Jezebel’s Saartjie Baartman: The Original Booty Queen reinforces Rape Culture
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We were extremely disgusted to see Jezebel publish an article on Saartjie Baartman which completely decontextualises Baartman's life from historical reality effectively erasing much of the history of sexualised violence directed at and experienced by women of colour. It erases the specific sexualised violence experienced by Baartman during her life and for the 200 years her body was on display.
It is obvious from the title alone just how poorly written and researched the article is and how badly it underestimates the impact of male violence - as racist, sexualised violence and in the destruction of whole communities through colonialism and slavery. We have asked permission to include the following comments from Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia), Khadijah J (@Pundit_AcadEMIC), and Sydette (@Blackamazon). Each of their tweets is in order as they wrote it. This is a clean link to Jezebel's article via Do Not Link Me.
We want Jezebel to remove the article immediately and apologise for the offence caused. They then need to publish an article on Baartman which is historically accurate and contextualised with the history of slavery, colonialism and the objectification of sexualised violence perpetrated on Black women's bodies. We shouldn't need to say this, but, it also cannot be written by a white woman.
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