Is it a Wrap for Poorly Behaved Powerful Black Men?

To understand the motivations of powerful men is to understand the patriarchy, power dynamics, methods of coercion and insidious tactics that have started wars, toppled regimes and created dynasties since time immemorial. Historically, women have fallen victim to these men in manifold ways – just the cost of doing business without a Y chromosome.

Though Black men in particular have been castigated, subjugated, demoralized and disenfranchised since the dawn of Blackness, a handful of us still manage to become powerful men, and as such are also subject to the aforementioned motivations. Bad apples get big bags all the time.

Fortunately, a new era of accountability is dicing those bad apples up. And it’s high time.

Exhibit A: The steady unraveling of Diddy over the last few weeks. The normally outspoken, bombastic music exec has, with few exceptions, kept his damn mouth shut as his reputation is dragged through pig feces and he’s forced to watch his empire reduced to ashes. It’s a precipitous fall for someone whose power and influence in the music industry has been nonpareil for three decades…dude received the Global Icon Award at the MTV VMAs just three months ago.

Even a decade ago, such accountability and consequences over a powerful man’s mistreatment of women would be inconceivable. These dudes built a culture of abuse behind the scenes; even with whispers and rumors of their behavior, no one blew the whistle because they didn’t want their bread to stop. Call it the Harvey Weinstein Effect.

But then a little thing called social media – especially the erstwhile Twitter – came along and birthed the concept of “cancelation” via public adjudication. And then the #MeToo movement, which was essentially co-opted from the Black woman who created it and molded into a national tool of reckoning in 2017, did the rest of the heavy lifting.

R. Kelly was one of the first bad, powerful Black men to topple. Today’s X would’ve taken his Zorro-masked head clean off at the mere whiff of his attempt to marry a 15-year-old pop star while in his 20s. But we let him rock before social media, not letting a statutory rape trial with a clearly sketchy denouement stop us from steppin’ in the name of love at every Black wedding in the first decade of the century.

It took a multi-part, multi-night, post-#MeToo television documentary proving that Kells was still coercing women into borderline slavery to plant the seeds ensuring that A.I. will probably take all of our jobs before he ever sees the light of day again. Shame on us that it took that long.

 Same with Bill “The Pill” Cosby: “America’s Dad” kept up his shenanigans for decades before the internet as we know it was a thing. It took an otherwise throwaway Hannibal Burress stand-up joke in 2014 for the allegations to catch fire, motivating a college lecture hall’s worth of accusers to come forward, irreparably tarnishing Cosby’s legacy and landing him in the pokey for three years.

Mind-blowingly, Cosby still has staunch defenders…a woefully misguided cadre of Black folks who believe he’s being targeted in a “racist conspiracy” involving NBC. Men and women lie for many reasons, but when dozens of unrelated people say the same s**t about someone – and many of them are septuagenarian grandmas not seeking a role in a Bravo reality show – I’m inclined to believe them.

Just as I believe that handful of completely random former classmates of Jonathan Majors who spoke out against his pattern of abuse with no apparent selfish motivations. He has yet to be convicted from his March domestic violence arrest, but as he continues his 2023 Open Court Embarrassment Tour™, I’ve little doubt that Majors laid hands on some women in aggression at some point.

He had the opportunity to grow his career to be a powerful man who did bad things unabated. Even if Majors’ career does survive, that won’t happen.

With power and fame comes an obscene amount of ego that makes folks think they can get away with murder (sometimes literally). Diddy curated the persona of the “fun” megalomaniac – yell at the band and make them walk to Brooklyn for cheesecake for the cameras – but few seemed to draw the line to actual maniac until Cassie unloaded her clip.

As their neck-snapping fast settlement suggests, it’s nigh impossible that Cassie’s lying about all the wild and extremely specific claims she made in her suit. It’s also unlikely that Diddy didn’t treat other women similarly at some point.

The importance of the Cassie lawsuit can’t be understated: It might spur another round of bad men being held accountable that #MeToo didn’t capture the first time around. Dr. Dre might experience the reckoning many believe he’s yet to for his history of violence against women. Russell Simmons might never come home from Bali. Social media is already ringing out with the names of (very) famous brothas who need to gird their loins for what’s to come.

The fall of the titan Diddy should serve as a portent for these dudes. But, perhaps more importantly, it might serve as a deterrent to other would-be powerful men who’d consider being a bad apple. Time’s up for all of that.