The Danger Of Memorializing Men Like Justin Fairfax and Africa Bambaataa

On April 16, former Virginia Lt. Gov Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife, Cerina Wanzer Fairfax before turning the gun on himself and taking his own life. In the immediate aftermath of this tragedy, there were many social media memorials, mostly from men, mostly focusing on their relationships with Justin Fairfax. 

It should never have crossed our minds to post pictures of ourselves with a fraternity brother and center him. It was too soon to reflexively insert mental health into the conversation. We were too dismissive of the survivors of intimate partner violence who still carry the scars inflicted by their abusers. We should always be careful not to omit how the system of patriarchy rewards men with power over the bodies of women and children.

As Amber Butts reminded us in March, “This is not about individual failure. It is about a system that requires harm to be absorbed in order to function.” That is to say that patriarchy, which demands several forms of subjugation from women, children, and yes, even men, is not and has never been an individual problem. It has always been a question of the collective, a question of reordering and reorganizing power.

Take, for instance, the death of Afrika Bambaataa. Like Fairfax, Bambaataa too had been accused of sexual misconduct. Yet those allegations rarely appeared in the public tributes that followed his death.

Like Fairfax, many of the social media memorials rendered in the wake of his death depicted Bambaataa as a hip-hop legend with little, if any, mention of or rejection of his alleged actions. This arrangement mirrors a society that is willing to erase the sins of famous men. So long as they made us dance or made our heads nod, it does not matter how bad their transgressions; we dare not speak ill of dead men.

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This inclination too, is apparent in who we mythologize and how we mythologize them. As Gerrick Kennedy notes in his critical tour de force of the stylized and glamorized “Michael” biopic, the film is “not, at its core, a film about Michael Jackson in the traditional sense. It is a film about who we want Michael Jackson to be—and how we’d prefer to remember him.” This, too, is a form of mythmaking, but we make myths out of men who may more precisely be regarded as monsters by their victims. 

In Fairfax’s case, per a report from The Washington Post, he became a man so monstrously obsessed with proving his innocence that Cerina Wanzer Fairfax had to shoulder the entire household. 

Wanzer Fairfax labored to the point where Fairfax County Circuit Judge Timothy J. McEvoy had to describe her efforts using a metaphorical device. Wanzer Fairfax, he wrote, was like “a port in a storm for her children.” 

McEvoy continued, pointing out that in his estimation, Wanzer Fairfax had become “the primary caregiver for both children for almost the entirety of their lives. … Among other things, she is the planner, the scheduler, the caretaker, the cook, the disciplinarian and the primary nurturer. … It also appears [she] is the primary earner right now.”

In a larger review of the gendered division of labor in American households from 2014-2024, Mylène Ross-Plourde and Mylène Lachance-Grzela noted that “being responsible for more housework has been related to negative consequences for women’s mental health, their careers, and couple functioning.” This, unfortunately, points at a sad irony as much of the online discourse centering Fairfax was concerned with his mental health, but completely ignored the toll that becoming an entire solar system to her children took on Wanzer Fairfax. 

Even more troubling, in their accounting, the Washington Post devoted an inordinate amount of time to her husband’s mental health. This dynamic is not far from social media posts dedicated to Fairfax. Some of those now-deleted posts came from figures who should know better, like one from political commentator for TV One, the host of the eponymous “Roland Martin Unfiltered Show,” as well as the CEO of Nu Vision Media, Roland Martin. Martin declared in his post that now was the time to have a conversation about the mental health of Black men; immediately after a Black man killed his wife before then turning the gun on himself. 

However, as University of Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal, an expert on masculinity, noted on an April 29 episode of NPR’s Code Switch, “A man killed his wife, and I’m talking about Fairfax in this context. How do we not lead with that conversation that a man chose to kill his wife with his children in the home?”

RELATED: High rates of femicide make it hard to be a Black woman in this world

Since April, the topic of femicide in the Black community has become more prevalent in social media discourse, as it should be. This is in no small part because it epitomizes the position of women, and in particular, Black women, inside of a patriarchal society, a society that is structured with limited safety for them. That safety does not even extend to their own homes. 

As Alexandria Onuoha wrote for the Global Network on Extremism and Technology in 2022, the specific violence that Black women face from their partners, often Black men, deserves its own subcategory: Black femicide.

“Black femicide needs to be named as such because the experiences of Black women and girls are different. Black femicide is the intent to murder Black women and girls.Black femicide takes many forms including intimate partner violence and sexual violence. In 2020, at least four Black women and girls were murdered per day in the United States and this rate has increased significantly according to FBI reports,” Onuoha explained.

As Baltimore’s mayor, Brandon Scott, noted in response to a post from journalist Phil Lewis on Threads, it is time for men to do the work of becoming better people and holding other men accountable. Much like the system of white supremacy, patriarchy too, seeks to punish or ostracize men who are out of step with its desires. We see this when men do something as simple as affirm the worth of Black women publicly and are dismissed as  “simps.” 

The implication, of course, is that a “real man” wouldn’t stand up for Black women and that those who do, are only looking for a reward from a woman in exchange. If patriarchy is to be dealt with on any level, men must create safer spaces, reject the entitlement that fuels disrespect and violence against women, and hold one another accountable. Otherwise, there will always be more Justin Fairfaxes and Africa Bambaataa’s for folks to survive. 

As associate professor Shatema Threadcraft told Capital B News in April: “Media coverage drives attention. Getting the stories out about what happened, getting people to care about what happened, is another fight that the families of these women struggle with. You presume no one will care, so you don’t produce the knowledge. And therefore, the knowledge isn’t right there.”

Cerina Wanzer Fairfax should not have had to die for so many people to learn what she carried, what she built, and what she meant to the people who depended on her. Yet even after her death, public attention continued to flow toward the man who killed her. Meanwhile, the life she built, the labor she performed, and the care she provided risked becoming secondary to the story of the man who ended it. Black women and femmes deserve better than to disappear behind the men who harmed them.