Flagged for Removal

August 19th, 2016

Narrative Hits a Major Speed Bump

Today I’m thinking about the Nate Parker/Jean Celestin rape scandal.

There is a new movie called Birth of a Nation. The title is taken from an old D.W. Griffith movie which portrayed the Klan as a noble organization. I haven’t seen the original movie; I would guess that almost no one alive has. I don’t really know what’s in it. The movie is extremely long, and it’s not exactly popular. In the minds of the public, renting this movie would be like checking Mein Kampf out of the library.

The new movie is about the Nat Turner rebellion, about which I know little. A slave named Nat Turner decided that God had told him to rise up against white people, so he led a revolt in which slaves killed white people indiscriminately. Turner himself killed a woman by slugging her with a fence post. I’m all for slaves running away, using violence and theft if necessary, but going from farm to farm murdering women and children for pleasure isn’t emancipation; it’s just sadism.

The new movie was written by two young black men, Nate Parker and Jean Celestin. They are former Penn State wrestlers. In 1999, they had sex with a woman who was so drunk she was unconscious at least part of the time. They invited others to participate. Both were indicted for rape, and Celestin was convicted and spent six months in jail. Celestin appealed, and he was granted a new trial based on ineffective assistance of counsel. The victim refused to testify again, and the prosecutor dropped the case. Celestin has since claimed that he was “fully exonerated,” which is not an accurate way to describe what happened.

The victim was an honor student who went to college a year early. After the rape, she dropped out. She became a drug addict. She killed herself.

The bizarre thing about this is that Parker used an extremely self-righteous, insulting image to promote his movie. It’s a photo of his face in a noose made from the American flag. The message it appears to send, which may or may not be the intended victim, is that young black men are victims in America. Coming from a highly successful film director who got a free ride to college and then avoided conviction for gang-raping a white woman, that’s a little hard to stomach.

When I say “rape,” I am not saying he was convicted or that he can legally be referred to as a person who committed the crime of rape. I am saying that what he and Celestin did was rape under the common-sense dictionary definition. He had sex with someone who couldn’t consent because she was extremely drunk. Without real consent, in my mind, sex is rape, whether or not it satisfies the legal definition.

The perpetrators don’t deny that they penetrated the victim over and over–simultaneously–or that she was very drunk.

A lot of people are surely getting caught up in the legal niceties right now, and they are surely trying to make a case that what these men did wasn’t rape, but that draws attention away from the plain facts. They shared the body of a young woman who had consumed something like 13 shots of alcohol, and after the fact, they made her miserable by hiring a detective who posted pictures of her photo all over campus.

Can you support a person like that just because he wasn’t convicted, or because his conviction was reversed?

Rape is a strange crime, because it has levels and nuances. If you have sex with your wife twice in one in one night, consensually, and then during the third effort she withdraws her consent and you don’t comply immediately, that’s rape. It’s also rape if a bum grabs you off the sidewalk and violates you beside a dumpster. There are lots of shades in between these examples. Realistically, you can’t equate all rapists. The damage they do varies.

What Parker and Celestin did was unusually sick. The victim was barely conscious, and Parker went ahead anyway. That’s very bad. Then he invited his friends, as if her body were a pizza he wanted to share. That’s horrendous; inviting another man to violate a woman who barely knows him is vile. Then the victim was shamed publicly, as though she had committed a crime. That’s beyond the pale.

It’s disturbing that two men like this could be paid and lauded for making a movie which appears to be the latest in a series of race-baiting, anti-white films. It’s ironic that the poster depicts lynching. Many black men who were lynched in America were murdered because it was believed they had insulted or defiled white women. Now we have a director and screenwriter who fit that description, literally, and they’re using lynching imagery to make money.

It’s almost as if Satan is telling non-black America, “Look. You were right about them.”

Racial tension is out of control in America. I think Satan is poking both sides to stir things up. I think this movie and the scandal are parts of it. It’s polarizing.

Satan is doing a fantastic job on leftists and blacks. Black Lives Matters rioters just tore up Milwaukee over a case in which a black cop shot an armed black man who was clearly threatening him with a gun. They’re proving what most of us have suspected for a while: it’s not about police brutality. A justified shooting is still a good rationale for looting and violence. A large percentage of the “protesters” are just looking for an excuse to do evil to their neighbors.

Non-blacks are likely to use this senseless aggression as an excuse for anti-black racism. Even the least racist among us are likely to make changes in our behavior. This is not a good time to move to an area with a lot of black residents; who could be blamed for trying to locate elsewhere? It’s a scary time to reach out to black people and socialize with them in places where you’re outnumbered.

There are some types of race-motivated behavior you can control with laws. You can ban discrimination in hiring and selling, to some extent. There are also things you can’t control with laws. You can’t force white people to have black friends, or vice-versa. You can’t force people of one race to buy from people of another race. If things keep going the way they are, blacks and whites are going to segregate themselves in whatever ways are still legal. We’ve already seen black students advertising for “POC only” roommates, claiming the stress of living with whites is intolerable.

We should be building bridges. Instead, whites are on the receiving end of constant, open, unjustified criticism and rejection, and I guarantee you, they will retaliate silently. When whites can strike back without accountability, many do so. Look at the increase in racist Internet comments.

This mess is going to hurt black people. It won’t damage the rest of us that much. It won’t make people reluctant to hire us or associate with us. It won’t hurt our businesses. It will make it harder for black people to assimilate and succeed.

I don’t think there’s much hope for people who don’t serve God. For the rest of us, the answer is clear: identify with God’s family, not a race or nationality. If you’re a child of God, other children of God are your relatives and your race. Other people may look like you, but they’re against you.

Americans are flipping out over whether this person has the right to wear dreadlocks or that person has the right to rap. We ought to be concerned about aligning our hearts with God’s. Any two people whose hearts are aligned by God’s heart will live in agreement and peace. Discord is proof that something is wrong. God doesn’t fight with himself. His house is not divided. If we’re at each other’s throats, we’re not really of his house.

I don’t like the race-baiting movies. I don’t like the scary anti-black Internet comments. I don’t like the way we’re being censored by left-wing extremists. I think it will continue and get worse, though. The only hope of rising above it is submission to God.

One Response to “Flagged for Removal”

  1. Chris Says:

    “If things keep going the way they are, blacks and whites are going to segregate themselves in whatever ways are still legal.”–As you probably realize, this is already happening to a certain extent at the nation’s universities. A lot of diversity-oriented groups and organizations are starting to make it known that they don’t want whites to be in their spaces–intellectual, physical, or otherwise. And it’s already having consequences, with Missouri’s enrollment numbers falling through the floor after last year’s protests.