Eddie Long addressed his people and the people (10,000) lined up with gold-leafed bibles and prayer cloths to ask for tolerance and forgiveness for Eddie Long. When one man asked for the truth, he was thrown out. Others ask not to convict the man before he’s proven guilty. This happens every time a man of God is accused with molestation or other misbehavior.
But ask yourself this: in all those other accusations, how many times has it NOT been true?
The answer is almost never. So, I don't wonder if he did it. Chances are he did. Now it's all about getting him out of it so the money can keep flowing in that church. If you want a more sympathetic view read Goldie Taylor's excellent blog here.
So before the payoffs begin, before people plaster religion over their denial and refuse to see what’s in front of them, let this, my most humble FB page, be a place where someone looks beyond the bullshit to something more important.
I am concerned with things more troublesome than another fake, homophobic self-hating gay republican minister. I worry about the root of this problem.
There is a history of sexual abuse that goes all the way back to slavery. The master raped his slaves then enslaved his own children. Black men were forced to have sex with different women without love commitment or jumping a broom. And we can only surmise that many slave masters were homosexual and raped male slaves. And after freedom, we carried these scars into an uncertain future.
Flash-forward to the rampant incarceration of black males in the 1980’s and 90’s during the creation of the prison industrial complex, when America’s phony “war on drugs” was used to end the progression of post-civil rights black America. Affirmative action was halted, discrimination laws relaxed and businesses allowed to ship jobs overseas. When unemployment soared, black men were left with few choices. And if they chose to use drugs in their despair (or weakness), then simple possession laws suddenly carried penalties that rivaled major violent felonies. Men were taken away from their families and communities and put into a burgeoning prison system which broke their spirit and awakened the aforementioned baggage of slavery.
Within the prison population that incarcerates 10.4% of the black male population, there is widespread sexual abuse and forced homosexual behavior. Some years later, this wholesale incarceration of black men led to a corresponding rise in reported male molestation in the black community. Many men admitted in a study (see below) that they are not homosexual but occasionally engaged in sex with men and in almost every case, they were introduced to this behavior by force or coerced by a trusted adult, like a minister of a mega church.
Understand that this is not a myth. It is fact proven with hard numbers and lives lost and turned asunder. A black man goes to prison under an unfair and unjust system. He is molested. He gets out and he in turn molests a boy, who molests another and so on. The studies show that within the black community that casual molestation inflicted upon fatherless boys became almost commonplace, Many victimized young men suffered from self-hatred, depression, suicidal thoughts. Also many of them carried resentment of women which came from resentment of traditional sexual roles. (And although this was not in the study, I say this anti-woman notion was reinforced by hip hop images and lyrics.) See, Childhood Sexual Abuse in Black Men who have Sex with Men: Results from three Qualitative Pilot Studies. Sheldon D. Fields, PhD, David Malebranche, MD, Sonja Feist-Price, PhD.
It is an almost Shakespearean tragedy: The same country that freed us, kept us in a constant state of legal oppression, within a cycle of poverty and subject to new and improved forms of slavery that kept the problems alive and allowed them to mutate until they were absorbed into our culture, thus proving the very false racist notions which justified our original enslavement.
Outrageous, you say? Ridiculous that prison culture could influence the greatness of Black America? Then were did the baggy pants style come from? Where did the “no snitching rule” come from? Rap tunes celebrating the strength of doing time? Prison tats? The rising HIV infection rates of black women?
We have survived many terrible things in this country but the shadow of our past is never far behind, it seems. And every time we slow down, it overtakes us.
I thought Eddie Long represented everything that was wrong with the church. Now it seems he also represents what’s wrong with black society. But which came first? Is Eddie Long a chicken laying eggs filled with abuse or is he himself a victim, an egg that matured to wreak havoc upon others?
Copyright 2010
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