These multi-party sexual encounters raise a number of questions that force us to re-evaluate the idea of consent in rape cases.  These types of activities, sometimes involve women who get raped in the same night that they consented to sexual intercourse with multi-partners.  For the most part, we think of the concept of rape as an “all or nothing” granting or not granting of consent.  How then should we legally make sense of situations involving women, who, engaged in multi-partner sexual activities, consent to touching by some partners but not by the others?  How should we measure consent in these contexts?  How do we prevent society’s biases and stereotypes from influencing the outcome of these types of cases?

     As we have seen in past rape cases, a jury’s application of the reasonable doubt standard in rape cases can be affected by its perception of the victim’s character as well as its assessment of the circumstances surrounding the occurrence of the rape.  This perception can be detrimental to rape victims who do not fit the profile of what a jury might consider as “careful” women or “traditional rape victims”.  In the absence of force or conclusive DNA evidence, the likelihood of these women’s rapists being convicted is currently not very high.  Consequently, our task for the future will be to construct a burden of proof which does not penalize the behavior of these non-traditional rape victims and, which, simultaneously, does not unduly prejudice potentially innocent defendants.           

The media has periodically publicized examples of that practice. A few years ago, Senator John Ford in Tennessee, for example, proudly testified to his maintaining a multi-partner and multi-household family unit in a 2005 child support hearing (http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/05/01/64558230.shtml).  Even more recently, the Jessie Davis case has brought this issue to the surface.  In its coverage of the case, the media has reiterated countless times, with fascination, the fact that the Jessie Davis maintained an extra-marital relationship and had two children with Bobby Cutts Jr., a married police officer.  The media also speculated that the legal wife of the police officer knew of the relationship between her husband and Davis and harbored no ill feelings towards Davis.

 Amidst the muddled speculations surrounding this poor woman’s disappearance lie a basic fact: Jessie Davis had a spouse-like relationship with Bobby Cutts, Jr. She carried two of his kids and maintained a long-term relationship with him.  In light of that, should women in Davis’s position not be able to seek the same legal protections reserved for De Jure spouses in American Law?  Was Jessie Davis made more vulnerable by the fact that her lifestyle was one that existed at the margins of the law? We might have to answer such questions sooner rather than later.  The reality of multi-partner unions is becoming one from which we might not be able to hide much longer.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss the role played by skin/hair politics in the mass exodus of African American male tourists to Brazil in search of the idealized Brazilian woman described by their friends and depicted in rap videos. Jelani Cobb documented these tourists’ predilection for Brazilian women over African American woman in an article published by Essence Magazine. The African American tourists interviewed in the article constantly described Brazilian woman as malleable, gentle, helpful and non-confrontational compared to African American women who they described as belligerent, confrontational, demanding, etc. These descriptions are consistent with the portrayal of black women all over the media. From Grey’s Anatomy’s “Dr. Bailey” to any run-of–the-mill cameo by a black actress, the no-nonsense black woman is a Hollywood favorite. While the idealization of Brazilian woman at the expense of black woman trigger an array of issues worth discussing, I would like focus on a question posed by an audience member after my presentation. Referring to the African American male tourists’ unflattering juxtaposition of African American woman with Brazilian woman, the audience member asked: “why aren’t African American women more mad about this? Why aren’t they doing more things to voice their anger?” My instinctive answer to the question was that, in the great scheme of challenges faced by black woman (food, shelter, job, racism, sexism, constant sexualization of their bodies, etc), this would probably not be their first item to tackle. My second thought, one often discussed with my best friend, was that, as many of the male tourists are often married or in a relationship when they go to Brazil, many black women, most likely, were aware of their partners’ exodus to Brazil even before the publication of the Essence article.

While I was in Brazil, I interviewed a Brazilian woman who told me that she receives $400 twice a month from an African American male tourist that she met during his visit to Bahia. In addition, Jelani Cobb’s article contains a number of anecdotes of tourists who, after their visit, send money regularly, to the Brazilian women whom they still see as their girlfriends. These types of transactions would be hard to hide from a partner. Women all over the world have always known how to negotiate and how to get what they need out of an imperfect situation. Whether or not the product of the negotiation is ever satisfactory enough in the long run is a question that is eventually answered by each woman for herself in due time.

As to my audience member’s question, “why aren’t black women doing anything about this?” I am not sure this particular phenomenon falls under the responsibility of black women to solve. Short of getting out of relationships with these tourists, it seems almost impossible to regulate something as deeply ingrained as the colorism/sexism-based preference for certain types of women. The work to eliminate these biases would have to be conducted on a number of fronts, among which will have to be community men’ groups working to help reverse the negative image of black women created by a racist and sexist society and media.

Michèle Alexandre

Couple upward mobility with the Eurocentic standard of beauty—the tall, thin, long haired, light skinned, bootie bouncing vixen—screaming from MTV, BET, and other popular culture sources, and it’s no wonder what is considered sexy and attractive is changing among young African American men and women alike.

Does Size Really Matter?

According to the Centers for Disease Control, seven out of every ten black women are considered overweight or obese as defined by the current “body mass index” (BMI) standards. Bigger body types, a diet heavy in fat, salt, and sugar—so called “soul food”—the reliance on cheap and convenient “Mickey D’s” and other fast food, and lack of regular exercise mean millions of black women are fat.

Despite these dismal stats, nearly one-third of adult African American women are married, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and countless others live within committed relationships. Some women are overweight when they marry; others become “fat and happy” in the years after “jumping the broom.” Then there’s the weight gain that comes with childbearing and from aging. The lifestyle choices of married African Americans are also a factor in the high rates of obesity and overweight. A 2004 Centers for Disease Control study found that black married couples are less physically active than single, divorced, and widowed people; and, not surprisingly, more black husbands and wives are fat compared to African Americans who have never married, or are widowed or living with a partner.

Sometimes there’s camaraderie in pigging out. “My husband is my ‘snacking buddy,’ and he always sabotages me whenever I try to diet,” one stay-at-home mom reveals. Vanessa, a U.S. postal worker, watched her boyfriend grow so threatened by the idea that she was about to become a slimmer mate, he cursed her mere hours before she was scheduled to have a gastric bypass. “He told me, ‘I hope you die on the operating table,’” Vanessa recalls. She came through the surgery fine, dropped the excess weight, and lost the boyfriend too.

New Jerseyans of a certain age will recall television commercials in which former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean declared, “New Jersey and you, perfect together!”  Kean’s declaration kept coming to mind as I read debate this week – on this site and in other venues – about Lewis v. Harris, the New Jersey Supreme Court’s recent decision holding that the New Jersey constitution requires that gays and lesbians be afforded the same rights extended to heterosexual couples upon marriage, but that the legislature could choose to provide those benefits through a statutory scheme not actually called “marriage.”  Arguments made by states in antimiscegenation cases before Loving also kept filling my head.  It struck me that, for this week at least, we could modify Keane’s tag to say something like, “The New Jersey Supreme Court’s Decision in Lewis and Antimiscegenation Laws: ‘Perfect Together’!”

Admittedly, I have been among those who, like the New York Times editorial page, have celebrated the ruling in Lewis as a victory of sorts.  But I have done so with the kind of reservation and disappointment that former Justice Thurgood Marshall and others must have felt in securing victories in cases such as Sweatt v. Painter, which challenged, among other things, the nature of the school facilities afforded African Americans under Jim Crow’s separate-but-equal laws.  This is an important step on the path to justice, but we have not arrived there yet. 

The New Jersey Supreme Court, in my view, should have gone farther than it did in Lewis.  Chief Justice Portiz, whose concurring and dissenting opinion mirrors my own position on the Lewis case, got it exactly right, when she, in response to her colleagues’ contention that the requirements of the state constitution could be satisfied without providing “marriage” to gays and lesbians, explained:  “’Language and labels play a special role in the perpetuation of prejudice about differences.  We must not underestimate the power of language.  Labels set people apart as surely as physical separation on a bus or in school facilities.  By excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage, the State declares that it is legitimate to differentiate between their commitments and the commitments of heterosexual couples.  Ultimately, the message is that what same-sex couples have is it not as important or as significant as ‘real’ marriage, that such lesser relationships cannot have the name of marriage.” 

In this context, I suggested in a comment to my prior post that perhaps the apparent majority supporting the civil-union compromise believe traditional, heterosexual relationships, all other things being equal, are best suited to child-rearing.  I'm aware of empirical support for the proposition that outcomes on social, cultural, and educational benchmarks are strongest when children are raised in households occupied by their natural father and mother.  This of course doesn't mean that children don't do well in other settings (I, like most Black folk under the age of 40, was raised in a setting wildly divergent from this traditional ideal), but simply that this arrangement, holding other factors constant, best facilitates desired societal outcomes  Commentor LAGuy challenged whether the best empiricism supports this proposition, arguing that his reading of the social-science data suggests that children do no better in households led by their natural parents than children raised by same-sex couples.  I'm very interested in reviewing this empiricism and evaluating the extent to which it undercuts data suggesting the traditional family structure, when it works well, best serves kids' needs. 

In addition to the empirical question, however, I suspect part of the explanation for the civil-union compromise concerns the intuitive appeal to the notion that a child's natural parents are uniquely situated to meeting that child's needs.  I think people intuit that fathers and mothers, generally, bring different competencies that, in combination, best meet children's diverse needs.  I suspect this itself flows from the intuitive sense that there's substantive meaning in the natural fact that children are born to a mother and father -- and that, relatedly, there's substantive meaning in the natural differentiation between men and women.  That men and women are not merely clones of one another, but that they are different, and that those differences, in the aggregate, best serve children's varied needs.  I understand that some have challenged the empirics -- or even the logic -- of these intuitions; but I suspect the strongly-held and seemingly natural character of these intuitions make them hard to uproot without the most indisputable kind of empirical data.

I want to emphasize that I'm simply trying to understand the seeming political consensus around the civil-union compromise.  I assume most people supporting it have good intentions -- as those who do not likely would reject government recognition of homosexual relationships altogether.  Too often in debates on this issue the conversation quickly devolves to the ad hominem: those opposing gay marriage are cast as intolerant Christian zealots; those supporting it are seen as flaming liberals seeking to destroy traditional families.  I tend to believe reasonable people can disagree on most issues; and in this post I simply want to explore why a strong majority of Americans, including many progressives, seem sincerely and in good faith to support the civil-union compromise.  I suspect it has something to do with the child-rearing issues I raise above.

Whatever one thinks politically of this conclusion, the constitutional distinction between rights and titles seems jurisprudentially suspect.  The Court held that the State had no rational basis to discriminate against homosexual couples in the dispensation of the legal incidents of marriage; it seems inconsistent to conclude, simultaneously, that the State has a legitimate interest in discriminating against homosexuals concerning the title it applies to those rights.  Whatever interest the State has in denying marriage-related rights to homosexual couples would seem to subsume its interest in calling homosexual relationships by another name.  To this extent, the decision seems irreconcilable with itself.

In his post Marc Lamont Hill, Mel Gibson and the Politics of Apologies thoughtfully explored racial politics of apologies. The recent controversy surrounding Arnold Schwarzenegger invites us to think about this issue again. In a conversation with his aides, the subject turned to Governor Republican Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia. A question is raised about whether she is Cuban or Puerto Rican. The governor responds that it does not matter: “I mean, they are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it.“ This was caught on tape—and, of course, made its way to the press. The short of the story is that the governor apologized in press conference to Garcia—and to anyone else who was offended. For her part, the Assemblywoman said she was not offended: “I love the governor because he is a straight talker just like I am. Very often I tell him, ‘Look, I am a hot-blooded Latina.’ I label myself a hot-blooded Latina that is very passionate on the issues. And this is kind of an inside joke that I have with the governor.”  So, at least one Latina, is willing to forgive him—nay, was not even offended. The question I am interested in is this: Does it matter whether the “very hot” language that Schwarzenegger employs refers to sexuality or temperament? Several of the press accounts of the issue construe the governor’s statement as signifying on temperament. Does it—should it—matter? 

Moreover, I hope his efforts will affect some people here in the US. The African American community in particular is ravaged by AIDS. Yet many folks continue to hide from this reality.  In my discussions with numerous  black professionals, including professors, I have met many who have never had an AIDS  test AND who do not use condoms either.

Perhaps we need to replicate Obama’s efforts and hold  a similar event at the annual conventions of our various black organizations including the sororities, fraternities, National Bar Association, National Medical Association, NAACP, Congressional Black Caucus,  and others. If the heads  of these organizations took the test would it influence their predominantly affluent successful membership?

Who will lead the way??