Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D.,
A black girl-child must be the most fearsome thing in the world based on how hard so many adults in the juggernaut of Hollywood/Hollyweird are working to demean and debase her. Whether it’s reporters who can’t or won’t learn to say her name — “Can I call you Annie?” No. “My name is not Annie. My name is Quvenzhané.” (I am not naming the offenders. I refuse to call their names.) Can you imagine a reporter not bothering to learn the name of a world leader because it makes demands on her articulation? Yet some want to call Quvenzhané uppity for insisting on the dignity of her own name. We’ve seen that before: Grown black women called “Gal,” never “Mrs.”
And then there was the person and organization who thought it was ok to call a nine-year-old baby girl carrying a stuffed dog a vaginal slur.
I am reminded of the prophetic and prescient bell hooks and her continually relevant essay “Selling Hot Pussy.” Black women and girls and our brown sisters are commodities from plantations to picture shows reduced to our urogenital orifices. (Bootylicious, anyone?) The claim of comedic license would be a joke if it were not so feeble and so deadly. The law of this land not so very long ago was that black women and girls could not be raped because we had no ownership of our own bodies no right to withhold consent or access from any white man or any black man to which he wanted to breed us. A black woman or girl who defended herself and her womb against violation and pollution was beyond uppity; she was a criminal.
White privilege and its daughter, White Ladyhood, cover white child-actressess from Jodie Foster and Drew Barrymore to Dakota Fanning in its embrace. They were not and would not be called filth and out of their names on their big night. The actions of these journalists reveal their belief that Miss Quvenzhané Wallis is not deserving of the protections afforded white ladihood, not even at the tender age of nine. Like a slave, she is not afforded the luxury of a childhood.
No baby, we haven’t come a long way. Some have never left the plantation. Others are trying desperately to recreate it and impose it on the rest of us. We are not a post-racial society. We are a society in which a few people of color have made extraordinary accomplishments and are then used as shields to defend against claims of racism. We also live in a world in which violence against women and girls is epidemic and cataclysmic. Little Quvenzhané lives at the intersection of black and female and is doubly impacted, doubly marginalized, doubly vulnerable.
That the writer who called Quvenzhané Wallis a word no nine-year-old should hear, know or have to be shielded from should be held professionally accountable and lose his (or her) job must be said. That so many in the Twitterverse and on other social media platforms are outraged is a hopeful sign. The media outlet which posted that comment and later took it down without apology has taken responsibility for its vicious act of sexualized (verbal) violence against a child is reprehensible. That the people who work there don’t understand that they feel entitled to treat Quvenzhané the way they are because she is black is the point and the problem.
Quvenzhané, I say your name with pride and respect. You are a gift to this world. You are brilliant and beautiful, made in the image of a loving God whom many cannot or will not recognize becauseshe is a black girl flowering into womanhood. And the world that lynched a Jewish single mother’s child simply can’t handle God in black female body.
(See Janet McKenzie’s iconic image of Jesus using a black woman as Christ/a, “Jesus of the People.”)
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-wil-gafney-phd/quvenzhane-wallis_b_2758373.html?utm_hp_ref=oscars
Rev.Will Gafney is the Associate Professor of Biblical Hebrew and Jewish and Christian Scripture
Follow Rev. Wil Gafney, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@WilGafney
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