There were so many personal stories and analyses that stood out to me while watching Thursday night’s two-hour premiere. But the comment that haunted me the most came from R. Kelly’s older brother, Bruce Kelly.

“Robert likes younger women,” Bruce Kelly said in his interview from prison. “That’s just a preference. Everyone has preferences. So what is the big deal? What is the big issue with my brother?”

I felt ill watching him say this proudly, with ease, on national television. I thought back to my girlhood, and realized that his sick reasoning is why Black mothers are wary about their little girls spending the night at people’s houses. It’s this twisted thinking that sparked our grandmothers’ conversations about us sitting on men’s laps.

Teaching Black girls to protect our bodies from men like R. Kelly, and his entourage of enablers who see his affinity for Black girls as a preference instead of predatory behavior, is a survival skill; one passed down from mother to daughter since white men first fetishized and preyed on Black girls during slavery.

Somehow, though, the person to blame anytime a Black girl is swept up into the dark unyielding world of men like R. Kelly, and his circle of enablers, is the Black girl herself. She was fast, they say. She wore revealing clothing, they say. She didn’t have no business talking to no grown man, they say. She didn’t do a good job protecting her body, so she eventually got what she deserved. It’s this societal pressure on Black girls that made me ashamed of my own body once my breasts started forming at 12 years old. In hindsight, it’s unbelievable and completely irresponsible for our society to place the responsibility of checking predatory men on Black women and girls. Meanwhile, pop culture, and our own families, celebrate and praise men based on the number of girls and women they’re able to bag.

I didn’t grow up on the South Side of Chicago, but the whispers of R. Kelly pulling up to Kenwood High School to scoop up Black girls made it all the way Out West too. So when R. Kelly’s infamous sex tape hit the streets in 2002, I remember not being shocked to hear that he was having sex, and urinating on, a 14-year-old girl. [R. Kelly was found not guilty on all 14 counts of child pornography]. I was in 7th grade. I had friends who downloaded the tape through sites like Napster and Limewire. I had overhead adults, who purchased the tape from their neighborhood bootleg man, debating on whether that was even R. Kelly in the video. I also remember later watching The Boondocks episode from 2005 where Riley tapped into the same mindset of many Black people who followed the R. Kelly sex trial: “If I started peeing on you right now, would you a) smile and ask for more, or b) move the hell out the way?”