Warning: The Following video shows graphic images of the exploitation of an innocent Black Woman. Viewer Discretion is advised.

In response to the “Kids Freak Fest” video, many have asked “How could such a thing have happened?”, “where were the parents?”, or “where did they learn this?”  I have wondered this myself. I just couldn’t understand how people could just stand by and let this happen.  Then I realized that we are all responsible. That wasn’t an isolated incident. While it may have been the worst that many of us have seen, many others have seen behavior like that—or worse– firsthand.

So why do I say that we are all responsible, you ask? Generally speaking, we all are responsible. Even if we do right by our own children by teaching them correctly, and limiting their exposure to negative stimuli. Even if we are on the PTA, the PTO, a boy scout troop leader, Sunday School teacher, community volunteer, or some other active/public servant, we haven’t done enough.

We haven’t done enough to define our culture. We are eager to defend it, but we often don’t know what “it” is that we defend. Defense of a culture is worthless without a culture worth Defending. Right now, most African-Americans are automatically lumped in together under one culture…Hip Hop! Sure Hip Hop may have been innocently noble to begin with. But look at it now. It is teaching our youth how to be black. Our girls act like strippers and Ho’s because they are being educated as strippers and Ho’s. Our music teaches them that they can only go as far as their butts can carry them. Literally! Our son’s are being educated as “Gangsta’s”, “Thugs”, “Playas” and “Pimps.” They are being taught to have sex early and often and  with as many people as they can.

Our children are being indoctrinated into a culture that glorifies sex, drugs, violence, mysogyny, adultery, racism, under-achieving, fornication, and just a general feeling of hopeless despair. A culture where teen pregnancy and absent fathers is becoming the norm.

Is Hip-Hop the sole culprit? No, it’s not.  However, music is the most accessible and influential entity in Black America. The music “used to” be influenced by the culture but now the reverse is so.

So again why are WE to blame? We are all enablers. We buy or allow our children buy the filth that passes for music. We support the artists that create this trash and the radio stations that play it. We allow our sons and daughters to dress the parts of rappers and video ho’s.

But back to Saartjie Baartman…

Sara Baartman, “the Hottentot Venus”, was born in 1789. She was working as a servant in Cape Town when she was noticed by British ship’s doctor William Dunlop, who persuaded her to travel with him to England. We’ll never know what she had in mind when she stepped on board - of her own free will - a ship for London. But it’s clear what Dunlop had in mind - to display her as a “freak”, a “scientific curiosity”, and make money from these shows, some of which he promised to give to her. No one knows if Dunlop was true to his word and paid Baartman for her “services”, but if he did pay her, it wasn’t sufficient to buy herself out of the life she was living. When 20-year-old Sara Baartman got on a boat that was to take her from Cape Town to London in 1810, she could not have known that she would never see her home again. Nor, as she stood on the deck and saw her homeland disappear behind her, could she have known that she would become the icon of racial inferiority and black female sexuality for the next 175 years.

She was put on display in a building in Piccadilly Circus, exciting crowds of working-class white men who viewed her with a mixture of morbid curiosity and malice. Baartman had unusually large buttocks and genitalia, and in the early 1800s Europeans were arrogantly obsessed with their own superiority, and with proving that others, particularly blacks, were inferior and oversexed. Promoters described Baartman’s genitalia as resembling the skin that hangs from a turkey’s throat.  

Contemporary descriptions of her shows at 225 Piccadilly, Bartholomew Fair and Haymarket in London say Baartman was made to parade naked along a “stage two feet high, along which she was led by “her keeper” and exhibited like a wild beast, being obliged to walk, stand or sit as he ordered”. In 1814 she was taken to France, and became the object of scientific and medical research that formed the bedrock of European ideas about black female sexuality. Once the French got tired of the Baartman show, she was forced to turn to prostitution. She didn’t last the ravages of a foreign culture and climate, or the further abuse of her body. She died in 1816 at the age of 26.

The cause of death was given as “inflammatory and eruptive sickness”, possibly syphilis. Others suggest she was an alcoholic. Whatever the cause, she lived and died thousands of miles from home and family, in a hostile city, with no means of getting herself home again. But even after her death, Sara Baartman remained an object of imperialist scientific investigation. In the name of Science, her sexual organs and brain were displayed in the Musee de l’Homme in Paris until as recently as 1985.

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