About a year and a half ago, I launched a petition against D.L. Hughley for his deplorable and misogynist remarks about victims of domestic violence. Now another washed-up comedian is making waves, this time for willfully ignorant and dangerous remarks about rape victims.
In an appearance on 105.1’s The Breakfast Club on Friday, Damon Wayans spoke out in defense of Bill Cosby, saying that he doesn’t believe that Mr. Pudding Pop is guilty because some of the “bitches” were just “unrapeable.”
“If I was him, I would divorce my wife, wink-wink, give her all my money, and then I would go do a deposition,” he said. “I would light one of them three-hour cigars. I’d have some wine and maybe a Quaalude, and I would just go off, because I don’t believe that he was raping.
“How big is his penis that it gives you amnesia for 40 years?” Wayans continued. “If you listen to them talk, they go, ‘Well, the first time … ’ The first time? Bitch, how many times did it happen? Just listen to what they’re saying, and some of them really is unrapeable. I look at them and go, ‘You don’t want that. Get outta here.’”
On your twisted scale of 1-10, just how attractive must a woman be to be rapeable, Mr. Wayans?
The In Living Color veteran goes on to offer more of the same cliché, superficial, ill-informed analysis that every single Cosby supporter has regurgitated since the allegations first began to spread, including, but not limited to, references to Woody Allen’s seeming infallibility and Cosby’s harsh criticism of African-American men as the reason he has “lost” the black community’s support.
This begs the question: What black community has he lost? Many black men—the same men whom Cosby has lambasted across the country as being lazy, trifling, good-for-nothing deadbeats—overwhelmingly support Cosby and have called out feminists (used as an epithet) who dare to join the White Man™ in tarnishing his legacy.
So, in essence, Wayans is saying that black women are defending the honor of black men against Cosby’s attacks, while black men like himself are defending Cosby’s sexual attacks against black women.
That’s about right.
And, yes, most of Cosby’s victims are white. It is beyond believable to me that this would be so when his entire shtick has been to re-create whiteness in blackface and teach black folks how to be acceptable Negroes. It feels redundant at this point, but clearly it bears repeating for those in the cheap seats:
Rape is about the desire for power. Rape is not about powerful desire.
It is well within the realm of possibility that Cosby chose to assert his idea of heterosexual black manhood in a white supremacist country by raping white women. Eldridge Cleaver did it—wrote a book about it.
But at this point, it’s less about Cosby and more about the moral compass of his most ardent defenders. After pushback from host Angela Yee, Wayans said that he hoped that any women raped by Cosby received justice, but that justice should be dependent on evidence.
Evidence, he said. “Innocent until proven guilty,” he said. Let’s set aside for a moment the casting couch culture that dictates that women have sex with powerful men to further their careers … or else. Let’s set aside the fact that even if rape kits, which were in their infancy when the alleged rapes took place, had been utilized, we live in a country that cares so little for women, an estimated 400,000 rape kits remain untested across the country. We can even stick a pin in having the conversation about the 68 percent of rapes that go unreported and the 98 percent of rapists who will never spend a day behind bars.
All of a sudden, when it comes to women being raped, black men like Wayans have insurmountable faith in the judicial system. The same judicial system that found three police officers not guilty in the shooting death of Sean Bell. The same judicial system that cleared George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. The same judicial system that declined to charge Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Mike Brown. The same judicial system that said it wouldn’t retry Randall Kerrick for the shooting death of Jonathan Ferrell. The same judicial system that declined to indict Daniel Pantaleo in the choke hold death of Eric Garner. The same judicial system that has taken over a year to decide if it wants to indict Timothy Loehmann, the cop caught on video executing 12-year-old Tamir Rice.
The complete buy into this double standard would be the funniest Wayans has ever been in his life if it weren’t so dangerous. Because what he really means is that while Cosby is innocent until proved guilty, his alleged victims are guilty until proved innocent.
Wayans went on to say that had his daughter been raped by Cosby he would have killed him, but since it’s not his daughter, he just doesn’t believe the alleged victims and thinks it’s all a “money hustle.”
Let’s be clear: Every single one of those women is someone’s daughter, sister or mother. If the only women a man cares about are those in his own family, then that is a man who hates women by default. Period. And with an estimated almost 1 in 5 women being raped in their lifetime, the chances that one of Wayans’ two daughters will be among them is relatively high. That is the frightening world women navigate.
And if that day comes, I can only hope that some self-proclaimed funny man in the last gasp of relevancy doesn’t use his dwindling platform to call them “unrapeable bitches.”