Mama Shouldn’t Say Knock You Out

LOL, Charles Hamilton is a pussy n*****, got punched by a bitch…

Charles Hamilton must be waking up this morning praying for a better day after facing ridicule yesterday from all corners of the web. I was pretty late to this myself, but comments like the quote above made my back hunch up. After following a Twitter conversation started by the writer Toure on the incident, I got even more fired up.

Here’s what happened (don’t want to post the video; that is easy enough to find). Hamilton was engaged in a freestyle rap battle with a female friend (Briana) on the streets of NYC. She delivered her diss-filled rhyme and then it was his turn. He got a little too personal. She decked him. Ham

ilton let it go.

The video surfaced yesterday morning and then all manner of verbal madness ensued. Toure argued, with the Rihanna/Brown incident still fresh, that Hamilton did well not to lash back at his friend. In this I totally agree. But then Toure went on to tweet, “The peo ple asserting no one should hit anyone are right but are missing the point: violence against women is pandemic. The opposite is not.”

This is also true, but I think it is Toure that also misses the point.

I wrote to him: “While that is true, violence itself is pandemic. We have to say no to it in all of its forms.”

If we are going for equality and peace in this world we can not abide double standards. The quote from the guy who called Hamilton a “pussy n*****” (we will save the racial, psychological, and misogynistic evaluation of these two words for another day) and Toure’s point are just two veins of a complex organ.

The woman who punched Hamilton is being hailed as a female hero, even though she herself has sort of apologized to him for the incident. Hamilton is being ridiculed because he literally turned the other cheek. If he had hauled off and slapped Briana back, not only would he have no career left, CNN will be hosting state of the black youth town hall meetings, false historical analogies and “Black leaders” in tow.

At the same time, if we glorify Briana’s actions as some Sojourner Truth moment the message we send to our children becomes muddled: girls get a pass, boys lose face either way. This reasoning sets up a cyclical wheel of resentment which spins into….violence. The point: No one should lay their hands on anyone else (self defense, the exception).

Violence itself is pandemic. We can not parse which gender is allowed to do what. I know a deluge of media (music videos, music, movies, etc.) speak otherwise, but it can not hurt to instill in our children, both girls and boys, that punching, kicking, spitting, slapping, shooting are unacceptable ways to seek conflict resolution or to quiet anger. To do so is to begin to breakdown one of the mechanisms behind violence itself.

photo courtesy of fightpromo.com.