Jessie Davis, Bobby Lee Cutts, and Rachel’s take on the racial aspects of the case
I don’t have cable and don’t watch TV news, so I didn’t hear about the missing Jessie Davis until Tuesday evening of this week, when I saw mention of her in some of the blogs on my Bloglines. By that time, apparently the whole rest of the country knew that the pregnant woman has been missing for weeks, her toddler son found by his grandmother home alone, that her body had been recovered, and that her boy friend, Bobby Lee Cutts, Jr., the father of the toddler as well as the baby on the way, has been charged with her murder.
This says something about the difference between getting your news from TV and getting it from newspapers; stories like this are easy to miss in print, and hard to avoid on TV. I had a similar experience back when the Scott Peterson trial was going on, being asked by my father, who was watching a lot of Fox News, what I thought of the time, and discovering that he, thousands of miles away, was much more up on the details than I was, living right in southern California.
Or maybe it just says something about how out of it I can be, personally, on certain stories.
At any rate, Rachel S. of Rachel’s Tavern, both at her blog and at Alas, A Blog, has a theory about why this story has been so big in the media: It’s About Interracial Sex Folks.
It’s about interracial sex. Interracial crimes make big sensational news stories, but crimes that involve interracial sexuality arouse the deepest passions of American bigotry. The OJ Simpson case, the Duke Rape, the Kobe Bryant rape case, and now this one–they all have tremendous sexual overtones. For a long time, I was surprised at how much attention the Duke case received, because I was focused on the fact that the accuser in the case was black, but I missed the mark. It’s more than the races of the people involved; if the crime is perceived as involving interracial sex, something snaps in people, suddenly they perk up.
The truth of the matter is that the US is a culture obsessed with interracial sex, but nobody will say this in polite company. During the slave era and the Jim Crow era, white people spoke with repulsion and disgust at interracial sex even though many white men were routinely engaging in sexual encounters with black women. In the colorblind era, people are still obsessed with interracial sex. However, they do not publicly say, “Wow, interracial sex is: bizarre, disgusting, exciting, adventurous, morally repugnant,†and so on.
This then gets tons of comments, with the comments, particularly on the Alas, A Blog post, showing some disagreement among commenters as to how far race has been a factor in the coverage.
I’m not sure how far the race angle would have leapt out at me if I’d seen this on TV (rather than reading about it first from African-American bloggers who were worried that white people’s prejudices would be reinforced by the case). I don’t know how they covered it, really. And crime stories that go really big on TV news generally have several hooks, not just one. Was OJ’s trial for murder big because of the nature of the crime, or because he was such a big sports star, or because he was a black man suspected of killing a white woman? How do you compare the response to, say, Claus von Bulow’s trial for killing his wife Sunny?
So, I’m not surprised that Rachel’s commenters take different tacks on which hook to focus on (the fact that Cutts was a cop? the abandoned child?).
The whole interracial sex taboo is in a weird place, because it’s neither a dead issue, nor a still fully openly acknowledged one. In that way, it’s like our attitudes toward race in general.
What a dead taboo looks like: In the very old days, my marriage to Joel would have been considered an intermarriage. I was raised Episcopalian; he was raised Catholic. That kind of thing once was a big deal. And interfaith marriage still is a big deal – and should be – in individual cases, for people making their own personal choices. If Joel and I were both devout in two different faiths, and held to those faiths in ways that made our life choices incompatible, about things that a husband and wife had better agree on (such as birth control, or whether a husband’s to be considered head of the house), then we shouldn’t marry. But those choices get made now without any sense that the world around you is going to think it’s a big deal if a Protestant marries a Catholic.
What an openly acknowledged one looks like: same-sex marriage. There are people who think it shouldn’t make a difference, and people who think it should, but no one ever suggests that we’re all beyond caring about what sex a person’s partner is. We take it as normal that “coming out” is a big deal to gay and lesbian people, and acceptance not at all something to be taken for granted. And we have huge, often evenly divided, debates about what choices people should make, who are attracted to their own sex.
Interracial relationships are in this weird space in between, where on the one side you’re getting messages that we’re all so over that, and, on the other hand, you know, not so much. I’ve blogged before about how that left me uncertain whether I was being paranoid when I was single and this was more of a live issue for me personally. Particularly when some people were being what I considered normal and sane, while another woman, whom I’d thought was a friend, outright accused me (not a “Blazing Saddles” joke, but in anger) of being after the, um, supposed large endowment (and how was I supposed to even know this? was I supposed to have been sleeping with tons of men and taking measurements?).
More recently, there’s stuff like having one of my posts that mentioned my nieces and nephews attract a comment (which I deleted, and banned the troll) saying it would have been better if they hadn’t been born – and I wonder, is there actually some non-trivial chunk of people who still think this? Or did I happen to attract some freakishly unusual Internet troll?
Anyway, why I got started on this was some of the responses to Rachel’s post. Since the comments I wanted to talk about are in two different places, I figured I’d post here, rather than joining both threads.
First, here’s Rachel responding to a commenter that I can actually identify with:
Les, with all due respect this statement is a real contradiction, “I’ve been spared hearing such titliating, racist crap from fellow white folks. When I was a kid, my much-older family members were against interracial dating. They said that when I got older, I would understand why.â€
Obviously you haven’t been spared racism talk.
She’s right, of course, that he hasn’t been spared racism talk, and yet I can really identify with his comment, because I, too, both haven’t been spared, and in some sense feel I have been spared. Everyone of my generation, in my immediate family, has had friends of other races, etc., and also has dated people of other races (starting with one sister in high school). And half of us (though not me) wound up marrying either someone who could be considered of another race, or someone who could be considered of mixed race. Mostly white/Asian, but the one brother has an African wife. And this has been OK with my parents. But I’ve also heard open criticisms of interracial dating, along with a whole bunch of other open racism, from my grandparents’ generation (though, as I’ve said in other posts, Grandmother dropped those arguments once she was faced with actual half African great-grandchildren). To the point where once, when I was in college, Grandmother was angry with me for attending a black church. Have I been spared? Well, in some ways, yes. Relative to what I run across on the Internet, I’m spared racist talk in real life. I’m spared in the sense that most of the people I’ve heard saying racist things in real life were much older, so I could comfort myself that their more racist views were on the way out. I’ve also been spared relative to what some other people I know have encountered. But I certainly haven’t been spared in the sense of not having heard plenty of racism from fellow white people, including some from people of my own generation. Just that, in ordinary real life, most of the time, racism isn’t exactly much in my face.
Second Rachel had written about the search tags for finding her site (sorry – these are going to be pretty bad):
I think my traffic at this site is evidence for the American obsession with race and sex. Within the last week here are a select few searches I have received:
black men impregnating white women stories
savages on blondes
Biracial family pictures black and white
BLACK ATHLETE MARRYING WHITE WOMEN
Black men breeding white girls
black negro slave woman naked pictures
black women with white men in adult movies
differences between white and black women’s breasts
blacks in bed sexing
george lucas in love black women
how do you feel about interracial relationshipAnd this was a really slow week, I’ve gotten at least 100 searches over the past few months for “savages on blondes,†which was a popular racist pornographic website featuring black men who act like “savages†who want to have sex with white women.
And a couple of people take exception to her example. First we have, in the comments of Alas, a Blog:
Rachel,
fwiw the related tags for Teen at technorati are* amateur,
* hardcore,
* blonde,
* brunette,
* mature,
* nude,
* celeb,
* ass,
* thong,
* titsI think this has more to do with the net’s role as a porn delivery device than anything societal about the teen years.
no idea if your broader point is correct or not.
Then we have a much less friendly criticism by Salvia, who “calls bullshit” on Rachel’s take on the Jessie Davis and Cutts murder.
So, as you already established you are researcher and teacher who focuses on race, African American Studies, gender, sexuality, and popular culture. You run a website that focuses on these very same topics. What kind of searches did you expect to have? Did you expect people looking for information on the rain in Texas or the wildfires out west? No, you are going to get searches that relate to the topic on your site!
The search request that are more sexual, that is to say “blacks in bed sexing†are, most likely, people who came to your site thinking it was a porn site and wanted to find things that related to their fetish.
Now, I don’t have an opinion about the coverage of this case, because, as I said, I haven’t seen the coverage of this case. I don’t know how far Rachel may be right, or how far it may be big for all the other reasons – the ex-cop, the toddler who may have seen his mother killed, etc. I do, however, have an opinion about porn and porn searches. And that opinion is, yes, one of the bigger functions of the Internet is to be a porn delivery mechanism. And, yes, a blog by a researcher about interracial relationships is going to attract searches by people interested in interracial relationships, including some whose interest lies below the belt. But, come on, there’s nothing obvious or inevitable about the kinds of interest that are turning up here. If people routinely look for porn that shows black men “breeding,” or black men as “savages,” that darn well says something about how black men are viewed. And I’m not going to be hopeful that those views are a fringe, extremist view that I can comfortably dismiss until I stop seeing those kinds of things showing up near the top of normal, non-porn, not trying to look for Klan site, searches that I do on terms related to race.