By Boyce Watkins, PhD
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Patricia M. Schnegg praised singer Chris Brown for staying on track with his probation. Brown hasn’t missed a session of domestic violence counseling and has completed 32 days of community service in his home state of Virginia. He was serving the probation as the result of his attack last year on the singer, Rihanna, who was his girlfriend at the time.
“It looks like you’re doing really, really well,” Schnegg said. “That’s always good to see.”
Brown was sentenced last year to five years probation and six months of community service, after pleading guilty to felony assault. The attack took place a few hours before the 2009 Grammy Awards. The judge also ruled that Brown can travel out of the country to do concert dates in May and June.
The Chris Brown saga was painful to watch, as he was another Tiger Woods: A mainstream black man with a squeaky clean image, made into public enemy No. 1 by both himself and the media. What I find interesting, however, is that there are men of other races who make equally heinous mistakes, but the media doesn’t make a sport out of laying the men out to dry in front of the American public.
Either way, Chris’ mistakes shed a great deal of light on the issue of domestic violence in the African-American community. I found myself disturbed that my daughters still loved Chris after this incident. Rihanna made things even worse by leveraging her pain into publicity, which almost seemed to backfire.
What is good for Brown is that he went through the domestic violence counseling, which many Americans should experience even when they haven’t done anything wrong. This counseling teaches people how to manage their anger and find productive ways to resolve disputes in their relationships. There are quite a few subtleties about domestic violence that all of us should study, not to just avoid physical conflicts, but to also know how and when to get out of bad situations. Chris was likely taught that, in many cases, you don’t have to touch someone to abuse them and that an abusive relationship is not the only way to find yourself miserable. These were valuable lessons for him to learn at such an early age, and the great hope is that his future relationships will not lead him to jeopardize all that he’s worked so hard to obtain.
At the end of the day, my point remains the same: Chris Brown is not a monster. He’s a 20-year-old kid with room to grow and evolve from his mistakes. In this conversation on CNN, I wanted to speak honestly on Chris Brown’s problems while simultaneously reminding the public not to make him into the next Michael Vick. When it comes to African-American men, America loves to make value judgments. I wasn’t interested in hearing all that.
