It’s like when we’re driving on a highway and traffic starts to bottleneck. “Everybody knows to stay away from Pastor John.”Īnd, yet, because it is grotesque-it is freakish to see and comprehend the act of a grown man sexualizing a little girl, we look away. Now that we know, our actions must be in alignment with our knowledge or we, too, are complicit in the ongoing sexual abuse of Black girls and women.Īnd, if we’re honest with ourselves, we have known in our own communities, too. In Biggie’s case, we didn’t know, but it’s the same principle. He told on himself and we still allowed it to happen for generations. No one cared because we were Black girls.” If everyone knew, how could this evil keep happening? Mikki Kendall, a survivor of Robert’s abuse stated, “We all noticed. “We knew to stay away from Olympia Fields.” Whenever I talk to Black women who grew up in Chicago, they all say the same things: The systems and silence surrounding Robert’s abuse of underage Black girls and Black women were known facts. And, in the aftermath of the release of the documentary that proffers a comprehensive exposé of Robert’s calculated abuse of Black girls and women, many of us are still ruminating and saying, “but we knew this the whole time.” This exploitation makes Biggie no better than Robert (R.) Kelly. Because, in this hypersexual/hyper-repressive culture, sex sells. Or, he could have chosen to lace her in the Afrocentric consciousness like Queen Latifah. Biggie could have waited for Kim to turn 18 before he yoked her with promiscuity. Society doesn’t see Black girls as innocent or worthy of protection, so that’s why if you say “women” you twistedly make young girls responsible for their own harm and abuse. There is no such thing as an “underage woman.” There are only underage girls. The notion that we were even able to consider ourselves older speaks to an “underage woman” culture. But even as we gave into the glamorous appeal of being perceived as older women, our weekday schedules and backpacks alluded to the fact that we were children. “He thinks I’m 19,” you would hear 14-year-olds say. We used to think it was cute to “talk to” (meaning get the romantic attention of) older guys. This girl could have been me or any one of my middle or high school friends. Once we start doing the math, the uncomfortable truth starts to set in-did Biggie engage in sexual activity with an underage Kim? She said, “I was just a little kid trying to enjoy my teenage life.they kind of marketed me as an older girl, even though I wasn’t.” Moreover, it was common knowledge that Biggie and Kim were engaged in an ongoing sexual relationship. In a 2016 XXL article, Kim said she was “only 16, 17-years-old” when she was recording Hard Core. Kim had to start fending for herself and sold drugs and sex (with grown men) before she met the Notorious B.I.G. Kim had a violent relationship with her father and, when he kicked her out of his house, she was the same age that I was when i first encountered her: 14. This poster, that was hanging everywhere from prison cells to bedroom walls, featured an underage GIRL. In a fairly recent interview on Hot 97 (97.1fm in NYC), Kimberly Denise Jones reveals that she was just 17-years-old when she posed for that provocative photo. Little did I know, the girl in the picture was only 3 years older than me. I loved seeing a female rapper who was “hard” getting acclaim. But as a first year student in high school who, thanks to being the daughter of West Indian immigrants, was new to the hip hop game, I relished in it. In this brazen act of displaying her sensuality, Lil’ Kim received backlash and was labeled all kinds of “ho’s” (as a patriarchal, misogynist society is wont to do). Her animal print bra and (presumably) thong, wrapped around her vagina like a holiday gift, as she thrust her pelvis forward-it conveyed body confidence and sexual prowess. Lil’ Kim: squatting, knees spread-eagled, legs open wide.
In 1996, I started seeing the ubiquitous, now infamous Hard Core poster all over New York City.