Decolonizing Consent. Imagining Culturally Competent Consent | by India Steward | Medium

"What are the nonverbal consensual rules Black and Brown folk apply in Afro-Caribe spaces and how do we know when someone has crossed a line?

In order to answer those questions it’s important to know that affirmative consent, when you ask before touching or kissing with someone, entered the mainstream because universities wanted to limit the number of sexual assault cases at their schools. These universities began to include affirmative consent in their freshman orientation in hopes of limiting the amount of sexual assault cases and improving their school’s reputation. Unfortunately,nothing about affirmative consent considers trauma. Many sexual assault survivors are shamed for not saying “no”, as if that would have stopped the attacker in their tracks, nor focuses on healing for survivors. Affirmative consent is of course not all bad, but it does support institutions in their attempts to paint situations and survivors as either angels or devils according to whether or not they explicitly and clearly said “no”.

Furthermore, affirmative consent reinforces the criminal justice system, which fails to prosecute even the most egregious sexual assaults (i.e Brock Turner, the white Stanford student caught in the act of assaulting an unconscious woman but still received no jail time). As Black and Brown radicals, it is our job to think of possibilities for community accountability and care outside of institutions and court rooms. Our work is to make safer and consensual spaces possible for IBPOC of all genders and sexualities.

There are cultural barriers to affirmative consent as well. Black folk across the Americas, in the United States as well as the Afro-Caribbean, dance with our hips close and embrace our sexuality uninhibited. In other words, affirmative consent can feel rigid, awkward, and…white. Does that mean that Black and Brown people should just throw consent out the window? Obviously not, our issue is the lack of discussion around what nonverbal consent and a nonverbal “no” can look like. The Metropolitan Organization to Counter Sexual Assault has created an easy and helpful chart explaining what qualifies as nonverbal consent. While that resource is a great template to build off of, IBPOC consent could be a creolized consent. A creole language is a mix of two languages resulting in the creation of a new and unique way of relating to one another. Creolized consent could include aspects of affirmative consent combined with our own cultural ways of relating to each other. In Kreyol, French is mixed with different African languages that the enslaved Africans spoke before colonization. Decolonizing consent by combining affirmative consent (can I touch you here?) and nonverbal consent may be the way forward...."