By today's Urban Chameleon contributor
Christa Bell
In many ways, focusing on serial rapist, #BillCosby,
is a way to direct rage and shame at an entire set of systems that
compose the massive and unwieldy phenomena that are patriarchy and rape
culture. It's easier to focus on him than on the rape and torture of
prisoners by, for example, the CIA. Cosby makes identifying the way
rape culture works within patriarchy, manageable, almost breezy. He
also makes it easy to identify those who have completely internalized
rape culture ethics. If anything could
be said to be redeeming about Cosby's decades as a serial rapist, it
would be that his heinous crimes against women force us to approach rape
from multiple and intersecting perspectives. It allows us to confront
the kind of eucharistic brainwashing, that we are all impacted by, that
allows patriarchy to operate so efficiently. By eucharistic, I mean
that spiritual ritual of double think that allows us to believe that
what is false, is actually real. As in the ritual of communion when
adherents accept that the bread and wine being imbibed are the actual
body and blood of christ. In the case of the ritual of defending Cosby,
his disciples have substituted his TV persona, his filling in for and
as their absent fathers, his representation of black masculine purity,
as the truth of who he is. But he is not. He is black, he is an
exceptional entertainer, and he is wealthy. He is also a scum who has
spent decades sexually exploiting women in one of the most vile ways
imaginable. You will have to find a way to reconcile those truths with
his persona. Reconcile the wine and bread with the blood and flesh.
This is also the work of #Ferguson. Upending and calling out all systems of oppression.
Follow Christa Bell at www.realcoloredgirls.wordpress.com
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