Abusers Don't Need Clean Up Women, They Need to Heal

on Jonathan Majors' redemption tour.

Tw: This post discusses domestic violence

What’s Love Got to Do With It? was one of my favorite movies growing up. I loved it so much that in high school, I studied the “Proud Mary” montage with some friends to perform it in a talent show. Released in 1993, the Tina Turner biopic starring the incomparable Angela Bassett was hardly appropriate for an elementary school-aged child to watch, but I remember the film playing frequently in our household. I didn’t realize it then, but my mother tended to gravitate towards art that spoke to her pain. She listened to a lot of Mary J. Blige, who, like her, was a Capricorn woman from a rough upbringing in a turbulent relationship — Mary with K.Ci Hailey, and my mother with my father. The lyrics to “Be Happy” from Mary’s iconic My Life album reflected the predicament my mother found herself in:

Oh, I cannot hide the way I feel inside
I don't know why, but every day I wanna cry
But if I give you one more try
To these rules, will you abide?
And if I mean anything to you
Would it make everything all right?

She also listened to a lot of Tupac:

I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it's time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women
And if we don't, we'll have a race of babies
That will hate the ladies that make the babies
- “Keep Ya Head Up”

She listened to these artists so much that everyone in our extended family began to associate Mary J. Blige and Tupac with my mom — they spoke to her on a spiritual level. It makes sense that this is the kind of content she engaged with in the early to mid-90s, when she was approaching the end of a 19-year cycle of abuse at the hands of my father. There is a scene in What’s Love Got to Do With It? where Ike drags Tina into their bedroom while her sons stand by watching that mirrors a childhood memory that is seared into my brain, and has indelibly shaped who I’ve grown into as a woman.

Five years ago, I ended a lifelong cycle of trying to forge a connection with my father, who is fully incapable of providing emotional safety and loving me in the way I deserved to be. For years, and often at the insistence of my mother, I tried to be open to a relationship with him. I reasoned that it wasn’t me that he abused, and if my mom thought it was okay, why shouldn’t I try? All of these attempts always ended in some disappointment — not showing up when he said he would, emotionally lashing out when I expressed my feelings, refusing to take accountability for anything. It took years of therapy, self-reflection, and reading countless self-help books before I finally made peace with the fact that this man was never going to be the father I needed. As I started to heal my people-pleasing tendencies, I also came to accept that I was only maintaining a relationship with him because it’s what other people expected. Whether it was my mother, who had to make the difficult choice between enduring abuse or not having a father around for her child, or my aunts who proclaimed “that’s still your dad” when I refused to engage with him at family events (usually funerals). I didn’t actually feel an emotional bond to him, how could I when he oscillated between being a phantom and a villain?

Still, I have a level of compassion for him and understand that his behavior is a symptom of being deeply traumatized. A child in the Jim Crow south, who migrated to Minnesota in the mid-1960s, I’m certain some unspeakable experiences have shaped him into who he is. I can hold this truth while also knowing that it does not absolve him of his behavior, and he is not entitled to access to me simply because his arrested development does not afford him the capacity to do better. This is a trait I wish Black women who are happy to play Clean Up Woman for men, who like my father, are abusers and/or narcissists, had.

For all of these reasons, bearing witness to Jonathan Majors’ redemption tour has been triggering, cringy, and frustrating to watch. Prior to Majors assaulting his ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari, I had heard whispers from people working in entertainment who suggested Majors was an egomaniac pain in the ass to work with. I am seldom surprised when celebrities expose themselves to be shitty people, because the entire culture of celebrity is rooted in manipulating audiences into believe their projections about the stars they admire — and it’s a shame how willing so many of us are to take the bait. It has all been so transparent: the staged acts of heroism, a performative romance with a beloved Black actress after dating not one but three white women who have accused him of abuse (the timing of which is questionable).

Vulture writer Nate Jones recently detailed the crisis PR strategy used for the Majors’ redemption tour. In it, he interviews Holly Baird, a crisis management consultant, who echoed a lot of my frustrations with how this has played out in the Black community. When discussing how some PR experts found the approach to redeeming Majors’ public image too aggressive, she counters:

“Were these other experts white or Black?” she asks me. “The Black community in general, and how Black celebrities are perceived, is a lot different. The Black community tends to forgive and forget a lot easier. You have got to go to the smaller blogs because that is where a lot of the Black community are watching.” She notes that Majors’s team have been careful to book him on “women-friendly platforms” such as Sherri Shepherd’s talk show, where he was accompanied by [Meagan] Good. Her presence doesn’t just soften his public image, but also acts as a subtle page-turn from Majors’s previous interracial relationships, Baird says. “They’re re-immersing him back into the Black community. They’ve brought him home, in a sense.”

Mere days after this piece was published in Vulture, America’s Sweetheart, Keke Palmer, announced that she will be interviewing Johnathan Majors on her podcast, Baby, This is Keke Palmer, titled “No Easy Answers: Accountability and Moving Forward with Jonathan Majors.” Though the backlash has been swift, there were a lot of people defending the decision. The “let this man live” and PickMesha congregations have consistently defended and propped up abusers who have done little to atone for their actions.

Forgiveness, in the Black community, is an action that our oppressors have often weaponized. This goes back to slavery and the inception of the Black church. Through Christianity, we are conditioned to believe that it is morally righteous to absolve people who have committed heinous acts against us because that is what Jesus would’ve done. We turn the other cheek in favor of being the bigger person, a practice that emanates a lingering air of Civil Rights era respectability politics. The concept of forgiveness has been flattened into a toxic sanctimoniousness that does not allow room for us to interrogate the impact of harmful behavior in truly meaningful and restorative ways. Yes, everybody makes mistakes, but some mistakes have the power to adversely impact people for the rest of their lives. Why, then, do we believe it’s fair for a person who abused someone to only temporarily live with the consequences of their actions while the people who have been traumatized by them are living with the effects of it forever?

We have seen this play out in celebrity culture many times. Whether it’s Kelly Rowland saying we need to extend grace to Chris Brown, a man whose pattern of abuse did not stop with his 2009 assault against Rihanna, or Erykah Badu proclaiming unconditional love for R. Kelly. It’s also worth noting that Keke Palmer has also defended R. Kelly, and both Keke Palmer and Kelly Rowland are survivors of domestic violence. These moments remind me of the familial landscape I had to navigate, in which I did not feel like my mother and I were protected, defended, or supported because my father was someone’s beloved uncle, brother, or cousin. Many of the women in my family who adore my father were also victims of domestic violence. As I raised my social awareness and expressed my frustrations with misogynoir, I was labeled a “man-hater” by aunties who, like these women, facilitate a learned helplessness in Black men who have never committed to evolving as human beings.

All of this brings me back to What’s Love Got To Do With It?, and why I was enamored with the film as a child. I was too young to understand the complexities of domestic abuse, so even if I was consuming this film because it echoed something that was happening in my home life, there must have been another reason I was drawn to it. The gravity of the subject matter often felt incongruous with the execution of the film. As harrowing as the incidents of abuse were, it never felt like it was too serious for me to be watching. I think about that line in “Drunk in Love” where Jay-Z says “eat the cake, Anna Mae”, and the music video where Beyoncé playfully bops along as he raps. Jay-Z is referring to a scene in What’s Love Got to Do With It? where Ike forces a slice of cake into Tina’s mouth and slaps her friend for trying to defend her. When looking up this scene on YouTube, there are a distressing number of comments that find this scene hilarious, proclaiming it as iconic, dropping crying laughing emojis, and even giving props to Jay-Z for adding that line in the song. This trivialization of Black women’s abuse is at the core of why so many people in our community fail to hold abusers to account. bell hooks discusses the film in an interview with Marie-France Alderman in her book Real to Reel:

You know, all these black people—particularly black men—have been saying to me, “Ike couldn’t have treated her that bad.” Why don’t they say, “Isn’t it tragic that he did treat her so bad?” This just gets to show you how we, as black people in this country, remain sexist in our thinking of men and women. The farcical element of this film has to do not just with the producers thinking that white people won’t take seriously a film about a black woman who’s battered and abused but that black people won’t either. So you have to make it funny. I was very frightened by the extent to which laughter circulated in that theater over stuff that wasn’t funny.

One could argue that this normalization of abusing Black women has deep roots in slavery, when Black men often watched their wives, mothers, and daughters be physically abused, and worse, and could not step in to defend or protect them. This is trauma that is passed down to both men and women, but in women, it can manifest in the form of downplaying abusive behavior. All of this breeds cultural thought patterns that deem any punishment the oft-persecuted Black man endures, whether earned or not, as a form of oppression. But for Black women, punishment, even when not earned, is not only tolerated, it’s expected. bell expands on this:

What I kept thinking about was why this culture can’t see a serious film that’s not just about a black female tragedy but about a black female triumph. It’s so interesting how the film stops with Ike’s brutality, as though it is Tina Turner’s life ending. Why is it that her success is less interesting than the period of her life when she’s a victim?

One of my biggest gripes with the culture of domestic violence is that we rarely focus on transformative justice and restorative justice, and what actually needs to take place for truly impactful redemption. There are so many people who will say, “Well, what do you want him to do? He did his time, he said he was sorry!” Rarely do we see people talking about a way forward that considers the needs of the victims and how to address the core issues that led to the abuse in the first place. Nobody is entitled to a Hollywood career, and losing one as a result of your actions is not persecution — it is simple cause and effect. For men like Majors, who have made millions working with some of the biggest film studios in the industry, there are more than enough resources available for them to roll up their sleeves and do the difficult work of healing. I don’t mean the manufactured PR healing where you talk about your love for God, your “Coretta”, and how you were in a dark space. I mean, having the self-awareness to intentionally take some time away from the spotlight and do your own emotional labor, instead of latching onto the teats of Black women who are more than happy to do that work for you.

It is disappointing to see so many Black women not only align themselves with abusers but also inflate their importance and relevancy, because what does Jonathan Majors’ presence actually do for the Black community? His desire to reclaim the prominence he was rising to has been in service of himself, not us. There are plenty of talented Black male actors in Hollywood, and many more we have yet to discover. He’s not offering us anything we can’t find in another movie star who doesn’t have multiple abuse allegations against him.

Whatever accountability Keke Palmer thought she was leading Jonathan Majors to was lost the second she decided to use her platform to promote his movie, because let’s be honest, this is what this is about. Unlearning abusive behaviors requires long-term accountability, which cannot happen when people who are unqualified to steward restorative and transformative justice are hand-holding you through the process. I’d be more willing to believe that he was committed to changing his behavior if working on it was his primary focus, not a PR relationship, a movie that was nearly shelved, and trying to get back into the MCU. Privilege is obviously at play here because while men in the real world rarely are accountable for abuse, when they are, they don’t have a legion of fans and PR teams to help reshape their images — they have to lie in the beds they made.

Keke Palmer has since pulled the episode from her podcast, but the damage has been done. Regardless of her intentions, her decision to not just platform but enable Jonathan Majors to control the narrative does more harm to his victims than it allows space for him to actually grow. My hope is that she took down the episode not just because of the backlash, but because she truly reflected on how she can be more discerning with her platform. I understand not wanting to throw people away or cast them out as pariahs, but we need to consider the harm we perpetuate by lowering the bar for entry into our spaces in the name of performative redemption. We do not have to be punitive in our approach to demanding accountability, but we do have to be prudent.

Last year, when Majors was sentenced to a 52-week domestic violence intervention program, Grace Jabbari read her victim impact statement, where she stated the abuse continued after the trial and asserted, “He’s not sorry. He has not accepted responsibility, and he will do this again. He will hurt other women. This is a man who believes he’s above the law … I will not rest until I feel that he’s not a danger to anyone else.” Majors chose not to make a statement and continued to maintain his innocence through his attorney. Nearly a year later, audio of Majors admitting to abuse was uncovered. When asked about the leaked audio on Sherri Shepherd’s talk show, his response was “God has a plan and sometimes you just throw your hands up… I can’t speak about it but I do know there is a plan. I’ve let go of control and I say, whatever it is it is”, to which the audience began to applaud. I hope whatever plan he believes God has doesn’t include continuing to deflect when caught in a lie. Given the PR push to revive his career, I’m sure his team prepared him for this moment. The disempowered outcast who has fallen from grace angle feels like a very intentional choice, considering how everything has played out, and unfortunately, it works. Cycles of abuse do not happen in a vacuum — it is the complicity of enablers, apologists, bystanders, and defenders that allows them to persist. I long for a world where we are more committed to understanding the role we all play in ending these cycles than we are to centering the people who instigate them.

With love,

LaChelle

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