Brothers Writing To Live: An Open Letter to Boyce Watkins

Dear Boyce:
We come at you as Brothers who appreciate your ability to build a recognizable brand and become a voice of importance for many in our communities, but with such visibility and influence comes great responsibility.  It is in the spirit of this latter point that we absolutely must challenge the logic and validity of your recent essay “How Sleeping with the Wrong Woman Might Turn You Into a Rapist.”  At best, your essay is irresponsible, callous and willfully thoughtless; at worst, it is hateful, misogynistic and deeply troubling coming from one who claims to love and represent the interests of our people.There is not an index of sexual violence and rape in this country that suggest that the rates of such offenses could ever be equated with the number of false accusations.  Indeed the numbers tend to pivot the other way as cases of rape and sexual violence, especially in our own communities, are underreported, often out of the need and desire for many of the victims to protect their Black males assailants.  In other words, very often the Black women victims of rape and sexual violence are more willing to offer protection to their attackers, than you were willing to offer protection to those same Black women in your article.  Many of these issues are directly addressed by Aishah Shahidah Simmons in her important film No!: The Rape Documentary .Right now, a Black woman somewhere in the US and around the world is having to confront real-time threats and acts of sexual violence at the hands of a male perpetrator. Right now, a Black woman—someone's mother, aunt, sister, partner, friend—fears telling the truth about an act of sexual violence that has forever shaped her life because she believes that authorities and others won't believe her report. Right now, a man is calling an act of rape a moment of great sex. And your unthoughtful article is excusing the inexcusable and furthering the problem of sexual assault, too often waged against our sisters, in a rape culture. But rather than name your article as solely problematic, we are using this opportunity to address a culture of women-centered violence. We, too, must do the work of self-reflexivity and transformation. As Black cis and trans men, we are the beneficiaries of a rape culture and our sisters are its victims. The words we offer here are reminders to us to do our work just as well: to challenge ourselves, to hold each other accountable, to change ourselves, to think differently about our sisters and to live differently in community with them. We encourage you to do the same. It is not without concern for the history of Black men being falsely accused of crimes, specifically rape, that we come to you. We all know this history very well. It is however, our concern that you are willing to turn a blind eye to the history and suffering of our sisters, to actively degrade them by name – “wolf in freaks’ clothing”—and  by action, based on personal anecdotes and a vendetta against white liberals. We are not engaged in the project of Black uplift if we choose to ignore that Black women are often terrorized by the Black men that claim to love them. This article you published excuses that terror.Like you, we are black men who have committed a large part of our life to the page, and to our communities. As Black men writing to live, we welcome regret. We welcome revision. We encourage each other to create prose that embraces the word "and," prose that wraps itself around the crackly paradox of being a Black man in the United States. We encourage you to revise your piece and welcome the possibility that yes some black men are wrongfully accused of sexual violence, sexual assault and rape by black women, AND those black women, like most black women, are far more likely to never ever report sexual violence, assault or rape committed by us, the black men closest to them.  Our hope is that our attempts at honest prose, and our attempts at committed revision will lead to healthy, decision-making in our lives on and off page. We know the women in our communities deserve far more love and care that we have offered, Boyce. More than anything,  we know we can be much better at loving each other.Kiese Laymon, Writer & Professor at Vassar CollegeMychal Denzel Smith, Writer, Mental Health Advocate, & Cultural CriticKai M. Green, Writer, Filmmaker, & Ph.D Candidate at USCMarlon Peterson., Writer & Youth & Community AdvocateMark Anthony Neal, Writer, Cultural Critic, & Professor at Duke UniversityHashim Pipkin, Writer, Cultural Critic, Ph.D. Candidate at Vanderbilt UniversityWade Davis, II, Writer, LGBTQ Advocate, & Former NFL Player
Darnell L. Moore, Writer & Activist