Chris Brown's to Beat or Not to Beat Killer Smile

Today is March 6, 2009, and for the past month the national press corps has inundated us with the Grammy-night assault on popular and beautiful international songstress Rihanna ("The Umbrella Song") by her singing-dancing sensation boyfriend, Chris Brown, beloved as much for his "clean-cut" looks as he was for his hit love songs. (Perhaps I should refrain from using even the musical word "hit" when discussing Chris Brown.) Yesterday, in downtown Los Angeles' Criminal Court, Brown's attorney, Mark Geragos, successfully petitioned the court to postpone Brown's arraignment until April 6, one month from today. The Chris-Rihanna situation brings to the forefront many disturbing issues about the mistreatment of women and how even celebrity women are not safe or protected from assaults by their boyfriends, lovers, and other acquaintances who, when feeling provoked, devolve into the dog-and-wolf carnivorous state of violence. The L.A. Times reports that Brown, while holding Rihanna in a headlock, bit into her ear. How such mistreatment of women is interpreted and evaluated, particularly by the legions of Chris Brown's adoring female fans, may influence whether and how soon it stops. It is this writer's hope that such mistreatment ceases immediately, regardless of Chris Brown's fate or fortune in criminal court. If he is acquitted, that does not mean he was innocent. Court acquittals are based on a number of technical factors that frequently have more to do with the district attorney's and court's rules and protocols than on the guilt or innocence of the defendant on trial.

Men of color, especially, ought to do a deep and thorough personal assessment and evaluation of themselves and their view and treatment of "their" women. Chris Brown is 19 years old. His mindset about and view of women is not original. He is the heir to the cesspool filled with generations of husbands and boyfriends who beat, battered, and verbally and emotionally assaulted their wives and girlfriends for often no reason at all. Included in this deranged war-against-women group is Brown's own father who, according to press accounts, filled the Brown family's life with countless assaults on Brown's mother. We need not wait for the outcome of the court trial to inform us whether or not Brown assaulted Rihanna as charged. The contusions on her face, the wrenching of her neck in a headlock, the hole bitten in her ear, and the terrorist-threat to kill her were not self-inflicted nor did they come from a seatbelt, in Brown 's rented Lamborghini, that was strapped a little too tightly.

That Brown did beat down Rihanna, is now a known fact that should incite and inspire men of color to FACE their own feelings about and behaviors toward "their" women, in any and all situations--the bedroom and the boardroom, among friends and family, in all-male confabs, or together and in a private automobile. Today, a young man's violence-orientation and assaultive behavior towards women is often a mirrored-reflection of the sado-misogynistic behavior of his father, his mother's boyfriend, or an uncle. And cheering that young man on, today, while they pass him the baton of their violence-against-women legacy, is a generation of Rap music icons whose lyrics demeaning, insulting and profaning women, and their public abuse and mistreatment of women, have made them wealthy. This form of blood money in their swollen bank accounts is commingled with that other blood money from their memorialized-in-song exploits as manly street thugs, hustlers and hoodlums.

Regardless of his violence-against-women roots, such a man ought, right now, to give himself a check-up from the neck up, and immediately seek spiritual and clinical counseling, beg his wife or girlfriend for forgiveness, and embark on a new life of respecting, celebrating, helping, giving to, and empowering women. Then he should go forth and spread this gospel on the school grounds where boys abuse, demean and humiliate girls; within the churches where women are brainwashed that their "proper" role is a biblically-mandated subservient (to "him") one; and inside the Grammy boardroom where nominations of urban (Rap and Hip Hop) artists are predicated on their multimillion dollar acclaim. This popularity (revered by many urban youth as "hard" and "masculine") is often literally built on the backs of "their" abused and battered women--physically or through their raps and songs. After Chris Brown's Grammy night criminal attack on Rihanna, the Grammy folks are now in a unique position to send a powerful message that such male figures are not artists, nor is their product art, when they beat down a woman; or when their Rap contemporaries do the same and then symbolically stand on her to make themselves look tall and heroic.