Some in the music industry were unsurprised when the allegations about the DJ Tim Westwood came to light last week. There had long been stories recounted by Black women of his alleged abuse of power – rumours that circulated among friends in Black nightlife and the music industry. An investigation by the BBC and the Guardian details the accounts of multiple Black women, some teenagers at the time – of alleged predatory behaviour and groping on the part of the veteran DJ. Some claim to have been groped at his shows, while others maintain that they were enticed to a flat on the promise of professional guidance, only to be abused.
In 2020, a Twitter account was created, named Surviving Tim Westwood and a hashtag of the same name started to trend. Then the account disappeared, perhaps due to Westwood’s legal team, as he has denied all the allegations. However it was also possibly indicative of a deep-seated truth: that Black women’s voices are often silenced. This is just one example of how misogynoir, the term used to describe misogyny specifically directed at Black women, may have aided and abetted Westwood in avoiding accountability until now.
Westwood was a deified figure within Black music – beloved by party-goers as well as industry gatekeepers. Many people, especially Black men, credit him with giving hip-hop and rap music that would otherwise have been relegated to the underground a mainstream platform. What is telling about that argument is how Westwood’s negligible influence in a culture that is far bigger than him is treated as more important than the allegations made by Black women. So, while the powerful, predominantly white, industry executives who continued to employ him as those allegations swirled should be held accountable, there is clearly an intraracial gender issue here, too – namely that Black women’s stories were diminished in order to justify Westwood’s standing in Black culture overall.
