“No! Stop! Help Me! Please Help Me!”

Those were the words I heard when viewing a video in which someone conducted a Facebook Live of a woman appearing to be drugged and a man forcibly raping her in a club for all to see. 

I don’t need to know the details of what happened before the video started rolling. What I saw was a black woman in clear distress calling for help while a man imposed himself on her. Unless this event was completely simulated to outrage or (for some) entertain us, somebody should have been arrested. To date, I have seen no update.

On the heels of the jaw-dropping Surviving R Kelly docuseries that aired on Lifetime earlier this month and people wondering how such horrors could have happened so long without the R & B piece of filth having virtually no consequences, I can’t say I’m surprised that a young black woman was raped in a public place while everyone stood around and did nothing but record the event for Media Take Out. 

Oh…and did you read about the four black boys that were arrested for dragging a girl and gang-raping her? You probably didn’t. It wasn’t three white boys so it wasn’t all that exciting. Anyone who lives on the periphery of the black community and knows its customs and values realizes that these incidents are not uncommon. And when they do occur, little fanfare is given unless a white man is a victimizer. Then, everyone wants justice. Then there is marching in the streets and thought pieces about the horror of white supremacy and how every single white person in the world is racist.

Remember Jazmine Barnes, the seven-year-old girl who was shot while in the car with her mother, who had first reported that the perpetrator had been a white man in a red pickup truck? The black community galvanized. Ancient black leaders rose from their crypts to hold press conferences demanding that the police find the man who committed these horrible crimes. The black sector of Twitter and YouTube gleefully announce the fabled race war was beginning and the “white supremacist terrorists” were now attacking women and girls. When it was discovered that the real perpetrators of this murder where two black men, the deflation of the racial-rousing activists was nearly audible. Everyone went back to their corners and sulked because when black girls are victimized by members of their own community it’s only a Tuesday. Wednesday. Everyday.

The dejected response that the perpetrator wasn’t a “white supremacist terrorist” but rather, a typical, run-of-the-mill black, male terrorist is because of one thing and one thing only: Black men continue to fight a war by proxy with white men. They simply can’t or won’t collectively compete with men the typical way men do—by building bigger, making the most, collecting the best, owning the most etc., so when anything happens to a black girl or woman and the perpetrator is a white man, all the mechanisms in place to “fight the good fight” are primed, greased, and ready to go full throttle. It’s the only war they have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. The black community has absolutely no motivation to collectively do what is necessary to reign in the real source of danger innocent black girls and women face. They would rather you believe that the biggest source of your fear should be the white man, when statistics and life experiences tell us otherwise. 

What I have discovered through the repeated stories I see on my news feed about black women being beaten, raped, maimed and murdered is that no one really cares enough to do what is necessary to turn this around, because at the center of all the violence is the black male, whom the community has a blood oath to protect against “the evil white man.” So next time, if it’s your daughter being filmed for entertainment while being sexually assaulted by a black man, don’t expect many people to care. In fact, almost always, she will be blamed for not dressing like a nun to go to a club, or twerking too much when she knows damn well she’s just asking for that dude to run up in her. Don’t expect these atrocities and the (non) reaction thereof to change in your lifetime. 

Now it’s up to you to ask yourself how much you believe YOU are worth. How excited are YOU to become cannon fodder for an un-winnable war that has little or nothing to do with you in the first place? How attached should YOU be to a community that is only outraged at crimes against you when others outside the community do it? When will YOU have enough?