In the midst of all these Boosie conversations, I can’t stop thinking about that BTLI lecture in 2014 when Dr. Stacy Floyd-Thomas talked about the collective sexual trauma that must be healed in Black folks.

She talked about how, in the American context, our origins of sex and physical intimacy are rooted in violence—our bodies being property.

- Plantation owners raping enslaved Black men, women and children because they could

- Enslaved men raping women and children and engaging in aggressive physical intimacy to reclaim power taken as a result of enslavement

- Enslaved children left vulnerable and unprotected against sexual violence

- Enslaved women and girls giving birth and supplying the plantation workforce, through sexual assault

- Enslaved women negotiating sex as a means of survival and family protection

Dr. Floyd Thomas said our inability to understand healthy intimacy and physical relationships is because we weren’t meant to understand or know them. Our sexuality was always to be understood—by them and us—as primal and barbaric, thus reinforcing narratives about our personhood.

The responses to Boosie, just like the responses to R. Kelly, the #MeToo Movement and others, reveal the wound and the collective healing we still need to do to move towards a healthy collective sexual ethic.