Anti-Racism MUST EQUAL Anti-Sexism

I love Key and Peele.  Their sketches occupy at least 5 of top 10 spots on my list of favorite internet videos.  But lately, watching their videos has made me increasingly uncomfortable.  I'd like to take this moment to simultaneously thank the Banneker Institute and curse it (okay, not really that second one) for opening my eyes to the things in the world that I'm now starting to identify as problematic.

The show just premiered its fifth season. If each season has a dozen or so episodes and each episode has 4 or 5 sketches, that means there are about 200 K&P videos floating around the internet. That's a lot of videos to comb through and analyze for potentially (most likely unintentionally) offensive content. To spare you all that, I'll just talk about one(ish) in this blog post.

That one is Negrotown.

 

It's funny, right? And it's a catchy song with lots of cool dance moves and flashy outfits, all of which are things I really appreciate. It even provides a really nice satirical commentary on the current state of affairs in America.  

If you doubt that any of the things alluded to in this video are true, I encourage you

1. Watch this TED Talk on the the injustice of our so-called "justice system" 
2. Look up names like Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Tanisha Anderson, and Tamir Rice.  Honestly the list of names could go on and on; these are just a few of the well-known ones. 
3. Read books like Claude Steele's Whistling Vivaldi or Jean Halley's Seeing White.
4. Or, if all of that is too much, literally just spend 5 minutes watching the news or scrolling headline stories on the internet, because this shit is everywhere. 

If you already believe that the things K&P mentioned in the video are indeed real, then you're ready for this next bit.

Go back to the video and start watching at \(\approx\)2:45.  This video is about the issues that Black people in America face, right?  Then why is it that the only complaint the Black women of Negrotown have is against other women and about their relationships with men??  I'm pretty sure Black women have bigger problems than "white women [taking black men] away." 

Maybe I shouldn't be making assumptions about the concerns of an entire demographic, but I'm definitely more worried about the fact that the median net worth of single Black women is less than 100 dollars, but the median for single white women is more than $40,000 (source here).  And about the fact that the infant mortality rate among Black women is more than twice that among white women (source here).  And about the fact that Black women earn 89 cents for every dollar that Black men make, and only 64 cents for every dollar a white man makes (source here). And so many other things.

I recognize that this video does not embody the entire Black rights movement. Nor is it demonstrative of the tone of every K&P sketch (some of them are incredibly feminist).  But it makes a nice litmus test for the mood of the movement.  Just as the problems solved in Negrotown are mostly those faced by Black men, or maybe I should say just as so few of the problems solved in Negrotwon are those faced by Black women, too few of the problems addressed by Black rights movements are aimed towards improving the lives of Black women.

I've participated in a few Black Lives Matter rallies and marches. And in each one of those few, we chanted one or two Black women's names, but the list of Black men's names went on and on.  Is this because only a couple Black women are being unjustly killed? Hell no!  It's because, though there might be a significant intersectional feminist movement, there isn't really an emphasis in most Black rights groups on intersection anti-racism. 

We should change that.