• ELIXHER
• On April 16, 2014

By KOKUMO (The following appeared as a series of Facebook posts. Compiled and re-posted with permission.)

I tried! I tried! I tried! I tried to be silent and not be the angry Black transwoman ruining people’s fun with logic, theory, and demands for intersectionality in practice and not prose. But fuck it! Fuck! It! If you are one of the million people circulating the footage of The Real Housewives of Atlanta‘s Kenya Moore being beaten by Porsha Williams, please ask yourself these questions, in no particular order:

KOKUMO

1) If two non-Black women were beating each other would you find this entertaining?
2) If two non-Black women were beating each other would you even find that plausible?
3) Why does seeing a Black woman being beaten enliven and invigorate you so?
4) Why is Black pain so, fucking, amusing?
5) Why do people dismiss Black women’s pain then demand that we tend to their’s?
6) When I was 21, I was attacked by four male-bodied people on the South Side of Chicago. I was even sexually assaulted in the process. I was forced to fight for my life. And I did. If you were there that day — if you saw me getting my ass whooped and body violated, would you laugh?

I purport that this desensitization is built, branded, and marketed via the commissioning of Black pain. Don’t ask me to decontextualize this. Please! There is no decontextualizing violence enacted upon a Black woman in a country that literally accrued all of its wealth and power by enacting violence upon Black women. In this country, in this world, violence against Black women is a business model and best practice. And I’m tired of not seeing it as an issue of race when it is abundantly clear that it is. It’s a matter of race and gender. I believe. I see.

I was triggered first thing this morning. I logged on Facebook to commune and the first thing I see is a Black woman being beaten. Violence is not funny. Violence, against Black women is not fucking funny. For me the issue isn’t that things got violent. It’s the intervention and introduction of the intrinsically racist and misogynistic lens of the mass media industrial complex. “Pop culture” doesn’t exist within a vacuum. Those cameras were set up in order to capture Black violence, package it, then sell it to the highest bidder. My critique of the mass media industrial complex is that while the general public is trained to be entertained by Black pain, the mass media industrial complex was created to exploit it. And that it did. I’se so tired. I be saying Imma leave social media, but the thing is afta I do dat, I’m jus gon have ta deal wit da violence in the streets. I’se so tired! I’se, so tired!

My critique is systemic more so than individual. As I stated above, I understand all the reasons for violence. As a matter of fact, my understanding of violence is intimate, as is all colonized people’s. But when violence that comes from a deep, tangible place for Black people is turned simply into a plot line, I call systemic racism and misogyny. It is not coincidence that out of the plethora of Real Housewives installments the ones most successful revolve around Black women, their rage, and the way their rage is transposed into violence against themselves and those around them.

As a Black transwoman who deals with all of the residual effects of being, trans, Black, and a woman I know that the healing we need is real. And I know that our pain being exploited is the motis operandi of racism. And as an artist, intellectual and cultural critic I cannot watch violence enacted either by or upon Black people with glib or glee.

KOKUMỌ is an African-American transgender woman and product of Chicago’s South Side. To KOKUMỌ surviving is passé. Therefore, she believes in sanctioning artistic, political, and actual space for other Trans, Gender Non-Conforming, and Intersex (TGI) people of color to thrive in. In accordance to this belief and her name, she created KOKUMỌMEDIA. KOKUMỌMEDIA uses film, music, and literature to create and generate realistic depictions of TGI people of color.