After a weekend of backlash against Girls star Lena Dunham, controversy once more arose after Dunham was accused of “hipster racism” by a fellow writer of the popular website “Lenny Letter,” which she co-founded. This form of racism, says Zinzi Clemmons, author of What We Lose who’s accusing Dunham, is one that “uses sarcasm as a cover.” She continues by stating an example, saying that in Dunham’s inner circle, she has a friend who was notoriously known for using the n word in effort of being “provocative” but when called out, it was proclaimed to just be a joke. “And in the end,” Clemmons says, “it looks a lot like gas lighting.” Zinzi encourages women of color to do the same as her, following Dunham’s claims last week.
My statement on why I will no longer write for @lennyletter, and the behavior I witnessed firsthand from @lenadunham‘s friends.
It is time for women of color–black women in particular–to divest from Lena Dunham. pic.twitter.com/dxOWCLhTpA
— zinziclemmons (@zinziclemmons) November 19, 2017
Just last week, Dunham threw herself in the fire when she decided to personally defend her friend, writer Murray Miller, who was accused of raping actress Aurora Perrineau back in 2012, when she was a mere 17-years-old. Dunham expressed that she had “insider knowledge” about the current situation of her Miller and that “Murray’s situation makes us confident that sadly this is accusation is one of the 3 percent of assaults cases that are misreported every year.” After the intense backlash, she released another apology, stating, she “naively believed it was important to share my perspective on my friend’s situation as it has transpired behind the scenes.” She continued to confess that “it was the absolutely wrong time to come forward with such a statement” and that she was “so sorry.”
— ? Lena Dunham ? (@lenadunham) November 19, 2017
Dunham, however, is notorious for simply being an apologist. For years, she has simply written sorry letters and moved on but while she may do that, the internet never forgets, especially when it comes from someone such as Lena Dunham. She herself went through a period of being accused of sexual assault after an excerpt from her book drove everyone wild after she wrote about “spreading” her sister Grace’s vagina open. “One day,” she wrote in her memoir Not That Kind Of Girl, “as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn’t resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.”
In another passage, she wrote, “As [Grace] grew, I took to bribing her for her time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do her makeup like a ‘motorcycle chick.’ Three pieces of can’t if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds. Whatever she wanted to watch on TV if she would just ‘relax on me.’ Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying. Maybe, I thought, she would be more willing to accept kisses if I wore the face mask my grandmother had for when she did her dialysis. (The answer was no.) What I really wanted, beyond affection, was to feel that she needed me, that she was helpless without her big sister leading her through the world.”
She even went as far as to write about casually masturbating next to her younger sister casually in the same bed. This landed a big debate over whether or not it was sexual assault. Some stated that it wasn’t because of her age but nevertheless, her wording of the situation, as well as the analogy, was highly questionable to the public.
