What Surviving R Kelly Means to the Black Women
The whole goal of feminism is to become redundant. My dream is for a world where I won’t have to call myself a feminist because there will be gender justice. And to get there, it has to be a mass movement.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ah it’s about that time where we talk about the not so nice stuff of inequality. I’m not going to bore you with the statistics because that’s another post, but what I really want to talk about is R. Kelly.
If you’ve been living under a rock, Surviving R Kelly is a 3 part Lifetime documentary talking about all the women that he assaulted or raped. The documentary series explains how women they were taken advantage of by the singer song writer.
First of all we’ve known that he was a bad guy since Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number came out. I can remember talking to my friend Sherita about it when I was 9. There was also a full episode of the Boondocks where they talk about R. Kelly being the King of R and B and people being AWARE of his actions….
Like we had full video tapes. This is the first time that a group of women have spoken out on the problem. And there is power in numbers.
Watching or even looking at Tweets were heavy, but we have to expose the uncomfortable to get to the truth. For centuries ,Black women have been told to be strong, carry the family, and take sexual violence. It’s completely ancestral. We don’t feel whole even when we move up to executive positions. It takes a lot of courage to heal and to speak your truth.
Surviving R Kelly is a small ripple in the movement particularly for Black Women. It takes a long time for people to change. This can’t be where we stop we have to keep the movement going.
