This is what the Africana A-List had to say about R. Kelly on March 7, 2003:

1. R. Kelly's on top of the charts (and your daughters)

In its ongoing effort to remain true to the hallowed mandate to be your Gateway to Black World, Africana.com has over the last year-and-a-half seen fit to throw quite a few pixels at the various scandals occasioned by the alleged pervy predilections of singer R. Kelly. This coverage has run the expected gamut--pro-R, anti-R, sad-and-confused-about-R--but, surprisingly, the numerous articles produced a mini-flood of email, not attacking Kelly, but professing staunch support for the R. Our reaction to these letters was, as you'd imagine, negative. Constant exposure to everything from amateur psychologists suggesting Kelly was emulating a child-marrying Elvis, to Cochran-like cautions "not to rush to judgment," to poorly-written screeds instructing us to "be real and stop fronting" because sex between young girls and rich and famous R&B stars must be, by definition, consensual as "all those girls watching him on BET are dreaming of getting with him sexually anyway," to the literally dozens of maddening, rote and ultimately inane one-line missives opining that "I guess age really ain't nothing but a number after all!" --well, you'll understand if those letters had the A-List just a little convinced that black folks must really be the most screwed-up, self-hating, in-denial population in all god's creation. After all, here was a vaguely unattractive singer with a so-so vocal range and a lazy eye, a songwriter whose great professional innovation has been the idiot savant-like ability to reduce the complicated realties of black intimacy to chintzy, lyrical prime-numbers along the lines of "you remind me of my jeep" or "let's go half on a baby," a grown man who definitely married (and presumably had sex with) at least one underage girl and allegedly videotaped himself having sex with and urinating on another, and yet, not only was there no universal outcry against him, but dozens of morons were writing in to Africana every day demanding that we stop defaming their favorite (alleged) child molester. Shameful and sad was the only way to describe it.

After receding into blissful remission for almost a year with the ebb of R. Kelly-related headlines, our depression came back full bore when we learned that his latest loveman oeuvre, The Chocolate Factory had debuted at number one on the album charts last week. The A-List isn't in the demographics business, but we've got a strong, sad feeling that most of the over 500K consumers who ran to stores last week to buy were likely grown black women (who at some point or another were girls) or the genuine article itself: black girls exactly like the ones for which Kelly is accused of having an unhealthy yen. This means that, perversely enough, the same population that has been at greatest risk from Kelly is in large part helping pay for his still forthcoming legal defense, a defense that could quite likely leave him free to, as he so eloquently puts it in his latest hit "Ignition," "stick my key in" more underage girls. Kelly has denied any wrong doing (on The Chocolate Factory he croons ''It's all because I'm famous, you know what I'm sayin' I mean, if I wasn't famous, then all this wouldn't be happening'') and only with a few notable exceptions, the success of his latest album has been greeted with a kind of shrugging "go figure" cynicism by a groggy celebrity/music press still suffering from Michael Jackson insulin shock. What's clear to the A-List, though, is that the non-reaction to Kelly's alleged transgressions is par for the course in a culture that de-values black girls as completely as does ours. Had Kelly been accused of molesting boys a la Michael Jackson he'd be under hot lights crying for Barbara Walters faster than you can say "20/20." And if there was a video circulating with images that may or may not be Kelly having sex with a girl that looked like one of the Olson Twins, you'd better believe he'd be in a CO's office begging not to be put back in general population faster than you can say "protective custody."

But hey, what do we know, right? We don't have children the age of Kelly's alleged victims and except for the cuts featuring Ronald Isley, we don't really like his music. That's why the A-List wants to hear from you. Are you the African American parent of a girl aged 13-16 who went out and bought The Chocolate Factory with your own money in the first week of its release? If so, we'd like you to write and send us a short essay (<500 words) explaining "Why I can look my daughter in the eye." The best essay will be published on Africana.com, and the winner will receive a copy of Sapphire's Push appropriately inscribed with a personal message from the A-List.

Needless to say, we had no takers.

Jelani Cobb sends this in:

Statement of Black Men Against the Exploitation of Black Women

Six years have gone by since we first heard the allegations that R. Kelly had filmed himself having sex with an underage girl. During that time we have seen the videotape being hawked on street corners in Black communities, as if the dehumanization of one of our own was not at stake. We have seen entertainers rally around him and watched his career reach new heights despite the grave possibility that he had molested and urinated on a 13-year old girl. We saw African Americans purchase millions of his records despite the long history of such charges swirling around the singer. Worst of all, we have witnessed the sad vision of Black people cheering his acquittal with a fervor usually reserved for community heroes and shaken our heads at the stunning lack of outrage over the verdict in the broader Black community.

Over these years, justice has been delayed and it has been denied. Perhaps a jury can accept R. Kelly's absurd defense and find "reasonable doubt" despite the fact that the film was shot in his home and featured a man who was identical to him. Perhaps they doubted that the young woman in the courtroom was, in fact, the same person featured in the ten year old video. But there is no doubt about this: some young Black woman was filmed being degraded and exploited by a much older Black man, some daughter of our community was left unprotected, and somewhere another Black woman is being molested, abused or raped and our callous handling of this case will make it that much more difficult for her to come forward and be believed. And each of us is responsible for it.

We have proudly seen the community take to the streets in defense of Black men who have been the victims of police violence or racist attacks, but that righteous outrage only highlights the silence surrounding this verdict.

We believe that our judgment has been clouded by celebrity-worship; we believe that we are a community in crisis and that our addiction to sexism has reached such an extreme that many of us cannot even recognize child molestation when we see it.
We recognize the absolute necessity for Black men to speak in a single, unified voice and state something that should be absolutely obvious: that the women of our community are full human beings, that we cannot and will not tolerate the poisonous hatred of women that has already damaged our families, relationships and culture.

We believe that our daughters are precious and they deserve our protection. We believe that Black men must take responsibility for our contributions to this terrible state of affairs and make an effort to change our lives and our communities.

This is about more than R. Kelly's claims to innocence. It is about our survival as a community. Until we believe that our daughters, sisters, mothers, wives and friends are worthy of justice, until we believe that rape, domestic violence and the casual sexism that permeates our culture are absolutely unacceptable, until we recognize that the first priority of any community is the protection of its young, we will remain in this tragic dead-end.

We ask that you:

• Sign your name if you are a Black male who supports this statement: http://www.petitiononline.com/rkelly/petition.html
• Forward this statement to your entire network and ask other Black males to sign as well
• Make a personal pledge to never support R. Kelly again in any form or fashion, unless he publicly apologizes for his behavior and gets help for his long-standing sexual conduct, in his private life and in his music
• Make a commitment in your own life to never to hit, beat, molest, rape, or exploit Black females in any way and, if you have, to take ownership for your behavior, seek emotional and spiritual help, and, over time, become a voice against all forms of Black female exploitation
• Challenge other Black males, no matter their age, class or educational background, or status in life, if they engage in behavior and language that is exploitative and or disrespectful to Black females in any way. If you say nothing, you become just as guilty.
• Learn to listen to the voices, concerns, needs, criticisms, and challenges of Black females, because they are our equals, and because in listening we will learn a new and different kind of Black manhood

That works for me.

from Susie Bright:

The next guilty teenage boy you see on the street... buttonhole him, and whisper, "You're not doing it ENOUGH! You better beat off like your life depended on it!"

A new study shows that regular masturbation can reduce the risk of developing prostate cancer. Seriously.

The Australian researchers who carried out the tests found men who ejaculate more then five times a week were better off then men with more modest numbers. And the younger you start, the better the results.

And, no. I have no idea why C-3PO is up there. It just felt right.

I don't have a proper segue for this, but: My father had funny ideas about the prostate. Sometime in the mid-70s, ground pepper was banned from our home because he picked up the notion somewhere that the grains somehow enlarged the prostate. When a male relative came down with some trouble down there, my father leaned over to me - at dinner, while dude was sitting across from me - to whisper that the relative had taken ill because dude masturbated into the pocket square he always wore six times a day. (The beauty of that story is that I must have been, like, 9. Me and Dad didn't see eye-to-eye much, but nothing brought us together like the male urinary tract.)

In stark contrast, my father claimed not to have touched himself since his days at an all-boys military boarding school, which, besides being a bold-faced lie (I found "the stash" when I was 10) gave me the raw material for a lot of likely homophobic - but good natured, I swear! - innuendo-making at his expense. Dad subscribed to a lot of quack "newsletters" - this was before the intertubes, they came in the mail - and had clearly picked up both the pepper thing and the prostate-wanking connection in their pages. When his own gland swole up unexpectedly one day, I couldn't resist telling him how it just couldn't be his prostate seeing how he had given up his life of dickcrime way back in boarding school. He didn't have much in the way of snappy comeback, but that might have been because he was howling in agony in the bathroom trying to pass a drop and a half of urine, poor old guy. :(