off the dominant cultural radar as fully human people to be concerned about at all.
What is additionally reprehensible and corrupt in the stories, is the more marginalised and oppressed the woman, the more she is portrayed as a threat: a druggie is a person who threatens the supposed purity of good white men; the prostitute is a person who allegedly exists to undermine the professed goodness, greatness, and holiness of rich het white men; Black womanhood, alone, signifies having too much power.
When the perpetrator is also Black, then Amerikkka tells the story of how dangerous Black men are. When the victim is white, well, he's just showing who his deepest misogyny is really aimed at: not white women, but white men who own the white women.
There's no dominant narrative in which Black women aren't wh*res, mammies, or just plain evil (far too powerful and far too dangerous).
(to be continued...)
Portraying any woman as a prostitute is simply to say she is more thoroughly a woman in the white male supremacist sense: seductress/spreader of disease/person of ill repute/carrier of evil.
ReplyDeleteAll women are that, in such a perverse view, but any man caught beating or killing a marginalised, intersectionally oppressed woman proves nothing about his lack of goodness, greatness, or holiness. It only tells us just how bad she must have been to warrant that level of "legitimate" disdainful force against her.
This is far too similar with white cops murdering Black civilian men: all the white imagination conjures is, "The man who was killed must have been dangerous in ways that don't show up in the video of the cop blowing bullets into his back." But the evidence white people need does show up: he's Black. Isn't that what the cop is telling us: That all Black people are a threat to 'us'?
The cop doesn't have to be white, of course. "Cop" signifies lethal-while-good white male colonial power and authority.
Meanwhile, her humanity isn't really allowed to exist even to that paltry degree. That's what these stories tell me; it's too painfully obvious:
How can so many Black women and girls be beaten, murdered, and disappeared at such rates with no dominant cultural outcry and outrage? But how could there be such outcry and outrage when the private white male response is, "Phew! Now there's one less threat to our morality and masculinity."
White male supremacy only exists and thrives by ceaselessly committing genocide and gynocide, with specialised atrocities of misogynoir aimed all too effectively at women of color; that is not a narrative even whispered about honestly in dominant media. It only gets spoken of mythologically, with white men telling it over and over through their use of terroristic 'goodness'.
Here's more on the Holtzclaw case and how some white women have the tendency to blame the victims of Holtzclaw. For example, his girlfriend.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjQMjbwEBhA
La Reyna
Hi La Reyna! It is so good to hear from you! I hope you have been well and healthy. I'll make the link work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjQMjbwEBhA
ReplyDeleteThanks, Julian Real. It's been a long time since I posted. I have too many things on my mind since 2016 and I was depressed when Trump came to power along with his minions and it's going to get worse when those emboldened followers of his going across the country destroying everything in its path. They're the most evil racist, misogyinstic, homophobic people ever known and encountered.
DeleteLa Reyna
Thanks.
ReplyDeleteLa Reyna