A lot of black men have been tossing the rape victim's white race out into the ether as if this is a reason black people should either just take Nate Parker at his word. Some black men have even gone so far as to imply that Nate only did their reprehensible things he did because "white women are whores anyway" -- as if he hadn't married a white woman.
This argument, as nonsensical as it is, reminds me that black men, white men, all men, see the sexual abuse of women outside their own race or ethnicity as a way of scoring points against men of another race or ethnicity. There hasn't been a time in history on this planet where men didn't conquer another land and rape the women as a message to the men that live there, same race or not.
Sexual conquest as a way of proving manhood is a raceless event for men too.
This leads to many men, of all races, going to the bar with the intent of getting some woman drunk enough that her "No" will go away or so drunk that she doesn't say anything one way or the other, leaving him with plausible deniability. Getting a woman to say "yes" is one path to sexual conquest and putting notches in the bed post.
But getting a woman to the point where she cannot say "no" in a clear strong voice is the other standard path to sexual conquest. And a lot of men (and some women) are having a hard time connecting the eliberate attempt to circumnavigate consent as the precursor to rape.
The man who tries to get "consent" from women who look like the women below aren't just being ungentlemanly. They are opportunistic rapists trying to get plausible deniability.
But we don't have to look at the one-on-one sex between Parker's date to determine whether or not we believe in Parker's guilt. We don't even have to look at what the victim said about what happened that night. We can look at what the black men there that night said.
EXHIBIT A: KANGAS
Kangas testified that Parker was having sex with the woman. When Celestin and him looked into the room, Parker invited him and Celestin into the room with a wave of his hand and invited them to have sex with her. Kangas's testimony definitely indicates that the woman was unconscious - which is likely why Celestin was convicted.
EXHIBIT B: KAVAMAHANGA
Kavamahanga is the one who took Nate's "date" to where Nate was or would be after Nate (in her opinion) stood her up-- for hours.
"Kavamahanga, who had been drinking rum and cokes, admitted at trial he kept the drinks coming, buying multiple rounds of Sex on the Beach cocktails. “She said [some other] guy bought her like four or five drinks,” he testified. “I bought her like two drinks, I think.”
...A week or two after the night in question, Kavamahanga testified that he asked Parker what had really happened.
“[Nate] said that he and a friend ran a train on [the woman],” Kavamahanga told the court. While none of the attorneys asked for clarity, to “run a train” is parlance for multiple men waiting in line to have sex with the same woman.
Kavamahanga added that Parker believed [the woman] was “basically lying” and said, “she consented.”
Read More:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/16/inside-the-nate-parker-rape-case.html
* * * * * * *
LET'S STOP HERE TO EVALUATE
WHAT NATE'S DEFENDING FRIEND TESTIFIED
THAT NATE SAID
THE URBAN DICTIONARY ON
"RUNNING A TRAIN"
ON A WOMAN
DEFINITION 1:
"dumbass hoodrat" = dumb black whore
DEFINITION 2
* * * * * * *
Kavamahanga was careful to say that the sex was consensual after he said Nate told him they ran a train on her but the phrase "RAN A TRAIN ON HER" is decades old. And I've never heard it without "SHE WAS SOOO DRUNK" and/or "WHORE" being used in conjunction with it.
Remember: In rape culture, whores are worthless. Therefore they can't be raped.
On college campuses of yesteryear and maybe today, it is the greeks (frat boys of all colors) and the athletes (all colors) that are notorious for this "running a train" It never used to be called a "gang rape" by anybody but select groups of women. The technical consent of a "drunk whore" was always discussed as a defense against identifying this behavior as a "gang rape."
Sometimes, I used to hear the frat boys or greeks got her drunk. Other times they opportunistically took advantage of finding a drunk woman. But I fully understood then that this is a gang rape, and I understood this before I believed in rape culture.
I understood that these "men" were only seeking plausible deniability when they asked a half-passed-out woman if she wants to have sex and/or if she wants to have sex with his friends.
Keep in mind that the men who"get confused" about consent in such situations will not be so drunk as to be confused about not driving a car drunk or jamming their hand down an active garbage disposal or even think to ask if the woman thinks she's on Venus or Mars to establish whether or not she can give consent.
And when the woman used to cry foul the day after "a train has been run on her" the response from men was usually something like,
"She put herself in that situation"
I've heard this phrase thrown around regarding women that have been sexually abused too many times to count. And it's been said by men and by women because women are raised to believe that you act a certain way and you will not get raped. Respectability politics isn't just about racism. It's about sexism and misogyny too.
The only reason these words weren't used on me is because I was taught a 100 different strategies on how not to be raped by "nice guys" in boys-will-be-boys mode. And I was also just plain lucky and sometimes discerning in my choice of male friends. Now that I believe in rape culture I understand that the Celestins and Parkers on campuses all over the country are opportunistic rapists, not "nice guys" who fell off the decent-man-wagon for a night.
EXHIBIT C: NATE PARKER
"You put yourself in that situation" are the words Nate Parker used on a recorded phone call with this victim And these words always mean the same thing to the opportunistic rapist: "Gotcha. Don't be a sore loser."
I don't care what everybody understood to be rape 1000 years ago, 100 years ago or yesterday. Nate Parker and his boy Celestin, both whom felt so remorseless that they got together that they wrote a screenplay that has a rape scene in it together. Even if neither one of them can bring themselves to identify what they did as "rape" I find it almost impossible to believe that they did not know, in the moment, that they were putting their penises in somebody that would be unhappy about it the next day when sober. I've heard the same phrases surrounding rape and gang rape too many times to not hear what the testimony is telling us.
Whatever you want to call what Parker and Celestin did, white men helped them over it up. It was either the school and the justice system or both. Without white male help, four black men do not get a drunk white woman alone for the purposes of having sex with her after her consent is going or gone and not go to prison at all.
White women's status might be low and close to nothing, but it's not entirely nothing. Four black men were involved in moving this white woman from point A to point B which resulted in a gang rape. White men don't care about the rape of white women. Brock Turner, Austin Wilkerson and a third one whose name I haven't bothered to remember show this clearly. But 17 years ago, this rape accusation would have been a classic opportunity to white men to use a white woman to put a couple of n-words in their place.
The rape of women and rape accusations, to a lot of men, are simply pawns to be played in a game against one another And in this case it must have been advantageous for white men to leave these two black athletes where they were OR to not dirty the name of a white institution, Penn State, with a rape accusation.
- When men win wars they rape the women for fun but primarily as a message of domination to those they conquered.
- White men used rape to put black men in their place, six feet under, by linking it to rape for more than a 100 years after the end of the Civil War.
- The Eldridge Cleavers among black men use women of black women and white women alike to prove their manhood, ability to conquer, as a sort of revenge for racism. And frankly, the misogynistic black male internal racism sufferers? Whatever they will do to a white woman they will do worse to a black woman. Just because a black rapists chooses Becky to rape, that doesn't mean black women are safe from him. Don't ever think that.
Again, it is NOT the victim's testimony that convinces me that she was gang raped by a gang led by Parker. It is the words of black men have led me to conclude she was raped just as she said. Just like white people who do not recognize the words "racist" and "racism" as anything but epithets that have no substantive meaning, there large numbers men, including black men, have the same problem with the word "rape"
Some white people
only recognize racists and racism
if someone says the word "n*gger"
while hitting someone with a baseball bat
IF it's on video AND the video was going a full hour before the actual assault,
It is these people that do not recognize
what the rest of what racism is,
the ones who do not recognize racist behaviors
because
they perceive these behaviors as "normal"
and that means that it is more likely than not
that they are participating in racist behaviors,
at least passively.
And by the same token,
some men,
including black men it galls me to say,
only recognize rape and rapists
if someone snatches a strange woman off the street
IF it's on video AND the video was going a full hour before the actual assault.
It is these men that do not recognize what the rest of what rape is,
the ones who do not recognize rape culture
because
they perceive these behaviors as "normal"
and that means that it is more likely than not
that they are participating rape culture behavior
and enabling rapists
Some people are wondering how this rape magically came out just before his movie came out. Well, wonder no more. There was no magic involved. A gang of white racists didn't conspire to do the movie in. Parker's studio wanted to control how the rape story came out. So Parker gave interviews, one of which he took his six year old daughter to (-- in order to avoid answering any rape trial questions when he went there to talk about his rape trial?)
If I hadn't read one word the victim said, I'd know what this man is. I've seen him before. I've met him before. I've listened to him before. Girls at my college, white, black, asian, or latina, knew perfectly damn well she wasn't safe anywhere near the greeks or athletes if she was planning on getting drunk without a boyfriend like object guarding her.
The elites at college are the same as the elites out in the world. A fair percentage of them are predators. And that includes black men like Nate Parker and Jean Celestin. And they are usually fairly unrepentant.
Nate Parker's initial statement about the rape
“Seventeen years ago, I experienced a very painful moment in my life,” Parker told Variety. “It resulted in it being litigated. I was cleared of it. That’s that. Seventeen years later, I’m a filmmaker. I have a family. I have five beautiful daughters. I have a lovely wife. I get it. The reality is” — he took a long silence — “I can’t relive 17 years ago. All I can do is be the best man I can be now.”
That statement is all about him. And to hear him tell it a few days later, he didn't even know the victim was dead. At first, I thought this was an obvious lie. I thought the studio had decided to trickle the information out in order to lessen the blow.
It just didn't occur to me that the studio would not research what happened to his victim to protect their investment in his movie, "Birth Of A Nation" So now you have to ask yourself why wouldn't the studio send a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars to track her down? (If they didn't know all along) Now I'm wondering if the white men at the studio, Celestin, and Parker, and now Harry Belafonte too only see rape accusation as a pawn one plays in game.
“The fact that [the system] may have screwed up, the fact that it didn’t really take care of justice, the fact that he should have been punished or whatever, is history,” Belafonte continued. “The fact is that he was confronted and then he did go through the process. Why are you bringing this up now? What has he done that requires this kind of animus?” (I so wish Belafonte's statement wasn't completely consistent with other male civil rights leaders)
http://www.theroot.com/blog/the-grapevine/harry-belafonte-on-nate-parker-what-has-he-done-that-requires-this-kind-of-animus/
If the victim, the woman who is raped, is always an unimportant pawn in a game between men, then it makes sense that the studio and Parker didn't go find out what happened to her --if they weren't lying about not knowing she was dead.
The only thing that mattered, when Parker first made his tatement about the rape, was how unpleasant the rape accusation was for Parker and Celestin.
That's pathetic. But I don't think this deviates from men's standard operating procedures.
Roxane Gay wrote a really good piece on the "Nate Parker and The Limits of Empathy" I think she's a better person than I am even though she talks about committing to not seeing his movie. She seems sorry for him in a way that I'm not. Nearly all of my empathy is going toward his dead victim. However, as usual, the defenders are hardening my heart more than the racist or rapist I'm writing about.
I thought maybe I could do something like pay for an alternate movie, making sure he doesn't get my money, then go see "Birth Of A Nation," see Nat Turner's story told the way it should be told, from the view that black men died trying for something noble and heroic just like white people portray themselves in movies like "Saving Private Ryan"
But I don't think I can disconnect the art from the artist.
I'm trying. I want to. I wanted to see this movie desperately. But I doubt I'll be able to see Parker's face and disconnect it from what he's done, not by the time the movie is released in October. Heck, I'm still trying to disconnect Mel Gibson, the actor, from his "Lethal Weapon" character. And it seems like it's been at least 5 years since his racist tirade all but ended his career.
Just like O J ran to BET when things got rough, Parker seems to have run into a blackness in the form of a black magazine to save him. He seems to be saying all the right stuff about consent and rape culture now. Instead of using one six year old daughter to block questions, he's using all five of them to say how much he's learned as a man.
To tell the truth, I do hope he's actually repentant, that his faith is real and not as convenient as it seems. If he hadn't gotten his head handed to him over the last week, mostly due to black women raising hell, I'd be more inclined to take him at face value.
Whether I decide to believe in sorrow or not though, I don't want him to have my money or huge success, not now and maybe not ever. I wish there was a way for the movie to succeed without him succeeding. I may be too vengeful by half but men need to pay for crimes against women.
And black women need to stop giving black men a pass for the sake of our own community, even if it was a white woman attacked, this time. What a black misogynist will do to a white woman he'll do worse to a black woman. I hope that's not what Parker is or remains, but he's setting an example for misogynists no matter who is he today in 2016
Taking away Parker's Oscar, taking away his bid to be a winner in the toxic masculinity sweepstakes isn't perfect. But if 100,000 young black boys the age of 14 and up see this black man lose because he ravaged a woman then all of us in the black community will be better off.
R. Kelly has pretty much been allowed to skate. Some of us tried to let Bill Cosby skate while others of us tried to make sure he didn't. Nate Parker is should be the first one in what I hope turns out to be a short line of domestic abusers and rapists that we allow to escape, at least, the justice of public scorn.
I hope white people get on the ball with their low status white women because we're all living here in America here together, but we have to take care of our own community first. We have people, mostly white, attacking us from outside -- the reason Black Lives Matter exists. We cannot let the predators among us multiply because they saw the predator that came before them skate with an "I'm sorry."
Black rape culture and black toxic masculinity are the ultimate in foulness to me. Do you know why? Because other women don't call their men "brother."
I'm not going to help Nate Parker along by supporting his movie. I can't do it. I shouldn't do it. I'm kinda of upset with myself for thinking I should do it.
Like everybody else in the black community, I'm still somewhat conditioned to save black men at the expense of everybody else.
http://thankherforsurviving.blogspot.com/2015/05/black-femiinism-more-than-definition.html
, that explained that it is the status of the victim that determines prison sentences and not so much the status, based on race and gender, of the perpetrator. 
