Chris Brown won't get cancelled. This is why.

Jasmine Crockett at the Chris Brown concert

0:00Just a heads up, y'all. This episode contains some salty language, which means there's going to be some cussing, but also contains references to violence against women.

0:11What's good, listener? You're listening to Code Switch. I'm Gene Demby. I'm B.A. Parker. All right, Parker, so let's set the scene. It's earlier this month at a packed concert at the gigantic stadium where the Dallas Cowboys play football, and Jasmine Crockett walks on stage beaming, cheesing, just a big old smile on her face. Who is it? Don't know I couldn't miss this night. Oh, yeah. Jasmine Crockett, the outgoing congresswoman who was running for Senate earlier this year.

0:41Yep. Here, here you go, Dr. Chris Brown!

0:47To honor Chris Brown, of all people. Why? I know, that's a great question, Parker. Here's what she said were her reasons. We are experiencing black joy to the highest level. In case you couldn't make it out, listener, she said, right now, we are experiencing black joy to the highest level. And then, she says, we want to make sure we document that into the congressional record. So, Parker, does that answer your question? I hope that helps. Yes, 100% does not.

1:18Okay. That's just, like, black excellence madly. Yeah, man, I don't know. Also, the congressional record of it all, what does that mean? I, these are all questions that still need answered. Like, what are you doing here? This man would not let a woman who looks like you into his section. Okay, that is Jamila Lemieux, and Jamila is an author and a cultural critic, and she was referencing this widely held notion that Chris Brown might be a little colorstruck and doesn't really rock with dark-skinned black woman.

1:51But Jamila was also confused as to why Jasmine Crockett could not see around the corner to anticipate the backlash that was going to come. If she had got up there and gave a rousing speech about the importance of the midterms, many of us would have said this was a brilliant way of redirecting Team Breezy for something good, right? At least she was trying. You know, she came in with an important message. No, she said, ooh, Chris Brown, you so light-skinned, you back-lipped so good. Yay, good for you.

The history of public violence

2:21So proud of you. So Chris Brown was performing as part of this big tour with Usher. And Chris Brown has a very public history as a person who has hit some of his girlfriends. He hits a lot of people in general. That is very fair. That is very fair. And so the opprobrium that was heaped on Jasmine Crockett was in no small part because Jasmine Crockett, during her time in the House, has chastised Donald Trump for his alleged history of violence towards women.

2:53And then she turned around and was celebrating Chris Brown? Yeah, I mean, people thought she was being a hypocrite, right? Back in 2009, leaked photos of Rihanna, his girlfriend at the time, spread across the Internet, and her face was bloodied and beaten. She had bite marks on her skin. Because Chris Brown had attacked her while they were driving in a Lamborghini, just a few hours before they were both set to perform at that year's Grammy ceremony.

3:26There were a lot of conversations back then about the ethics of sharing those photos so widely, but also a lot of messy, ugly conversations about intimate partner violence. And remember, Chris Brown pleaded guilty to felony assault in that incident. It wasn't just Rihanna. There's just this long scroll of incidents and allegations with Chris Brown, attacking other past girlfriends, attacking his manager, attacking his mother, fighting people in clubs.

3:58Listen, like, just this past July in London, he pleaded guilty to charges from hitting a music producer over the head with a bottle back in 2023. And that sentencing is actually set for a couple weeks from now, in October. And he could get three years in prison for that. And yet, this guy is still steady packing out arenas and selling out shows. And Gene, it seems unlikely to me that he would ever do actual jail time because celebrities don't go to jail for stuff like this.

4:30Right. But also, I'm like, what would that solve if he did? Like, what do we want? Yeah, and I mean, that's what we're talking about today, Parker. Because, you know, maybe once a year for the last two decades, Chris Brown will end up in the news and the public has to relearn and relitigate his history. And so I'm talking to Jameela Lemieux, whose voice we just heard, who has written extensively about the Black public's relationship to figures like R. Kelly, right? And also, the culture writer and DJ, Noella Williams, who has written about how famous Black women have formed a circle of protection around Chris Brown,

5:07who says she would never play a Chris Brown song during her DJ sets. So it's just a light conversation. Yeah, you know how it goes. And I'm sure his fans will be perfectly reasonable about all of this. As they always are. Okay. Take it away, Gene. For sure.

Earliest introductions to the artist

5:26All right, so could you both tell me about your earliest introductions to Chris Brown? Oh, yes. So Chris Brown blows up when I am a senior in college. Okay. And I'm a teacher's assistant. So I'm working with middle school girls, and I get to see them fall in love with him in real time. You know, and he was 16. And I know there were, you know, women my age who were also attracted to him.

5:57You know, my first thought was, he's a kid. I'm not interested in kid music. Like, you know, B2K and Pretty Ricky, they were my age, and I didn't want kid music. You know, I wanted to listen to grownups like D'Angelo and Maxwell. But Chris Brown won me over, you know, pretty quickly. I thought he was really adorable. He could sing. He could dance. You know, Black girls hadn't had a heartthrob in a long time. And so I thought it was cool that, you know, they had somebody like him to put the posters up, you know, on their wall for him.

6:28How about you, Noella? So I was born in 99. So Chris Brown was like, when I recognized he existed and was a singer, he was already this heartthrob status like you're saying. And I kind of knew of Chris Brown through these singles, but also through the movies that he did, like This Christmas and Stomp the Yard. And that was really my first intro to him. Okay. Just a few weeks ago, Jasmine Crockett, the outgoing congresswoman from Texas, was roundly criticized for showing up on stage at one of his concerts, presenting him with a congressional commendation.

7:07And this seems to be a theme in these cyclical Chris Brown controversies, right? Like a prominent Black woman, whether that's Jasmine Crockett or Kelly Rowland or Chloe Bailey will defend him or give him an honor. And then they come in for a lot of blowback because of it. Like, what do you make of their support of him and the response to it? I was surprised because it's one thing for you to want to put on your fashion Nova finest and go see Chris Brown and you have a right to do that. But it's another thing to say, oh, I'm going to post me as an elected official at the Chris Brown concert in my fashion Nova.

7:43But she took it a step further and said, me and my rhinestones or whatever foolishness she had on are going to deliver him a congressional... Why are you dragging her off? Because the outfit, because... Why are you dragging her off? It has to be addressed. The outfit has to be addressed. Everything about it was ridiculous. Yes, every time he is taken away from doing some kind of performance or when he is attacked online, that there is like this heap of Black women that includes these celebrities, whether they've collabed with him or not, that are like, we need to forgive him for his mistakes.

8:16He can't be still answering for something that he did when he was a child. And it feels like that we are having the same conversation. And, you know, people like myself might say, oh, we're, you know, caping for someone, the backflip of grade. But it's so much deeper.

Protecting Black male celebrity

8:32To build off what Noelle is saying, like, I think that the Black community, we are divided on so many things, right? But if there is one thing that you can get agreement on from people on the far left to the far right and the majority of us who live somewhere in the middle, there's the belief that Black men and boys are deeply disenfranchised, right? That we agree on. And I believe that many of us are wanting to be protective of Black men and boys to the point that we're unwilling to hold them accountable for the things that they do to women and girls.

9:15That was the argument with Cosby. That was the argument with R. Kelly. R. Kelly. Right? And so that is, you know, Chris Brown, this excellence in music, this two decades, right? That weighs more than a history of criminality so rich that there's an hour and a half documentary about it. And so I think for Black women in particular, we have largely, for generations, been trained to protect our men, first and foremost.

9:46So you don't call the police on that man. You don't get a Black man involved in the system, right? So the idea of simply holding Chris Brown accountable for what he has done and continue to do, for some, is like an act of racial treason, right? I am attacking the Black man. I am complicit. They're trying to take the Black man down. Like, people say that really explicitly. There's something about Black male celebrity in particular that is collectivized. And all of us, the Black public, is implicated in their success and their failures.

10:20Yes, that whatever goes on with them, for better or worse, is a reflection upon us and we have to protect them. And what's interesting is we do not have that same instinct when it comes to most Black female celebrities and notables, which is why, in the case of Jasmine Crockett right now and Kelly Rowland in the past and Chloe Bailey, when these women fall on their sword to defend Chris Brown, and he rarely says anything to defend them, right? If he doesn't show up and say, hey, hey, if you're mad at me, be mad at me, but don't take it out on Kelly Rowland, you know?

10:52He says nothing in their defense. And it's easier for us to judge and lash out against them than it is him because we're used to engaging Black women that way. Yeah, I absolutely agree with everything Jamila is saying. And I think that coming from a church background, Black conservatism is a very big thing at play here, something that I saw a lot at going to an HBCU where a lot of Black conservatism does come from a lot of Bible Belt rhetoric, where there is this notion that it is okay to forgive abusers.

11:26It is taboo to speak about gender-based violence and just any kind of thing that is after Rihanna, which includes Carucci, which includes Chris Brown's document of violence, even towards his mother. When I was watching the documentary that Jamila mentioned, I didn't know that when Chris Brown was in rehab for dealing with his anger management issues, when his mom was saying, hey, maybe stay a little longer instead of leaving, he picked up a brick, threw it at her car window, and shattered it.

12:01And I guess in the past, I didn't really come to realize that that was his mother's car that he was throwing it at, since there are a lot of other documented cases of him fighting men. But it's so interesting when people have this collective memory loss of things that happened since 2009. And I really think that we need to sit down and think about who is making up Team Breezy, who are the people that are defending him, what are their politics, why is this continued to happen, why does it feel like Jamila said, I am a race traitor when I bring this up?

12:38I think something you said there is really interesting is, like, you said that, like, we need to think about who makes up Team Breezy, and I'm actually really curious about, what do you think is, like, if you said that Team Breezy is a distinct population of fans, right? Like, who do you think is in that population? Obviously, we know overwhelmingly that Chris Brown's friends are Black women, right? But I'm curious about what you think is underneath that. Is it a generational thing? Who is in that cohort today, in 2026?

13:02I think it's intergenerational. I mean, absolutely, Black millennial women were some of his first fans, but I'm Gen Z, and I still know a lot of my peers that would be ride or dies for him, that are going to this sold-out tour, that went to his sold-out Breezy Bowls before this tour, that the fact that there are a lot of women in the UK, so outside of Black American women that are maybe, you could say, his first fan base, there are a lot of people internationally that see him as this prince of pop still.

13:36I do think of Black women first because of who is usually more likely to defend him, but we also know that there are a lot of Black men that are supporting him as well. I mean, it's not a surprise that Chris Brown is also someone that has supported Tory Lanez, that has supported other similar men that are doing these very heinous things that are usually heinous acts towards Black women or Black girls. Yeah. I think, you know, as far as Chris Brown's Black male fan base would go, he occupies a really interesting kind of complicated position because typically a big, tall, light-skinned boy would not be the cis-head Black man's favorite artist, right?

14:18And it's interesting considering how little representation there is of light-skinned Black men in media. They're still just kind of, every time they show up, it's like, oh, here we go with the light-skinned stuff, you know, with the men. Just with the men. So it sounds like you're saying that the people who rock with Chris Brown are also motivated by the same thing that a lot of the Tory Lanez fans are motivated by, which is sort of like, I'm just reflexively defending a Black man accused of gendered violence because I just, like, I'm always going to be solid with a Black man in these cases, regardless of the context.

14:53Period. That's the end and the beginning. I would say that's probably the case for a lot more male fans than female fans, where I think more of the female fans will be driven first by the aesthetic and the music, right? But I do believe that that's at the heart of the fervor over Team Breezy, you know? I think the reason that some people are passionate about, you know, speaking about him online, right? It's one thing to be like, oh, I like him. I stream his music. I go to his shows. But, like, that you have to identify as Team Breezy and be part of this stand-up is defending a Black man who's been accused of gender-based harm.

15:25Yeah, I was going to, there was something that you reminded me of, his fans, maybe these are also people who are unaware of how domestic violence victims can have this attachment to their abuser, and often that could lead to going back to them or trying to save them. And I think that plays a lot into a lot of what Jamila said about just having this mentality of we can still save him, we can make him change, no kind of transformative justice is being mentioned along at this point, or no kind of way to work through this, but there is some way to save him, allegedly.

The limits of criminal accountability

16:06But it's weird because, tell me if y'all have heard the same things, but I feel like every time there's a Chris Brown controversy, what comes up is people saying, oh, well, I need people to give him a chance to do right, to do better. And, you know, obviously, the Rihanna incident was 15 years ago, 2009. That's a lot more than 15 years, Gene. Oh, my God.

16:28Jesus, that's 16. Oh, my God. I'm so old. Oh, my God. Okay. It was 17 years ago. So it was over a decade and a half ago.

16:38And when that happens, obviously, Noella, you mentioned that, like, there's been this whole interim that's been just memory hold. It's almost like there was a Rihanna incident and then nothing in between them. Why do y'all think that is? I think part of it is just that, you know, there hasn't been a criminal conviction for violence against women specifically. And so every other instance of violence is treated as an accusation or allegation, you know?

17:09And so there's no video proof. There's no victim coming forward. But you have to remember that even with Rihanna, like, people say now it's been 17 years. Yeah, now. But I remember, Jane, I'm sure you do, too, the discussion when it first happened, right? Like, I remember the very early conversation about Rihanna. I remember the conversation before we've seen her photograph. You know, island women are spicy. And she was probably fighting him, too. To this day, I still hear people saying, you know, you know they were fighting.

17:40They were just fighting each other. And so I think it's just a willful decision not to hold this man accountable, right? Like, they're not engaging. They're not reading. They're not clicking those links when he's accused of something. They're just simply not dealing with it. So for them, in their mind, he hasn't done anything wrong since the Rihanna incident, if they even think that was a serious act of wrong. Which is wild, because the Rihanna photos were everywhere. And you can have a whole conversation about how ethically dubious it was to just be sharing those things widely.

18:13But everybody saw the photos. Everybody saw her bloody, beaten face. And yet there was still, like, for people who like Chris Brown, there was still, like, a plausible deniability in there somewhere. I think it's also interesting. One thing that stood out to me from the documentary that I was watching earlier, Chris Brown, History of Violence, which came out in 2024. Is that he also acknowledged that his stepfather allegedly abused his mother and how that affected him and scarred him.

18:46And he, you know, then continued to perpetrate this same harm, not just against other women, but like I mentioned earlier, against his mother as well. As far as lashing out against her, throwing things at her. And when it comes to holding him accountable or him being a victim that deserves to have some kind of retribution. There's never any transformative justice, which, you know, the abolitionist framework, it is a response to violence, harm and abuse without the policing system, prisons, legal system.

19:27And if we're trying to, quote unquote, make things right, I mean, accountability maybe looks like what acknowledging that violence is a collective harm. And that it requires a collective response, which does mean thinking, why are there still women, even if it is predominantly Black millennial women that have been his fan for years, that think that it's okay to make these statements like Jamila said about, oh, Caribbean women are spicy.

19:58Maybe Rihanna said something that she shouldn't have done this, she shouldn't have asked him this in a car, maybe she shouldn't have confronted him. And it still falls back on the woman to kind of answer for all of these questions when he is clearly not interested in doing any of that work himself. So the journalist, David Dennis posted a video, I think yesterday, talking about Chris Brown and his history of violence and Chris Brown stepped into the comments.

20:31Can I read what he has to say? This is happening as of this morning. Hey, brother, can you show me where I'm actively abusing women to this day? Not allegedly, not I heard. Criminality is public information when you are convicted of something. So, hey, my good brother, please print some receipts for your claim. What abuse charges, violence against women currently and over the last 17 years have I been convicted of? I want you to show me those charges and convictions.

21:02I love your message, but you are clearly misinformed or you believe any headline without facts. So, again, I haven't been convicted of anything. It's also really interesting, just since you said that, like how often in these specific cases that black folks become very credulous of the criminal legal system, right? Like if a black male celebrity is accused of something and either does not end on a conviction or settled out of court or whatever, it's like, well, the justice system did its job.

21:37Like, what are we supposed to say? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, suddenly people are just like, oh, you know what I mean? You know what I'm saying? Justice is blind and it disposed of this case the way it was supposed to do it. Yeah, in these specific incidents, everybody just suddenly believes in the American criminal legal system as like unflawed and capable of dispensing justice as well. If a black male celebrity is legally exonerated or never criminally charged and convicted, then the system is working. If he's found guilty, the system is out to get black men.

22:09There's never, again, there's no room for accountability, right? So Tory Lanez, in the court of public opinion, it was very split, right? There were people who refused to believe, you know, despite a preponderance of evidence and first-person testimony from the victim, right? Rappers have been getting shot my whole life. I've never, ever, ever heard anybody say, I don't believe you about getting shot. I don't believe that the, until it was Megan, until it was a woman, right?

22:39And so, but he's convicted, right? There's all this evidence that like, here's why he was convicted. He wasn't convicted because Roc Nation cut a check. He wasn't convicted because they're trying to take a black man down, right? He was convicted because there was evidence and because there was first-person testimony. And that is seen as a, you know, an example of the system not working. Some of the defense of Chris Brown, though, is kind of about the way fandoms work today.

Fandom dynamics and the music

23:06Like, everybody's very much ten toes down for their favorite. And the fandom is actually, a lot of fandoms are just held together by shared grievance, right? Like, they feel like their favorite musician is being disrespected, being unfairly criticized. So if you were trying to reach his fans, if you were trying to disabuse somebody who was, like, team breezy, how do you think you would break through that impulse that so many fandoms have? Which is like, nah, nah, nah, like, we rally the troops around this person, whether that's Chris Brown, whether that's B, like, whoever it is, right? Like, whenever people get criticized, like, people just come around and put their ramparts up.

23:39I think through mutual aid organizing for the past six years or so, I have learned a lot of times you have to meet people where they are. And in this case, I think that, unfortunately, you have to give them some kind of individualistic statement that's like, well, what if someone you knew was the victim of domestic violence or gender-based violence or sexual assault? Would you care if this was someone you were related to or cared for?

24:10And I don't know if that would change any of these people's minds because of the amount of damage that Chris Brown has done outside of not just women, but also just punching men that jump in his photo or being homophobic to Frank Ocean and attacking him, what, 2013? I don't know if people would have any kind of sympathy.

24:36It's really hard to tell. I think with fandoms, the hive mentality, whether it's Beehive, whether it's the Barbs, or whether it's Team Breezy, it can be very hard to pull someone out of that digital space. Saying that as someone who's been in fandoms more in, like, a science fiction fantasy-leaning side since I was a teenager on Tumblr, I understand that you can be very deep inside of the cloud of judgment that you can develop over time in these groups,

25:07especially when your algorithm is also putting similar people in front of you and around you that you might become friends with, you might be in a group chat with, you might meet up at these concerts, for example, or at these Comic-Cons, in my case. But, unfortunately, I think it's very hard to find the answer to what will it take to get to Team Breezy right now, unless it might start at a, what would you do if this was you or your loved one in this scenario? Would you believe them? Would you want better for them?

25:38Would you want to be there and be a confidant for someone? I can't really see any circumstances under which I would try to reason with somebody who was a member of Team Breezy in 2026. You know, I think that what I would rather focus my energy on doing in terms of the public Chris Brown discourse that I participate in is, you know, having conversations like this, reminding people what he's done. And so it's not that we're going to convert Team Breezy. It's the moderates, right?

26:09The people who might be like, hey, I'm not proudly on Team Breezy, but I love Usher. So I want to go to the R&B tour, right? But we're like, no, go watch that documentary, though. You know what I mean? And they're like, hmm, actually, maybe I can't do that, right? I think we're making it, hopefully, we're making it increasingly difficult to support Chris Brown in public, right? By reminding people of the things that he's done. Do you think there's something specific about his particular celebrity that makes it stickier? I guess, I mean, obviously, like, this happened with R. Kelly, too. But if you play R. Kelly at a cookout, at a wedding, or something like that, you are going to hear about it.

26:45Like, there's going to be some friction that is going to be, you know what I'm saying? Introducing that situation. I'm like, yo, yo, cut this off. I don't feel like that's exactly true with Chris Brown. I do feel like Chris Brown is allowed to skate some, like, in a way that is really fascinating. I'm not sure what it is about him in particular. But, like, people, I've heard people have told me that people they know who are going to the Chris Brown on the tour are called the Bumps and Bruises tour. They think it's funny. Sort of like, you know what I'm saying?

27:15Yes, I've heard that, too. Yeah, it's like, it's sort of like, hoo-hoo, I'm doing something, like, naughty. So it's not like a thing that people are, like, oblivious about, right? Also, you have to remember, like, how long this went on with R. Kelly before he was finally put in a position where he couldn't be on tour no more, right? And how much work it went into demanding accountability for him. And obviously, R. Kelly's crimes are different from Chris Brown's in a lot of ways. But, yeah, I think the really insidious thing is that both of them sing about love and sex, right?

27:45And so this idea that men who harm women, you know, are also seen as romantic and sexy is really scary. Because what are particularly the youngest women fans taking away, right? And so Chris Brown is not just somebody you want to listen to. You want to be with him. You want to go backstage. You're going to pay a bunch of money to take a picture with him. You know, that bad boy persona, like, it's just so deeply entwined to who he is. We don't cancel Black men.

28:16You know what I mean? We just don't, you know? And so it's like, it took 30 years of us fighting about R. Kelly to get to a point. And like, yeah, at a lot of cookouts and parties, that'll be an issue. But I've been in space, particularly, you know, if I'm somewhere where the people are older, you know what I mean? Like, than me, like, if they're over 45, 50, they're going to play some R. Kelly and nobody's going to blink. Like, I've been thinking a lot about, as a DJ, like, I am very adamant about, like, who am I playing? I'm still not going to play anyone that has a very ripe history of any abuse, regardless of, like, if the song sounds good in the club, if it's popular.

28:54And I think that there are a lot of male DJs that are not thinking any of these questions at all. You mentioned that you try not to play artists that have long histories.

A DJ policy on abusive artists

29:07Don't play. Right. You don't play, right? So I'm curious, like, has that been an issue for you? Because, I mean, you know, I remember at our wedding, we had to be supposed to say, hey, no Michael Jackson, right? You know what I mean? Like, that was a whole thing. I know, I'm curious about who is on that list, number one. Like, who is on this list of, like, you don't touch them. And I'm curious about whether you've ever gotten any static for that. Thankfully, I don't play a lot of things where people give me requests so I can kind of have my own don't play in my head.

29:39Like, no Chris Brown, no Don Tolliver, no Kodak Black. Like, any man with an allegation is, of course, not going to end up in my portfolio. But I also think a lot about the men who are agents of misogynoir that I don't want to play either. Like, I don't have any Drake in my thing. Like, if anyone wants to hear Drake, you can go to any club in Manhattan. You can listen to most of the men that are playing in these small clubs, and you can hear Drake from them. But I personally have zero interest in playing anyone that has maybe sided with Chris Brown, sided with Tory Lanez, even DaBaby.

30:18Right. That makes sense. Noella, you talked about transformative justice. What would him taking accountability, or even just being held accountable, look like? It's hard, because you would have to go back in time at this point. There's nothing—like Jamila said, with the fan base, Team Breezy, the core of them that just love Chris so much, are so sold on Chris being this savior, this bad boy, this king, this prince of pop. He's Michael Jackson's in the lineage of MJ.

30:51I really don't think that there is a space for accountability. And not just because he's a grown man now, but I think that we are maybe, what, it's been 16, 17 years. I would have been in, like, high school when he would have had to go on air and apologize. So I think that if Chris Brown today, you know, said—and hey, he might get sat down, right? He might be convicted to some actual time in the U.K.

31:23But if he said, look, I've made some mistakes over the years. I haven't always been honest with you all about some of the things that I've done. I've hurt people. I'm sorry for the people I've hurt. I want to make amends publicly and privately. I need help, and I'm going to get that help. And if he, instead of being on tour and making new music, spends time working on himself, this could be the greatest comeback of all time. There's our ability to continually forgive these cats.

31:54It's like, is that tied to how dope we think the music is? Like, this is a very crude way of phrasing this. But, like, I feel like I cannot imagine people, like, doing all of this caping and coping for, like, Jason Derulo. You know, for, like, 15, 16 years. You know what I'm saying? Like, I'm not trying to— He's the one that catches the stray. It's so funny. But I just— No, I didn't— You really got to be wet. You kind of got to be wet to not be held accountable. You got to be real. You got to be—

32:25And to me, like, I— There's a floral whiteness you can't hold beneath probably. The Chris Brown music that I've heard, he has a few songs I've enjoyed. But, like, talk about him, you know, keeping R&B alive. I'm like, our abusers used to be able to sing, okay? Marvin Gaye, James Brown, you know? Like, they was beating women too, right? So, like, you know, not to say that lightly, but I just think that, again, that, like, I think that, yes, for some people, I like the music so much.

32:55I will defend him by any means, but I do think with Chris to a certain extent, and especially with Tory Lanez, it's the abuse has made them compelling, right? You are the bad boy. So, you're either the black man I have to protect from the system, or you're this avatar for violence against women that maybe I endorse, want to participate in, somehow think is okay. So, I think that for some people, the badness is part of the goodness.

33:25Noella Williams, Jamila Lemieux, thank you for talking to us. Appreciate you both. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

33:35We reached out to Chris Brown and Jasmine Crockett for comment, but we ain't here back.

33:41And, y'all, that is our show. You can follow us on Instagram at NPR Code Switch. That's all one word. This episode was produced by Kayla Lattimore and Xavier Lopez. It was edited by Courtney Stein and Jasmine Romero. Our engineer was Jimmy Keeley. And we'd be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the Code Switch Massive, right? That's Christina Calla and Jess Kung and Leah Dinella and Daya Mortada and Barton Girdwood and Yolanda Sanguini and Maya Dangerfield. As for me, I'm Gene Demby.

34:11Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all. Be easy, y'all.