Are Chris Brown And Rihanna Getting Back Together?

Some suggestive tweets from Rihanna‘s twitter account have touched off a gossip investigation on the part of The Sun to find out if the 23-year-old singer is back together with her abusive ex Chris Brown. I’m not sure it’s gone that far, but at the very least, there’s some inappropriate shit going on.

“How can you lie to her, while u lay with me???” Rihanna tweeted the other night,supposedly after seeing Chris Brown out with model Karrueche Tran at a Las Vegas party. Since then, she’s sent out a couple more amorous tweets that could be about anyone, but which gossip cops are taking to obviously be about Chris Brown. “Despite everything that has happened RiRi has not stopped loving Chris,” a “source” told The Sun. “They have been in constant contact for some time and things seemed to be stepping up a gear in recent weeks. Many thought these public declarations of love on Twitter were paving the way for an official reconciliation.”

Perhaps even more distressing than the possibility that Rihanna is reconciling with the guy who beat the shit out of her is that fact that few of Brown’s young fans seem to care about the incident anymore. A recent story on NPR revealed that a good 50% of urban youth surveyed in Boston believe that Rihanna was at least partly to blame for the abuse. Quotes gathered from young fans outside a Chris Brown concert in Baltimore modeled some disturbing thinking, as well. “Obviously she played a part in getting beat, or whatever,” one fan told NPR. “However you want to put it.”
This is especially problematic in light of the fact that many Chris Brown and Rihanna fans fall into a demographic that suffers from domestic violence at elevated rates: young black women. I’m not saying it’s Rihanna’s job to teach better lessons, but this should be a wake up call to those actually charged with teaching health classes and the like. Rather than count on celebrities to model healthy behavior, educators should take this as a sign that they need to do a better job teaching kids about abusive relationships, misogynistic culture, and victim-blaming.