Dee Barnes and Dr. Dre

I watched The Defiant Ones because a friend recommended it, and I really liked it. 

I did feel some hesitation to start it, because I worried that it would gloss over Dr. Dre's assault of Dee Barnes. It sounded like Straight Outta Compton did.

There was no glossing. In the second episode the documentary talked to Dr. Dre about, they talked to Dee Barnes about it, and they showed footage of the Pump It Up episode that directly led to it. 

It was still incredibly unsatisfying.

There are a few reasons for that. For me, one is that Dr. Dre's acceptance of responsibility is still pretty sexist. It seems that a great deal of his shame is because he, a man, put hands on a woman, which he calls stupid. There might be deeper issues that he could examine. 

Certainly there is some residual frustration because it doesn't matter that he says it was wrong, it still happened. He can't erase it and make it go away. That appears to haunt him.

I don't know if for him that is solely a matter of personal embarrassment, but it is also an inescapable fact that it destroyed her career, thus victimizing Barnes twice.

The low-level possible way forward could be Dr. Dre asking Barnes what he can do for her. I don't know if that has happened. There was a suit and a settlement, but regardless of the final amount, there was still the loss of career, and definite financial hardship for Barnes more recently. 

So, there might be something to talk about there, and restitution that allows the person who was harmed to specify the terms may be something that helps with a feeling of actually being able to put a situation in the past.

However, I think part of that feeling of emptiness is also that there were really so many people involved besides those two.

Dee Barnes was the target of Dr. Dre's rage, but she was not the source of it. She was a convenient target because of the Pump It Up episode, but that was two separate interviews that were edited together to stir things up. There were people other than Barnes making those decisions.

Editing aside, the material was unquestionably there. There was great animosity between Ice Cube and the remaining members of NWA. I had never heard of The DOC before the documentary, but I was mad at Ice Cube for the way he mocked his voice. So there is anger there that doesn't pertain to Dee Barnes nearly as much as it pertains to Ice Cube and Eazy-E and Jerry Heller. Other than Heller, I think all of them eventually made up, if not when Eazy-E was dying, then when they made the movie, but that did not undo all past damage. There is probably unrecognized damage.

Beyond that, there was the fact that a victim of an assault was shunned out of an industry in deference to the one who assaulted her, which isn't that uncommon, but it is still a problem. It is impossible to feel good about that.

In fact, there was a broader pattern of sexual harassment common in the industry. For that Barnes is probably the most prominent victim, but the total damage would be hard to calculate.

I don't have answers for that. The culture that is based on dominating and pushing everything that you have to take downhill is built on suffering, so it perpetuates it.

Religiously, I believe the reason that Christ can offer forgiveness is because he can also offer healing and resurrection, actually repairing the harms that were done. Then it can become sanctifying.

Without that level of power, I still believe in the importance of facilitating as much healing as we can.

This issue has not been resolved, but it doesn't have to be impossible.