Why is it, that on every website/blog I see about the Duke alleged rape case, people keep bringing up Tawana Brawley? As if she set the standard for all black women who can claim rape. It is very unsettling that because of Tawana’s story, which took place over 20 years ago, this black woman in North Carolina has been reduced to an immoral stripper, who is obviously charging these young men with rape for her own benefit. Although, I am not quite sure how she would benefit from these accusations.
When the media and other folks continue to compare her story to Tawana’s, they yet again, reinforce the idea that if a black woman claims rape, she must be lying. That black women cannot be trusted. That black women who tell their story of sexual assault, have a secret agenda. That black women are out to get white men. Bull. These two cases are exceedingly different on many, many levels.
It’s also interesting to note that, no one rushes to evoke the numerous stories of lynched black men who were accussed of raping white women. When white women lie about being raped by black men, no one resurrects photographs of black bodies hanging from trees, or the mangled and bloated body of young Emmitt Till who, supposedly, only whistled at a white woman.
If anything, the only connection I see between the two cases is the media hype and racial “taking sides” we have all fallen suspect too. How dare anyone to compare these two cases, when the facts and evidence are strinkingly different. People do lie. But that is no justification for criminalizing other rape victims.
I urge you all to see Aishah Shahidah Simmons NO! the rape documentary. I can’t stress enough how important this film is in challenging media hype about black female rape victims and idiots who continue to compare this case with Tawana Brawley. Black women are indeed victims of rape, just as much as other women–we must understand that.
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to add to this, because otherwise we’re making the same mistake of accusing women of lying about being raped, it’s a safe bet that the women who accused black men of raping them were actually raped….but in most cases by white men who had power over them, so they sought “justice” in a culturally safe direction. To Kill a Mockingbird wasn’t made up of whole cloth. Harper Lee lived in that culture in that time period.
are you serious. have you ever heard of ida b. wells? the red record?
if not, i suggest you read it.
i really don’t think all of those black men were running around raping white women in the post-bellum south, with the threat of lynching haning over their heads.
black men and white women often had consensual relationships, and black men were still lynched. period.
So you’re saying that in the past women lied about being raped to get something out of it? hmm…
I am not saying the Duke case is one, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she sued the school. Then again, someone who was raped would probably sue the school too, so even that doesn’t tell us anything.
Odanu, many White men in this country could not fathom that a relationship between a White woman and Black man could be consentual, so they assumed that this was rape. The idea that Black men are out to rape and abuse White women was something assumed by many Whites. In some cases White women made up rape allegations when White men found out about their relationships with Black men because they knew they would be threaten, disowned, etc. so they protected themselves by lying about Black men.
I think that this is likely (although not unheard of) in this day and age, but there is a historical precedent.
Not holding their heads down when they saw a white woman on the street could be called rape and “grounds” for a lynching. What Strom Thurmond did with his maid’s 15 year old daughter was rape. We all know that right?
My comment was strictly about addressing the “you mean women lied then but not now about rape” comment I knew would pop its ugly head (and it took….3 whole comments?) I don’t question at all that black men and white women had consentual relationships. What I question is that when a white woman accused a black man of rape, she was lying about rape. She may have been lying about who committed it (probably was, given the atmosphere of the day) but not about the act.
And blackademic, please re-read what I said. I did not say that black men were running around the south raping white women. I said that white men were running around the south raping white women — and then getting black men blamed for it.
Hello everyone,
This is slightly off-topic, but not much: anyone who is concerned with accuracy and unbiased reporting and analysis of this case would be very welcome over at Wikipedia, where some other editors and I are desperately trying to keep the post on this topic both accurate and neutral. (No easy task!) If you can help us out at all, please do so! Editing Wikipedia is simple, quick, and extremely helpful.
Thank you,
SeaworthyViolin (usually a lurker)
Oh, I thikn in a lot of cases rape didn’t happen. White men lynched black men, blamed white women for it, and black people have been very eager to blame white women for it ever since. If you want to defend one group of women from lying, then by God don’t do it by claiming another group lied. Or is it all about defending the men? Thanks, but all kinds of men are rapists. Rape serves a purpose for men, and one of those purposes is to drive women apart, to blame women instead of men.
Women of any color were not allowed to serve on a jury till the late Sixties and early Seventies. White men and black men are just as sexist as they can get away with. Women’s rights are opposed by men of all colors while those very same men claim fellowship with men.
Eldredge Cleaver didn’t spring out of nowhere. Men have always treated other men’s women like property, even while they protested that they themselves were human beings. Hell, what do you think outing Valerie Plame was all about? Bush was too cowardly to take on Joseph Wilson so he went after his woman. Don’t tell me black men are pure souls who don’t feel the same urge to get revenge on other groups of men through the conveniant, weaker vehicle of their ‘possessions.’
White men lied about rapes in the South. For the record, according to Against Our Will, the most common charge which lynching was blamed for was robbery/homicide, not rape. It’s a myth that all lynchings were motivated by rape accusations. Funny, though, that it’s so durable, so satisfying.
And just for the record, I believe all women, and I don’t give a fuck what color their assailant is. Anyone who accuses a woman of lying better have some good goddamned evidence, or else she or he is just as sexist as anyone. I don’t care what color you are, what gender you are. If you accuse a woman of lying—and whole groups of women of lying—then don’t bitch at me. This is bullshit.
bean–
i have seen the whole film (on tuesday in fact)
it will be available for purchase soon. look at her website.
odanu–
i misread your posting. it wasn’t clear to me.
From Against Our Will, “A Question of Race”, page 224, Brownmiller says, quoting an NAACP report:
It may be fairly pointed out that in a number of cases where Negroes have been lynched for rape ‘attacks on white women’ the alleged attacks rest upon no stronger evidence than ‘entering the room of a woman’ or ‘brushing against her….In many cases, of course, the evidence points to bona fida attacks upon women….It is apparent that lynching of Negroes for other causes than the so-called “one crime” have for the whole period been a large majority of all lynchings and that for the past five years (1914-1918) less than one of five of the colored victims have been accused or rape or “attacks on women.”
White men used white women as the excuse to kill black women. Is it just so much easer to blame women and men? It wasn’t white women who profited from accusations of rape, it was white men, who often seized black property as a result of the owner’s murder.
i don’t think a lot of people think that lynchings were done because of rape accusations. since, people were lynched for owning businesses or doing anything else that “threatened” white supremacy.
rob, where in the hell did you get that idea from?
When white women lie about being raped by black men, no one resurrects photographs of black bodies hanging from trees, or the mangled and bloated body of young Emmitt Till who, supposedly, only whistled at a white woman.
This is a general statement. You accept as fact that white women lied about being raped by black men. And you ignore something else entirely: to the white men who murdered Emmett Till, he was just infringing on their property rights over that woman. She had nothing to do with it.
Don’ t defend one group of women by claiming another group is whole sale lying. I’m sick of this. Whenever interracial rape comes up—as if we’re different races—people are curiously silent on the subject of white men, white lies, Eldredge Cleaver, and Leroy Jones.
If you don’t think people believe lynchings were motivated by false charges of rape by white women you’re sadly misinformed adn haven’t done your research. The myth of “The One Crime” conveniantly makes white men invisible. Why on earth wouldn’t it be the most popular accusation in the world? Womens’ voices were stifled. Who spoke for them?
Okay. I am a feminist, and I think its right to believe women about rape. I think that largely because women (despite the legal and cultural victories by feminists in the 70’s and 80’s) still have damn little to gain by lying about rape in most instances and a lot to lose.
And I generally love you Ginmar. But it seems like you are arguing that women are incapable of lying about rape. This seems silly. Even sillier, it seems to me, is the argument that all false accusations of rape by white women against black men in the bad old days are somehow related to actual rapes by white men. What possible evidence is there for this?
I can think of more than one example in which white women–even in modern times– have demostrably falsely accused black men of various crimes. They had something to gain–namely that their otherwise unbelievable stories would take on a patina of common sense in a racist society. Remember the mom who murdered her children by driving them in to the lake, but claimed they were kindnapped? Case in point.
Generally, I think intellectually coherent feminsm has to accept that as we begin to win legally and culturally by creating penalties for rapists and restitution for victim, the downside for women reporting rape will decrease and the benefits increase. Hopefully as we take on racism in society the benefits of racially motivated false accusations decrease and the penalties increase.
Those social changes will have an impact on individual peoples behavior; giving women as a class greater social power meanst that some individual, unscrupulous women will have more power to cause trouble than they once did. other individual unscrupulous women will have less.
Does it all work out in the wash? That would be nice, but doubtful. The punchline? The possibility of false accusation does not undermine the goal creating a society that doesn’t toerate rape.
ginmar—
please, don’t try and educate me on “the myth of lynching.” i am well read, well studied and an excellent researcher–
what i said was that, yes people do understand that black men were lynched due to accusations of rape, but i give more people credit than you do. i think people are quite aware that men/women were lynched for a number of other reasons. i agreed with you, however, you decided to take it upon yourself to try and call me out. useless, actually.
and, i am not defending black women to say that white women lie–but i am also going to go as far as to say, women/men/people do lie about being raped.
lastly, i am not sure why you keep brining up cleaver with no context to back up his name with.
Curiousgirl, why is Susan Smith worth a hundred women who told the truth and weren’t believed? If a woman tells the truth about a nice white boy, nobody wants to believe her, no matter who she is. The difficulty of the burden is what matters. I notice nobody brings up the way white men lie and get believed because their lies are so very pleasant.
Blackacademic, if you want to bash the credibility of white women based on the words of men, you are not as well read as you think you are. Also, don’t patronize me. You dimiss wholesale hte idea that some black men might have raped some white women. This is bullshit. All kinds of men rape. It’s not giving people more credit. It’s being more naive. All kinds of men rape, no matter what their race. White men blame white women for the acts of white men. Everybody finds this far more palatable than the truth, which is when men are oppressed, they choose to oppress women. They regared women of other cultures and colors as the possessions of men. Calling white women liars basically gives ammo to anybody who wants to call this victim at Duke a liar. Congratulations.
And you don’t see the significance of Cleaver? Cleaver was a rapist who raped white women to get revenge on white men. This is an ancient idea that did not originate with him, with this century, with this skin color. Intellectuals of all stripes—and yet curiously, mostly one gender—-tripped all over themselves to accpet his justifications for raping women—-white women for revenge, black women for practice.
You want to discuss rape, and lies, don’t say that one group of women lies while another does not. It doesn’t work. Either most women lie, or most women don’t. Have you even read Against Our Will?
i don’t think a lot of people think that lynchings were done because of rape accusations. since, people were lynched for owning businesses or doing anything else that “threatened” white supremacy.
Are you nuts?
Try Birth of a Nation. The myth of the One Crime is woven into the fabric of gender relations in this country. Try To Kill a Mockingbird. There, you get the wonderful two-for-one of a sexually frustrated white girl being rejected by a noble black guy, so you get a false rape accusation wtih a scorned woman stereotype. Oh, wait, then there’s the stereotype that white women lie about black men, too. It’s a trifecta. So only white women lie about rape?
Or do men lie about women and what men do to them?
my mistake–i left out the word, only.
people don’t only think of lynchings as being associated with rape
and, my dear ginmar, i did not say that only white women lie about being raped.
No, but you did not exerise proper care in phrasing it. women lie or they don’t lie. You specified women lie. As it happens, men lie about women lying. Then other women back up men of their community.
Either all women are to be regarded as truth tellers—-in which case your claims of thinking well of all people are justified—-or some women are regarded as liars, in which case, your claim that you think well of people amounts to a claim of, “But some of my best friends are white!”
ginmar, it seems like you’re just waiting to call blac(k)ademic a racist against white people. do we need to even talk about how ridiculous this is?
i’m not seeing how you are getting this idea. but let me rephrase, some people lie. is that better?
but i guess this is no different that your previous posting where you said, “white men lied about rape” or “white men used white women to kill black women.” you didn’t properly phrase it as some white men lied, some white men used white women. but i guess, we can only generalize about white men here, as feminists, right?
it seems to me, that you are purposefully manipulating my words to make it seem that i am saying something that i am not and not acknowledging your generalized statements as well. (how in the hell you can glean the idea that my words are equated with “my best friends are white” is beyond me)
but this conversation is over. we can only agree to disagree.
and if you do not patronize me or resort to questioning my mental stability, then, i will be civil towards you as well.
Blacks, and especially black women, are invisible to this sort of person. So of course they think of Tawana Brawley, because they don’t know (and don’t care to know) any black women in real life as people, don’t see them as people, and prefer to remain totally ignorant of racist and sexist violence.
It’s a more pernicious version of the comfortable ignorance that leads white people to think George Washington Carver and Martin Luther King Jr. are the only blacks who ever did anything historically important.
What a weird and illustrative thread. I don’t agree with ginmar that women never lie about rape (altough I’d say false accusations are quite uncommon), but the willingness of people here to believe that women do make false accusations on basis of race is ridiculous. That is, white women falsely accuse black men of rape (I guess all black rapists in jail are innocent as well). The memetic entanglement of feminism and anti-racism means that talking about black men as rapists is wildly unpopular. Meaning that the focus is on white rapists. I don’t have reliable statistics on race/rape, but I’d guess that rapists exist among all races (not going into “which race rapes most here”) , and rape victims can be of any race.
I personally don’t understand why a woman who is raped would want to just have some man suffer instead of the rapist (as Odanu claimed, in #1 and #8) — that white, raped women would have a motive to accuse a black, innocent man of rape. Makes no sense — usually an accusation of rape involves identifying the perp, not just “I was raped, go kill just some man (whose killing is socially approved) in revenge”. A claim that women would have done this in large scale during lynchings sounds quite anti-feminist (=women getting innocent men killed/jailed). But since it is anti-racist (=blacks alway innocent victims of white supremacy) it flies under the radar. Weird.
Of course, the practice of lynching was horrible, but do people really fear that admitting that perhaps some of the black men who were lynched had actually committed a crime (other than being “uppity”) diminishes the injustice? I don’t know how many were guilty and how many innocent (I’d guess probably most were innocent in the modern sense) — but the claim that no black man had raped a white woman (which seems to be implied), or that most accusations were done just save some privileged white man sounds like wishful lefty revisionism (white patriarchy is always to blame).
re: to main post – I’ve been noticing that too. Some of the flamers have been on my blog (one guy tried to have a discussion with himself) and a bunch of others that i’ve read that cover the Duke case…
Dorktastic, read more carefully. I’m not going to dignify your statement with further response.
And BA? White men are the most powerful group in this country. They have all the power, property, and control. They are a monolith. They do not deserve qualification.
I’d qualify that, because just saying “white men are the most powerful group in this country” could give the false impression that class doesn’t matter. For that reason, I’d say “rich white men are the most….”
There are a bunch of other things that matter too – body type, ablebodied or not, queer or not, trans or not, etc – as well. Basically, think of all the classes that can never be a viable candidate for President.
I don’t assume that you’d disagree with any of this, Ginmar.
Why is it, that on every website/blog I see about the Duke alleged rape case, people keep bringing up Tawana Brawley?
Good question. Maybe it’s the company you’re keeping, because you are the first person I’ve seen bring it up. I’ve seen numerous posts on numerous threads on Free Republic (for those of you not familar with it, it’s one of the pre-eminent conservative web sites) and I haven’t seen a single reference there.
Odanu, many White men in this country could not fathom that a relationship between a White woman and Black man could be consentual, so they assumed that this was rape.
My guess would be that a lot of white men where lynchings were taking place didn’t give a damn if it was consensual or not. Black men who had sex with white women were to be killed, regardless of the circumstances.
Just to clarify–i dont think Susan Smith is a reason not to believe women come forward with rape accusations. I just think the idea that opressed people somehow *never* lie isnt very credible and is easily refuted.
Of course I’ll grant you that white lacrosse players get away with lying a lot more than the rest of us. My hunch is that the Duke lacrosse players are lying no, and even if they get away with it, they will be resentful for having to face any cahllenge at all to their right to do whatever they want to whomever they want.
But lets not confuse a political approach (I approach situations from the starting point of believing women whoe make rape accusations, becuase I think most women have little to gain from lying and a lot to lose from coming forward, and because I think the benefit of creating a society that condems rape outweighs the potential costs) with a logical argument (I always believe women who make rape accusations because women never lie).
ginmar, I am reading carefully, and most of what I see is you being unnecessarily rude and putting words in blac(k)ademic’s mouth. What I don’t see is
I also don’t see how comments like
can be read differently.
Dorktastic, that’s your opinion. BA is dispelling the ghost of Tawana Brawley by bringing up white women, not white men.
I simply don’t assume that women lie. But no one is factoring in what happens far more commonly: when women tell the truth, they get accused of lying. And when someone singles out a group of women and says they lied and caused deaths of men, when they had almost no power at all at the time, I don’t see what other response there is but anger. The Emmitt Till case is typical. Till was killed by two white men. They found out about him not from the woman in the case, but from one of his own relatives. Why are we discussing a black boy who was murdered by white men in the context of women lying? Women had nothing to do with his death.
Ampersand, when I think of white men, I think of Congress, fundies, all these able-bodied white guys who send poor people of color off to fight wars, who try and take away women’s rights. If I were going to talk about the disabled and so forth, I would be specific. I find that when discussions about lying women get going, all classes of men have the same issues with women. Being sexist makes them feel like men, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got.
… you are the first person I’ve seen bring it up.
RonF,
It happened here on this very blog. Go back and look through the Duke rape threads. I criticised somebody for bringing it up here at Alas within the last couple of weeks.
In fact, look at the “Duke Rape Case Round-Up” – comment # 88 made on the fifth of April for the example that I mentioned a comment ago.
>
This is a fair point, but it seems like things got overheated before we got there. I think there are some possibly good arguments against this point, but I’m not sure I could formulate them at the moment, except to say:
Gin, I agree with you that the lynching of black me was not primarily for the benefit of white women as opposed to white men. But it would be a mistake to think that white women don’t benefit from being white, a a condition created through such violent acts and a host of others.
Oh, I think that what resulted from the lynchings in the south was not benefit to women, though. Whiteness results in privilege in other circumstances, but the Southern lynching phenominon, in the long run, resulted in more damage than benefit. It fits too well with the other stereotypes about women, all women: scorned woman, lying slut, vengeful whore, and so forth.
Wehn I go shopping, I have to be dressed very very badly to get the hairy eyeball. Meanwhile, I have some friends who can dress up like they’re going to church and practically get thrown out of the store. So I know white privilege exists. However, there’s some ways that white privilege for women gets temporarily nullified—and that’s through the reduction of a white woman to the status of a mythical female stereotype. Male privilege versus white privilege in a woman? That’s an interesting discussion. I think being female makes such privilege far more fragile than male white privilege. We don’t have any truly hateful stereotypes of men that equal in viciousness the ones we have of women, which blame us for everything, doubly so if the women being blamed are of color.
I need more caffeine before I try and articulate this. I just watched a documentary about Emmett Till, and I was just kind of amazed about how the white guys who killed him got short shrift. They killed him. End of subject. He was a fourteen-year-old kid. It’s like white guys are invisible, and it ain’t because they’re so pale they’re transparent.
Yes. And to the person who said, this post is nuts, I beg to differ. I believe that Ida B. Wells-Barnett took up fighting against lynching in part because three male friends
Blac(k)ademic, I think people are comparing this case to that of Tawana Brawley because of the prominant use of the race card. Only the most inveterate racists would hold that all black women lie about rape, and I hardly think the media are that kind of inveterate racists.
The real issue here is people using this case to wax lyrical about race relations, especially by trying to evoke greater sympathy for the alleged victim because she is a minority and the alleged perpetrators were white. Do you agree that the alleged victim should receive no greater or less sympathy because she is from a minority group? But while her race should be an insignificant detail in our consideration of the case, many people have been beating this up as a racial issue. This is comparable to the Brawley case, which backfired completely because her allegations were unfounded.
The frequent comparisons to the Brawley case are a reminder of how people were duped into believing a case that ultimately had no credibility because they thought the victim desevered extra sympathy, and a warning to avoid repeating it. At the very least, you should pay attention to the lessons of the Brawley case and learn that if you want to use a case as an illustration of racism, wait until the facts of the case are settled first. The facts of the Duke case are far from settled.
Ay, let me try this again!
Yes. And to the person who said, this post is nuts, I beg to differ. I believe that Ida B. Wells-Barnett took up fighting against lynching in part because three male friends of hers owned a successful business which angered the White business owners to the point where they lynched them. This was hardly an isolated incident. In fact, entire towns populated mostly or entirely of Black people were burned to the ground by rioting Whites who felt ecomically and politically threatened by them.
White women may have been less privilaged than White men, but they had much more privilage b/c they were White than Black men or women did or do today. They weren’t all crying falsely about rape, in fact many of them were active in the anti-lynching campaign but White women did participate in that terrorism, because they were White(even if they were female and facing sexism within the race). They were posing in photos of lynched Black men beaming from ear to ear along with the men(and the children). It is very hard to see them as oppressed victims in all this, and to me, it appears more that this argument is a denial of the racial privilage that they enjoyed, often at the expense, torture, rape and death of Black men and women.
To deny that, in order to say, hey I’m all for women no matter what their race is, is to slap Black women in the face by denying them their right to criticize White women for their complicity in the racist actions taken by White men and women. It’s to deny them their histories under a racist and sexist society which continues today as well.
That’s too high of a price to pay in my opinion to feel comfortable as a White woman oppressed by the male gender.
Do you agree that the alleged victim should receive no greater or less sympathy because she is from a minority group?
It seems to me that, in order for the rest of your post to follow, you expect this to be a “yes.”
The problem with this argument – which one sees frequently when discussing “hate” crimes or other crimes which are racialized, sexualized, etc. – is that it presumes that people, for instance the people on this blog, are reacting to the individual rather than the larger political and social trends that the individual symbollizes.
So, yes — any victim gang-raped probably deserves, on a personal level, equal sympathy.
However, if dehumanization because of race makes it easier to gang rape women of certain ethnicities – they need more protection to counterbalance that.
I suspect that your reading of this case would indicate that if Mary Doe had been a white woman (and I’m choosing to keep this on a wihte/black dichotomy, since that binary opposition informs most American thought on race) events would have proceded exactly as they did. This is not necessarily true. In fact, I’d say it almost certainly isn’t true. We *know* race was a factor in the anger toward this woman – who was at least brutalized. Lynching threats and references to slavery can not be hurled against a white woman with the same vehemence and injury. Therefore, this case is racialized overtly, even more than it is racialized on the subtler level that most events in this country are racialized.
Equal opportunity isn’t something inherent; it’s something we have to build.
Yes. If you are with a man of a different race especially if you are married to or in a relationship with him, and/or you are with your kids, if they are biracial, for example.
If you are alone, you “pass” for White, in a way you don’t when you are with them if that makes sense.
Jake, I didn’t see it, but then I haven’t read all the Duke rape threads on here. I’ve tended not to read threads I’m not allowed to comment in.
Ugh. I haven’t read this whole thread, and I apologize if I have missed something critical, but I have to say this before my blood pressure goes sky high. White men lynched black men and their EXCUSE — their *excuse* — was that black men had raped or assaulted white women.
One of the most inspiring stories of American history is the story of Ida B. Wells and Jesse Daniel Ames and the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Ida B. Wells and other black woman leaders of the early 1900s, enraged and horrified by the ongoing lynchings of black men and unable to stop them, approached Jesse Daniel Ames and a few other white women and said the rough equivalent of, “So what are you going to do about white men? White men are lynching black men. What are you going to do about it?”
Jesse Daniel Ames then created the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. They went from city to city visiting sheriffs, pastors, and local white male leaders demanding that the lynchings end. When a lynching was scheduled, they showed up, confronted those in charge and demanded that the lynching be abandoned. They were tireless, going from city to city, disseminating information, and especially, insisting that white men admit that black men were NOT raping white women, that they were making this shit up, that it wasn’t white women who were claiming to be raped, it was white MEN lying their fucking asses off, in part as a show of ownership of white women, in part to intimidate black men who threatened them economically and in other ways.
The campaign was so successful that by the late 1920s, if I’m not mistaken, the number of lynchings was down to something like 1 or 2.
This is an AMAZING story that is rarely told. I wrote an article about it that was published and will try to link to it when I get home. But if you google “Jesse Daniel Ames,” “Ida B. Wells,” and the “Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching”, you can learn about this time in history. (My apologies for those who already know or if someone already mentioned this– I didn’t have time to read each post.)
Heart
“In 1924 Ames became the director of the Texas branch of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), and she was promoted to the position of director of the CIC Women’s Committee at the organization’s headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929. In 1930 Ames founded the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL).
“She challenged the notion that white women needed protection from African-American men. She pointed out that alleged rapes of white women by African-American men, the supposed rationale for a lynching, seldom occurred and that the true motive for lynching was rooted in racial hatred.
“Ames was successful in rallying the support of thousands of women and hundreds of public officials for her anti-lynching campaign. She recruited white Southern women to go out into the community and persuade law enforcement officials — mainly sheriffs and judges — to sign a pledge that they would do everything in their power to protect their prisoners from being lynched. The pledge read in part: “We declare lynching an indefensible crime, destructive of all principles of government, hostile to every ideal of religion and humanity, degrading and debasing to every person involved. We pledge ourselves to crate a new public opinion in the South which will not condone for any reason whatever acts of the mob or lynchers.”
“In addition to law enforcement officials, ASWPL members recruited local churches, social clubs, and politicians to sign pledges condemning lynching. They held lectures, published anti-lynching pamphlets, and gave talks at colleges and fraternal organizations. As Ames recounts, the women of the ASWPL persisted in their campaign even though they encountered resistance. “Women went into communities where there had been a lynching. Many of the people were surly, belligerent. Women were by no means safe. They knew of the constant dangers and didn’t forget to pray. Many were threatened. I know women who wouldn’t tell their husbands the threat because they feared their families would make them quit work.” In 1940 no lynchings of African Americans were recorded, a first since the end of the Civil War. ”
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_people_ames.html
I apologize for my error up there, there were no lynchings by 1940.
It’s so disturbing. White men lynch black men with the excuse that black men rape white women, and that gets morphed around to be that white women were lying about rape. Black women leaders approach white women and say, “Hey, how about you deal with your men?” And white women say, “damn straight, you are right,” and they do it, and that gets forgotten. When someone writes about Jesse Daniel Ames and her movement, people accuse her and the movement she started (ASWPL) of not including black women or black people, or they say Ida B. Wells is being forgotten, what is not said is, Ames’ work was something Wells and other black women urged them to do.
And in all of that, people begin to forget that it was white men who lynched black men, who had the power to do it, the means to do it. And that they never stopped on their own, it took a campaign of white women and black women working together to stop it, as one title I read describes it, “Divided by Race, United by Gender.” HELL yeah. It is in the best interests of white men to get the attention elsewhere, anywhere but where it belongs, right on them.
Heart
RonF:
You’re allowed to comment in that thread.
Radfem, you didn’t read carefully. People blame lynchings on rape accusations. In fact, as the report I cited indicated, this was not the most common excuse for lynchings, and white men pulled all the strings. Nowadays, however, the belief that black men died solely as a result of lying white women is common—-and sexist. Nor did I declare that white women were guiltless. There are photographs of white women grinning at lynching victims and hissing and spitting at the children who integrated schools. The fact is, though, that they were women. If they couldn’t be used they were usless. They were just as much property then as we are now.
As for whtie privilege being nullified, I dare you to feel privileged when a guy who’s six foot four and outweighs you by two hundred pounds mugs you. If the guy’s bigger it doesn’t matter how much privilege you have. It’s not going to stop you from getting your skull cracked and your teeth knocked out. It’s not even going to get you any sympathy. If you’re poor and white, you deserve it for living in a dangerous neighborhood—–that wasn’t dangerous till then.
If we’re going to talk about lynching, then we need to talk about everything about it—-including, as Heart mentioned, the women who tried to stop it, and who strangely enough do not get mentioned enough. They were opposing men in their own communities, men whom they knew and who knew where they lived.
Actually, I think I did read carefully. I never said that lynchings were based on rape accusations. I just responded to your assertion that someone was “nuts” for posting that they were also done for economic reasons and to reinforce White Supremacy in the economic, political and social institutions. BA said that and I agree with her statement.
I’m aware of “Birth of a Nation”. It premiered in the early 1900s just down the street from me. “To Kill A Mockingbird”, great book. But these are fictional accounts written and produced by Whites, one to perpetuate racism through terrorist violence, the other to challenge its practice.
I also referred to the White women who worked against lynching, before Heart did, though I thank her for her interesting and informative posts on the topic. That said, it doesn’t mean that all White women participated in these efforts and some people here are giving that reality shortshift in their posts. No one has addressed the issue that White women also were present at lynchings and afterwards posed in pictures with the bodies. Some people fight against racist oppression. Others do nothing while it goes on around them. White women are no exception to that. But mention that in feminism, and it’s treated like it’s a huge offense, b/c all women including those who are in oppressor/oppressed dynamics are supposed to spend all our time bonding over our shared oppression as “women”. There are reasons why women of color give White feminists a wide berth.
Disregarding White women’s participation in racism particularly its terrorist acts while saying that they do it out of being victims and not in part as oppressors might be one of them. It’s certainly one I run into often in RL and online discussions. Emphasizing the heroism and ignoring the racist behavior is just as dishonest as vice versa when talking about lynching as well as other situations.
I’ve lived through two attempted assaults, four muggings and numerous death threats, even before I entered my current line of work. In large part, because I lived in a neighborhood that was predominantly Black and Latino, and members of those racial groups made up the majority of the victims as well. Many have lost children, and other loved ones and have been victims of violent crime. Sometimes, a Latino or Black person can’t even leave the house without being targetted for violence by a gang b/c of their race. A White person in that same neighborhood, even a White woman can walk around much more freely.
I’ve learned that give a man a gun, and he can be 5’8 and 150# and still be dangerous. You seem to be under the impression that I don’t know what sexism and the cost it takes from women is all about. I do, but I know that it’s one oppression compared to many women, who have two or three. That and my experiences dealing with “approximizing” racism and other things has given me perspective on that issue. Even a man can be more oppressed in certain circumstances than I am. White women don’t dominate our prisons, for one thing, nor are we hassled by cops FTMP unless we are with men of color(as I have found). Our mothers don’t sit up late at night praying we weren’t pulled over by a cop for some busted tail light on a car that’s the same color of one reported stolen.
Still, I live in fear most of the time and it isn’t from the hypothetical(and sometimes very real) 6’4 and 250# men, it’s from people my taxes pay to protect and serve me who hate me not because I’m a woman but because I’m a race traitor.
A little over the top – but hey, this is a feminist blog.
Interestingly, the construct of human brains ensures that our society will always be full of liars of both sexes.
Jerome Burne provides a comprehensive report on the social aspects and various methods used to lie in his article: Born Liars
Without directly calling any woman a liar, I’ll note that Jerome suggests women are better liars than men.
In this case, I wish people would stop even bringing up the TB case.
At this point, the only people who we know for sure are liars are all the lawyers.
Mandolin:
The point I was trying to make is that if people prematurely make this case about the larger political and social trends that the individual symbollizes and not the individual itself, then you risk having your points undermined if the actual case doesn’t turn out the way you hoped.
If the Brawley case made black womens’ accusations of rape less credible, then this was strongly exacerbated by people who used the Brawley case as being symbolic for black/white race relations as a whole, because Brawley’s lack of crediblity was then reflected on an entire race by that use of symbolism.
I think we should be discussing the relationship between the Brawley case and the Duke case more, not less, because I think there are lessons to be taken from the Brawley case that will avoid repeating it in the future.
As for whtie privilege being nullified, I dare you to feel privileged when a guy who’s six foot four and outweighs you by two hundred pounds mugs you. If the guy’s bigger it doesn’t matter how much privilege you have. It’s not going to stop you from getting your skull cracked and your teeth knocked out. It’s not even going to get you any sympathy. If you’re poor and white, you deserve it for living in a dangerous neighborhood…”“that wasn’t dangerous till then.
If policemen are likely to believe you over the guy after the assault occurs because you’re a white woman and he’s a man of color, if the law is more likely to believe you than a woman or even a man of color who has been similarly assaulted, if your attacker is more likely to be tried and sent to jail than a person of color’s attacker–then yes, you are privileged.
exactly, lanoire.
um, this statement bugs me. i lived in predominately black/latino neighborhoods my whole life, i never got attacked, mugged or shot. you are implying that all brown neighborhood are dangerous–bullshit
If policemen are likely to believe you over the guy after the assault occurs because you’re a white woman and he’s a man of color, if the law is more likely to believe you than a woman or even a man of color who has been similarly assaulted, if your attacker is more likely to be tried and sent to jail than a person of color’s attacker”“then yes, you are privileged.
Yeah, maybe it was the fact he just got out of prison for mugging and literally left a trail of my blood to his door that did it.
Sorry, but the reason I brought up Eldredge Cleaver is this: how privileged are you when men of color regard you as either somebody else’s possession, or a possession they can stomp on to rectify what privileged men have done? Nobody wants to touch that one, because it’s typical male behavior. White guys have done it to black women for centuries. Cleaver explicitly acted upon it. Conservatives believe in it.
Is Brawley the real problem here? Or is the way that case was handled, followed by other cases? Mike Tyson raped not a white woman, but a black one—and he got the community support, not the victim, who received death threats—from her own community. OJ Simpson was a wife beater, yet what was the issue at trial? His race, not his sexism. Sometimes a man is just a man, and acts like other man, and treats women like other men do—-horribly. For me, the issue remains women first. If men attack them for being women, then I don’t care what color the man is. How come the only time the property crime aspects of rape become apparent is when the color line gets crossed?
You’re right – in that particular situation white privilege isn’t a comfort for someone getting mugged. But all of life is not that particular situation. (And I’m sorry you got mugged, by the way.)
This doesn’t seem to be a different argument than the MRAs who argue that male privilege doesn’t matter because some guy they know got beaten up by a woman. Yes, as she’s beating the crap out of him, in that single specific moment, his privilege isn’t helping him. But that doesn’t mean that his male privilege hasn’t helped him in a lot of other situations in his life.
Finally, almost no one “feels” privileged. Most white men don’t feel privileged. It doesn’t mean they’re not.
The fact has been brought up that people who cry Tawana Brawley don’t know any black people in real life. There has been alot more media coverage of the defense lawyers and their thoughts and plans but you have to go to blogs or less publicized articles of the accuser’s thoughts, more specifically, her family’s and co-worker’s. What you see is a different picture. Her family said she is the youngest of three, the baby of the family, quiet, smart, a good student who does not bring attention to her self.
Her family said when she found out her report to the police made the news, she started crying. She did not want it to make the news and only wanted to go on with her life. What people don’t read is how it was reported to the police. At the convenience store, she got the manager to call 911 to report racial slurs. When the police came and talked to her about the racial taunting, it came out that she was raped. This is not someone seeking attention or money although that can’t be said about the second dancer. People who are raped usually do not report it to the police out of the correct fear that the repercussions are much worse.
The bigger news outlets don’t cover her side. Only local news outlets like the following cover her side’s thoughts.
Ex-Husband Says Accuser Would Not Make Rape Story Up
http://www.nbc17.com/news/8655830/detail.html
Well, I’m talking about mine, not all neighborhoods that are Black and/or Latino. My intention was not to generalize. If I did so, I apologize. It’s both peaceful and dangerous if that makes sense. Twenty shootings including young children in their yards in six weeks isn’t one of its more peaceful times. A lot of car washes that summer-that’s how funerals and burials are paid for. It’s hard to deny that side of it in these circumstances. But to examine why it happens this way, is to look not so much at who populates it(except by race and economic class), but how society reacts to them, treats them and values them as a whole. It does not do this and most of its members don’t either, and both show in many different ways how they don’t daily, and the violence that often grips this community is born out of that apathy, animosity, bigotry and indifference over days stretching into years and decades.
My city has many different neighborhoods. Some wealthy, some poor, some middle-class. Although the leadership hypes the multiculturalness and diversity of our city, it’s still as segregated as it was when racist housing laws created enclaves for Black and Latino residents in the late 1800s through the mid-1960s. There are three neighborhoods populated by people of color. Two predominantly Latino neighborhoods(one fairly old, the other created by annexations in the 1970s) and a old neighborhood that was originally mostly African-American and was when I lived there, but in the past three or four years has become mostly Latino(split almost in half between multi-generations and newer immigrants from Mexico and Central America). Middle Class African Americans either move out of the city(mostly because they can financially, and b/c it’s a pretty racist city so they want to move) or they move to my new neighborhood, to the west. Many go back to family in the South. Middle class Latinos go to cities in the eastern part of the county or another county.
Whites live mostly downtown(pushing out poor Whites and pockets of Black and Lation residents through gentrification), in the “special”(as a White councilman calls them to defend against homeless shelters being put there) neighborhoods in the middle, the West and part of the South East, which is the new fast-growing “White Flight” area for city residents and people from Orange County. As that area becomes more racially and ethnically diverse itself, White residents either sell or rent out their houses and move south to “white flight” cities in the Southern county or San Diego County. This neighborhood made national news when Whites threw a temper tantrum over the naming of the new school. What did they want to call it? Martin Luther King, jr. High School.
MLK, jr. naming causes protest.
White Supremacism gangs abound there who target immigrants in other neighborhoods for beatings, knowing they won’t report them to the police, are called “groups” by the police. That’s not when their own numbers are increasing in response to the diversifying of their area. You know “groups”, as opposed to the term “gangs” being used for both actual Black and Latino gangs as well as more than two members of those racial groups in the same location, same time. That’s a whole separate topic that could be its own thread, that racial double standard
My old neighborhood has both peaceful moments, interspersed with violence. It buried four black teens, all aged 13, in one six-month period. They did not all die there, but they all died because they lived there. Three were killed by Latino gang members, the other(a relative of a friend of mine) was killed because a Black gang thought he was Latino. All came from very poor or slightly better off working class families. One died on his porch. His death was retaliated for, by the shooting of a four year old Latino kid, four blocks to the north. Back and forth these things go, until both factions often forget how it all started or who started it. Not all years are like this, it’s almost cyclical when it is at its worst. You can tell when a hard summer is coming by tension in the high schools and 187 graffiti and crossouts appearing mostly on buildings abandoned b/c of the neglect by city services in the neighborhood, This summer’s going to be a bad one, unfortunately. As usual, it won’t be unless it’s a tourist or someone from outside the neighborhood that gets killed(even the death of a kid within the neighborhood doesn’t move people anymore) before it gets any attention from anyone outside the neighborhood.
The violence that comes in waves has sparked at least in this neighborhood a movement to address both it and the economic and social issues that create and feed it. To create more jobs, more tutoring programs, more vocational training, more recreation opportunities. More city services(besides cops) that other neighborhoods don’t have to beg for, like street cleaning and consistant garbage collection. Discussion groups between Black and Latino kids, in and outside the schools. But a lot of these things take money, some times serious money and when you are limited in income, or fighting to earn enough so your family can survive and feeling emotionally stressed by everything that’s going on around you, that makes it tough sometimes. The city promises its support, but so far it hasn’t meant it.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. The mayor, city council member and other politicians are always at the candle light vigils held at the spot where some kid, grandfather or even a Nigerian citizen who came to buy gas and was shot within five minutes, and is still in a coma some place with a bullet permanently lodged in his brain. But beyond that, they don’t really care. They’ll break into a rash if a White neighborhood looks bad in the media b/c some racist skinhead “group” has stabbed someone, more than they care about what goes on in this neighborhood. But when there’s violence in this community, they do the photo ops, drop the sound bytes and then talk about everything that needs to be done, and then the culmination of all this effort winds up being another multicultural festival that isn’t even held in the community. Most of the people have usually left by the time the doves get released.
The police response initially was a containment policy. Let the violence go on, clean up the bodies and do whatever was necessary to keep it from spreading to other(White, affluent) neighborhoods. If it spilled over or threatened to do so, then occupation(complete with mobilized SWAT units) and suppression tactics were used in the neighborhood. Then a Black woman was shot to death 12 times over by cops while she was unconscious in a car and changes were forced on the department as a result. Now, they work more within the neighborhoods, but in a way that seems more schitzophrenic than anything else, as if they are trying to merge what they have learned, with what was supposed to be rejected in return. So there are still problems with racial profiling, gang profiling and lots of tension between the community and police(especially after the recent shooting of an unarmed Black man). Lots of police issues.
There are lots of homeless in the neighborhood, but not native to it. Most of the homeless in the city congregate either in its more rural south or downtown, near the bus station and parks. However, my neighborhood had both homeless shelters, plus a new shelter for women(and it should have been near the men’s for families to have some proximity in a situation where there’s gender segregation practiced). There was a day services shelter in the northern part of town, but that area became developed for office and warehouse space, which caused property values to go up. This shelter was not able to pay its lease so it moved to a church in one of the “special” neighborhoods, which brought on an onslaught of NIMBYism. There was a decision to move it either in my old neighborhood or to build it within one mile of the “special” neighborhood. Guess who got the shelter? My neighborhood, and the advisory committee which made the decision did not include one single resident. Typical, another win for the NIMBYism of White liberals. NOT IN MY BACKYARD(but yours will do just fine so I can sleep at night a good Christian)
If they stay downtown, they are policed hard. Some have been beaten, mostly Black homeless people. Even within the economically based populations, there are heirarchies for how different subgroups are treated. Race is one of them, imo.
Then there is all the parolees that wind up in the neighborhood because they are often dropped off there(so are mentally ill homeless people) or come in on the bus. My city, b/c it’s the justice center and the county seat, gets more than its share, and my neighborhood doubly so. There are more registered sex offenders in this neighborhood than any other, few of them are probably really locals. There are few programs to address the needs of these populations, and geared at reducing the recividism rates of parolees. It’s very difficult to rebuild your life after prison, even when you really want to do so. If there are no resources out there, it doesn’t often get done.
You don’t find lots of registered sex offenders, parolees, or homeless people in predominantly White middle-class or more affluent neighborhoods. Why is that? Because they have the economic and political clout to raise a real stink if that were to happen. I’m of the thought that all city residents should share in the responbilities for addressing the needs of these populations, not just the poor ones.
I loved my neighborhood because there were a lot of good people, families. I moved b/c my corner was gentrifed first and rents went sky-high to accomodate the mostly White and Asian-American student population of a university exploding in size. But it hurt a lot of people to see their kids joining up with gangs b/c there were no programs in parks, like in the wealthier neighborhoods, or no public pools, no community centers open for more than a few hours to hang out, few local community-owned businesses. In other businesses, why shop there when you are followed around the store or called a “n—–r” to your face? Another way to be viewed as criminal in your own neighborhood.
A lot of us worked together, in little pockets but then in larger groups. The death threats I received were because I and other residents didn’t want drug dealers hanging out where mothers lived and kids played. One ticked off drug dealer showed up one night and shot an entire family eating dinner, who had left a door open so the breeze could cool them. Not even the intended target.
The reason I reponded to ginmar like I did was because there’s this assumption that only your gender restricts your movement in society because of fear of violent crime, but for many Black and Latino women in my neighborhood, they understand that it’s their neighborhoods where they might face violence, inside their homes and out of it. As the gangs have moved on from shooting people who are in other gangs to just shooting people on the basis of race(why this is, is complex, but partly on how overzealous policing and incarcerating tactics have created a prison culture that dictates what goes on outside as well), some of them during the worst of the shootings don’t want to leave their homes.
My best friend still live there, still fights the fight. We were on the phone the other day, and I told her I had walked around my block when I got home from a meeting we had attended. It had been late at night, and she said, she wished she could have done it, take a walk around her block. But there had been a young man shot to death in an alley a block away the previous night and she and her kids were staying home. (Irony, of ironies, her new rental used to be a meth house, which means that given that meth houses have to be professionally detoxified to be safe to live in again, she’s probably in a way in as much danger at home)
The saddest thing is that gangs only exist to fill the vaccuum that exists in many young people’s lives, which I’ve learned through talking to people who left gangs or kids about to make that choice whether to enter them(which can happen as young as eight). Either because their parents work two jobs apiece to keep food on the table, or their parents are in prison themselves(and thus they are left with guardians, some times those who are too elderly to take care of them). Abuse, both physical and emotional, plays a role as well. I think a lot of it begins as a search for love and acceptance, a sense of belonging, which all people need. In White neighborhoods, you have Scouts, Brownies, little league, recreational teams, summer schools, libraries, after-school programs, musical choirs, etc. for children who live there to access. There is more access to counseling programs, drug programs including rehab for parents of White kids in more affluent neighborhoods to send their kids. My friend works on all these issues and she works with the gang members, helping them get into the only gang intervention program my city has(which has effectively just been defanged through the latest “restructuring”).
Gentrification which will wipe out my old neighborhood in probably a decade or two, replacing its residents with White middle-class university students and young professionals is already in its earliest stages and just adds to the stress by pressing more of the neighborhood’s current residents even closer together including gangs(whose turf is being defined by outside factors). That has worsened problems with violent crime in the streets. Maybe it’s worsened it inside the homes because of the stress, or PTSD which many residents I know probably have. My friend, whom I mentioned here, was diagnosed with it several years ago. Gentrification makes me think, why is it that it’s only Whites who deserve cleaner streets, public services, safer parks and access to both affordable and a variety of shopping choices? Why are Black and Latino neighborhoods neglected and often left to die slowly(often in the interest of lowering property values so the city can pick them up cheaply to resell to developers) at least in some urban areas in this country?
Eminant domain(even though the city has promised it wouldn’t use it against property ownes) will carve up my neighborhood even further. The school district is taking a lot of homes away from families who have owned them for years, partly to build a new elementary school(because the only one in the neighborhood is so overcrowded, trailers of classrooms sit where the playground used to be). It will also be used to widen several streets to accomodate increased vehicle traffic caused by a new housing project of $375,000 houses squashed together which will house mostly White families. They get less traffic. Some of the residents of my neighborhood get a check for much less than what their house is worth and will guarantee that they will wind up moving to an even more poorer area outside the city.
White women and/or women who are more affluent don’t face that in the same way. But even in their own neighborhoods, White women are safer than men or women of color would be to move through them. If you are a person of color going through a predominantly White neighborhood, the police will pull you over and harass you, telling you that you don’t look like you “belong” there. You might even die there. I had a boyfriend who was Latino and he was practically ran out of his neighborhood(predominatly White) by the police always stopping him or interrogating him any time anyone reported any crime at all in that area. How would you like it if you were running one minute, then handcuffed and in a police car the next to be paraded in front of some White woman who had her purse stolen?
In my old neighborhood, even as a victim of crime myself, as a White woman, I would still be safer than a woman of color. In fact at meetings to address the gang violence, many men and women of color especially African-Americans walked to their cars with White people, because they knew they were safer. No gang member is ever going to shoot a White person because if they shoot a person of color, one to four gang members(or innocent members of the same race in their stead due to racial profiling of individuals and neighborhoods) may go to prison. If a gang member(s)shoot or kill a White person, the entire gang will be put out of existance(as happened when a White man was shot outside the neighborhood).
So in my case, I lived in a neighborhood that could be very, very dangerous, but that was not the only quality that defines it. And even when it is dangerous, the real issue of “why” is so complicated and yet simple and needs to be examined as parcel of why bad things occur there. I’m sorry this post is long, but it’s a long-drawn out explanation to your question. For me, that is the best way to answer it.
Wow, Radfem, great post.
Yeah, maybe it was the fact he just got out of prison for mugging and literally left a trail of my blood to his door that did it.
The thing is, if you were a woman or even a man of color, that might not have done it. He would definitely have been more likely to walk free if you were a woman of color, and probably if you were a man of color as well (depending on the police, the neighborhood and your socioeconomic status).
For me, the issue remains women first.
And maybe I’m a cynic, but the way I see this working out in practice is “white women first,” or even “white people first.” Unless you take into account the complexity of the interactions of various oppressions, I don’t see how justice can be served. As a woman of color I bristle when white radical feminists tell me that my gender hurts me more than my race, just like I bristle when my brother tells me my race hurts more than my gender. Either way, something is being overlooked.
Lanoire, the way you see it in practice is not the way I practice it or feel it.
Amp, the difference between myself and white guys is, well, they’re guys. I faced male detectives, male cops, male doctors—including one who decided that I wasn’t worth fixing up—–and needless, to say, that male assailant. That white privilege doesn’t matter when you’re a woman and you’re facing a guy—-at least, if you’re not a perfect white girl. Anybody here want to claim that, because I sure as hell can’t. What people miss about privilege is that for women the ones that get it often have to jump for it on top of that pedestal. I have more privilege than other women, sure. But how come the nobody is using the word ‘lynching’ and ‘crucifiction’ to describe the way t his victim is being treated? Or Mike Tyson’s victim? Or OJ Simpson’s? The men came first, same as here. Racism is just a cover for the same old sexism. It’s easier to see when it’s cross races, but that doesn’t mean it’s different.
The awarding winning book Without Sanctuary notes that the most common motive lynchers gave for lynchings were accusations of murder. I believe rape allegations and general “attacks on White womanhood” were the second most common.
I don’t think that it was unprecedented for White women to make false and exaggerated claims about attacks by Black men. There is a story in the book about a White women who had a Black men stop by her home to ask for help. She thought he was there to attack her and later told someone (I’m assuming a White guy.), and they ultimately lynched him. I don’t know that she directly made a rape allegation, but she thought he was going to hurt her. Did the White men goad her into this? I don’t know. Did they threaten her? I don’t know, but she was instrumental in the process that lead up to the lynching even if she did not directly engage in the act.
I don’t think that White women’s lower position in the gender hierarchy negates their active participation in racist rituals. We (White women) are not completely without agency.
Lanoire, the way you see it in practice is not the way I practice it or feel it.
I believe you. But that’s the result I see your philosophy having, whether you mean it to or not.
That white privilege doesn’t matter when you’re a woman and you’re facing a guy…-at least, if you’re not a perfect white girl.
Huh? Are you saying you get the same treatment as a black woman would? Or a black man? You get worse treatment than a white man, yes, but you are almost always privileged in relation to a black woman and sometimes in relation to a black man.
Also, Tyson and Simpson are rich black celebrities. Using them as an example of how black men are treated is a lot like using Oprah Winfrey as an example of how black women are treated.
definitely, in my opinion. There were women of color in my neighborhood who would try to report crimes against them or get reports filed and the police officer would look at them and tell them no crime occurred.
For example, they were told this in cases involving rape or sexual assault including those where they had lost consciousness even though they had only a small amount of alcohol. Meaning that a date rape drug could be involved and the window for it to show up in a test is not a very large one before it’s gone forever. That is also true for other physical evidence that a crime occurred which is often needed to build a criminal case. So even if their reports were ever taken, but only later, important evidence might be lost that could help them. Not only were their experiences denied but so was a lot of their opportunity to get justice. So there’s not much incentive to report crimes to the police.
But I think that police officers are often really great at labeling people of color as criminals(i.e. “Black crack dealers” and “Hispanic gangsters” ) and never as victims. Or even if they are victims, they are not blameless victims.
Law enforcement and the criminal justice system do not treat women who are victims of crime equally. Both are heavily steeped in racism, which interfers with their ability to do this. I need to be reminded of this, one thing I can do is read the comments in my blog.
But then again, you could be a White woman with a gun sleeping inside your car and the assumption would be that the gun was to protect you, whereas if you are a Black woman, that would make you a criminal. One example of the latter, was in need of medical assistance and got 12 bullets(out of 24 fired) instead, all to the back of her head and her body. Where were the major feminist organizations when this was going on? Or when a Black woman was shot by police in her car b/c she was holding a cell phone?
If it’s not happening to a White woman, sometimes I think they just don’t care.
I agree.
Exactly. Take Simpson. If he had not been a wealthy celebrity embraced by Whites, he had been eligiable for the death penalty, because the most common circumstance for deciding to impose it is in cases where the victim is White and the defendent is not.
If Simpson had been poor, he’d have been eligiable for the death penalty and instead of the “dream team”, he’d have probably gotten an overworked, overstressed, underpaid public defender. I’ve met some of the “team” and they were formidable on their own. Together, once they gave some egos a rest, they made a huge difference. Not every lawyer wants to challenge the LAPD’s record against African-Americans in open court and their decision to challenge the department’s investigation(and its lead detective, racist and sexist Mark Furhman) was what won them the case.
But don’t believers in class/race/gender analysis use the fact (for example) that every U.S president has been a white male as an evidence of white male privilege? Rich white men like Bush are used all the time as de facto evidence of white, male privilege. Shouldn’t the opposite be allowed too, then?
While I believe both being a black and being a woman generally make things more difficult in the US (at least from what I’ve gathered), is Oprah (a Black, rich woman, 2/3 unprivileged) for example, more or less privileged than a poor white man (1/3 unprivileged)? I’d say definitely not.
How can these oppressions ever be precisely measured? And if they can not be measured, what evidence is there of their existence? I mean, they work as a way to make people think about things like race and gender, but I am troubled by the dogmatic nature of the language of class privilege and oppression, and the overuse of terms like “racist” and “sexist”.
A specific counterexample, regarding Oprah, was an incident several months back when she showed up at her favorite French boutique at closing time. For whatever reason, someone didn’t recognize her, and the door was essentially shut in her face. Oprah’s power and money (both of which she earned) do a great deal to mitigate the oppression she would otherwise feel, but keep in mind that this is a woman who was raped at least twice that she admits to publicly, and also suffered from a crack addiction in her early twenties — all before power and money (due to talent and energy) mitigated the oppressions of color and gender.
The “measurement” of oppressions and privilege is always very difficult and complex. It is also situational. When one says that white men are privileged, it is a generalization (or shorthand) for “white men, in most situations in western society, have privileges due solely to race and gender that are not accorded to others, notwithstanding that this inherent privilege might be mitigated by such oppressing factors as homosexuality, differently-ableness, age, social class, etc.”. It’s fair to shorthand in situations like this because the generalization does apply to so many situations.
definitely not…
I was unclear, meaning that Oprah is more privileged.
I do not dispute that. She has worked hard and has talent. Good for her, really.
And whose fault is that? (The rapes are very clearly the rapists fault).
How vague.
1. Addiction is not the “fault” of the addict. Addiction is a disease, and it manifests differently in different people. The vulnerability for it is partly genetic and partly environmental, as is the choice of substance. Her vulnerability to crack, specifically, was likely a direct result of living in the Black community, just as a vulnerability for methamphetamines, specifically is more often linked to rural white communities. “Self discipline” is not the answer. Education and treatment are.
2. There is a huge difference between complexity and vagueness. The interplay of privilege and oppression is complex. A gesture “over there” is vague.
Please!
Addiction is a disease, but largely self-inflicted (choosing to take the addictive substance). The crack didn’t float into Oprah like some bacteria in the black community. Not that this matters so much. It still needs to be treated.
I pointed out the whose fault is that to disprove that her crack addiction was somehow part of her oppression as a black female. It is not.
False dilemma.
Well, I beg your pardon. But the answer to “how can privilege be measured” is most often answered with something very similar to “The “measurement” of oppressions and privilege is always very difficult and complex. It is also situational.”
I haven’t gotten a better answer anywhere. It’s just complex, difficult, hard to measure etc.
You know, “over there”.
Do you eat? Do you ever consume alcohol? Have you ever gambled? Have you ever exercised? Have you ever taken a prescribed pain pill or a prescribed psychotropic drug? For some people (people with a vulnerability to addiction) as little as one exposure to a substance can lead to a lifetime of struggles. For many, especially people who have experienced significant traumas such as rape or abuse, or who live with chronic pain, that first taste is from a desire to self medicate — often either because medical care is unaffordable or feared.
Not a false dilemma. People who recover from addiction do so because they get educated about their condition, and seek help or self-help finding ways to combat it. Self-discipline comes only at the end of a long process of education.
As for multiple oppressions and privileges, what are you after? A flow chart for every conceivable human culture and condition? There are over 7 billion people on this planet, with seven billion different human conditions. It might be possible to force sort all seven billion human beings into ranks of privilege and oppression by some mathematical formula, but what would be the point? A new culture and new condition would emerge and ten minutes later it would be necessary to recalculate.
It speaks to the relatively high privilege you enjoy that you apparently have not had enough subjective experience of oppression to understand what is and is not oppression. If you want a mathematical formula, fill in the variables and assign each a value dependent on their objective utility in the real world in the majority of situations (this of course would take years of study and millions of dollars to do as a quantitative study).
As an example equation: X is female (-15), white (+20), has a graduate degree (+15), is heterosexual and married (+10), lives in a blue collar neighborhood (-15), is non-Christian ( -15), is physically healthy (+10), mentally healthy (+10), and within a “normal” weight range (+5). (Total = 25 on the Privilege/Oppression scale)
Compare this to Y: A male (+15), black (-20), high school dropout (-20), who is homosexual (-10), lives in an inner city (-25), is Christian (+15), has type one Diabetes (-5) and PTSD (-10) and is obese (-10). (-70 on the Privilege/Oppression scale)
While such a hypothetical scale would measure these traits based on their utility in, say, 100 common situations of daily living, it still would not be able to capture exceptionalities, and cultural differences in oppressions.
See? complex and hard to measure.
“I pointed out the whose fault is that to disprove that her crack addiction was somehow part of her oppression as a black female. It is not.”
So the reason she had a crack addiction in her early 20s and Katie Couric / Barbara Walters / Diane Swayer didn’t (AFAIK), is just due to some specific character flaw on her part?
One example of the latter, was in need of medical assistance and got 12 bullets(out of 24 fired) instead, all to the back of her head and her body. Where were the major feminist organizations when this was going on? Or when a Black woman was shot by police in her car b/c she was holding a cell phone?
What a horror story, Radfem. Do you have links to this? I’m not at all amazed, but I am disgusted, that I haven’t heard of these stories through the media.
But don’t believers in class/race/gender analysis use the fact (for example) that every U.S president has been a white male as an evidence of white male privilege? Rich white men like Bush are used all the time as de facto evidence of white, male privilege. Shouldn’t the opposite be allowed too, then?
As you said, the fact that every U.S. president has been a white male is evidence of white male privilege (and is supported by scads of other evidence as well, including the predominance of white men in other privileged positions besides the office of president). Since not every celebrity is a black woman, and since black women do not predominate in most privileged positions, Oprah Winfrey by herself cannot be used as an example of some mythical black female privilege.
is Oprah (a Black, rich woman, 2/3 unprivileged) for example, more or less privileged than a poor white man (1/3 unprivileged)? I’d say definitely not.
I agree with you. She is more privileged than most poor white men. She is also more privileged than virtually all black women. My point wasn’t that she wasn’t privileged. My point was that she’s an exception, privileged in spite of and not because of her race and gender, and that her existence cannot be used to disprove the oppression of other black women. I’m not sure what you thought I was trying to say, but whatever it was, you’re clearly wrong.
No matter what the systems of oppression are, there will be exceptions.
Lanoire
It’s evidence that highly privileged people are white and male. It does not follow that white males are highly privileged.
A non white-male person chosen at random in the US has essentialy no chance of being president of the US in their lifetime. A white male chosen at random has about a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of becoming president. Big deal. Most white males have no chance of becoming president, same as everyone else.
The same fallacy applies. None of this demonstrates that Joe Sixpack, who cleans the municiple toilets, is privileged.
On the other hand, you as a woman of whatever colour, have essentially no chance of being conscripted into the military or sent to kill or be killed in another country. It’s hard to quantify what that risk is to young men in the US today, but it’s hardly unthinkable with Bush’s posturing over Iran, and the obvious overstretch of the US military in Iraq and elsewhere. So this is a real genuine privilege that women – ordinary women – enjoy. Even without conscription, poor men, especially poor black men, are often drawn into the military because they have little other economic choice, and because they are specifically targetted for recruitment.
Yet feminists refuse to acknowledge these kinds of disprivilege that men face. Bush evaded his service, and has sent thousands of poor men to their deaths. His privilege does not make them privileged. Blacks are overrepresented, and feminists recognise the colour aspect of disprivilege, but they are blind to the overwhelming degree to which men are victimised and disprivileged by the military.
The same could be said for criminal justice. Much is made of the way blacks are treated unfairly. What is ignored is that men are treated unfairly.
Unless you voluntarily join the military.
Toumas,
Privilege can be measured by holding all other variables equal and comparing across some specific line. Do black people in the US have higher infant mortality rates than whites? Yes. Do black people with equal credentials have a much harder time getting loans, or getting professionally bonded? Yes. Do people with black sounding names get fewer call backs on job applications with identical resumes? Yes. Do women get paid less on average than men? Yes. Outside of prisons, are women more likely to be raped than men? Yes. Do poor people get worse health care than rich people? Yes. In the US, are Jews more likely to be beaten up for their religion than Christians? Yes. Etc.
All these things can be, and have been, measured. You can look them up.
Now, there are layers of nuance on top of these simple facts, and those layers of nuance are not easily susceptible to measurement. Furthermore, all of these different measurable results are interconnected, as are the various axes of privilege, and this makes more complicated measurements much more difficult (to impossible). Likewise, intercomparison of axes of privilege (is it worse to be middle-class and black or poor and white? etc) becomes prohibitively complex very quickly, particularly since “worse” implies a calculus of summation of the various different specifically measurable parameters, and such a calculus (like all moral calculus) is hopelessly contested.
So, yes, the full system of privilege is complex and nuanced and very difficult to measure. However, to assume that because the full system can’t be measured, that therefore it is simplest to assume that the full system doesn’t exist, and that the individual and particular measurable interactions are merely unconnected trivia, as you seem to desire to do, is simply absurd and without merit.
Do you assume that because religion can not be measured that it doesn’t exist? Sure, you can measure church attendance, or charitable giving through churches, or you could calculate the number of laws supporting a particular religion, but would any of these measurements really give you the full details of the religion, or distinguish a religion from a philosophy from a cult? No, they would not. From this, the immeasurability of religion, I suppose that you have no choice but to conclude that religion does not exist.
Addiction is a disease, but largely self-inflicted (choosing to take the addictive substance). The crack didn’t float into Oprah like some bacteria in the black community. Not that this matters so much. It still needs to be treated.
I pointed out the whose fault is that to disprove that her crack addiction was somehow part of her oppression as a black female. It is not.
I’ve read that many addicts are trauma/abuse survivors. She might have “chosen” to use drugs, but there are a whole host of forces at work to push her towards that choice. It doesn’t mean she’s not accountable for her choice, but I fully acknowledge that addiction is a health issue–likely more a mental health issue. (And I used to have the opposite view.) Poverty (which affects a higher proportion of Black people than White people, again, thanks to power and privilege) also plays a role–not only do you have more to contend with (lack of health care, nutrition, or support), you have fewer (or no) resources when you are in crisis as compared to someone from a wealthy or middle-class background.
Look, the fact that the overwhelming majority of CEO’s, senators and representatives, cabinet members, and administration officals are wealthy White men–and that all of the Presidents in the US were and are White men–does point to a huge disparity in power.
Odanu:
None of these compare to crack addiction. An illegal substance with no nutritional or utilitarian value. I don’t want to push the point here. I’m not one of those “you chose to use drugs, so I don’t care if you suffer” -people (I support universal healthcare etc.).
The chart would be nice, please show me where to find such. OR feminists/anti-racists/leftists should stop making “all white men have privilege” -type of claims, since they have no evidence beyond anecdotes.
When I was a teenager and doubted the existence of Satan (of course I still do), the ultrachristians used this as an evidence of being under Satan’s thumb. A nice circular argument it is: If you doubt the universal existence of some kind of privilege (white, male…) it means you have plenty of privilege. Which then means that your opinion can be disregarded.
Of course this trick is pulled on sceptics.
I would think such study would have been made by now, considering the importance (costing only millions? Wow.). Privilege is definitely not objective, but highly subjective.
In other words, it can not be done (your mathematical values were mere guesses). Yet “white male privilege” is used to justify Affirmative Action and other measures, and as an excuse why male-specific problems are not important.
No one used her as an evidence of “black female privilege”, in fact I said the exact opposite: While I believe both being a black and being a woman generally make things more difficult in the US .
Exceptions DO NOT prove the rule.
Sheelzebub:
Or thanks to culture that calls blacks who seek education in the “White Man’s World” race traitors, acting white… Leftists contribute to this by telling blacks that all of the problems in black community are caused by White Supremacy/Patriarchy (I’m sure I would be an asshole if I had been told all my life that every adversity I’ve faced was someone elses fault. I’m glad so few people empowered my occasional “nice guy” -whining when I was younger, for example, and I grew out of such foolishness.).
It’s not all that, but certainly part of the problem is with blacks themselves (like the fact that so many young black men are in prison: they should stop joining gangs and committing crimes. Duh.).
The point being that differnt outcomes do not equal different opportunities.
Daran:
What evidence do you have that men are treated unfairly in the criminal justice?
I’m not so sure about that. Like I said, outcome does not equal oppression (men in prison more is caused by men committing more crimes).
Wealthy white men (hmm, is it a chicken or an egg…). Most people in the US are white (in the past the disparity was even clearer) and in the past nonwhites and nonmen (heh) were prevented by doing so (so it is true historically), but I’m not sure now — Rice vs. Clinton is a plausible scenario in the 2008. Besides, I think men just seek power more, thus meaning that there will naturally be a statistical difference.
Besides, feminists in countries with women as presidents/leaders have not backpedaled one bit. On the contrary.
So…. let me get this straight. You use one example of a case where you don’t een know that the woman ‘cried rape’ to extrapolate from there to a general group of white women….yet it’s bad when a proven liar gets brought up? Christ, you’d think on a feminist blog this wouldn’t have to be pointed out.
I’m reprinting this because nobody paid attention the first time: Gender trumps race. Just as you cite one case, so will I. According to Ann Jones, white women who were raped by black men—if they were ‘common strumpets, as in the case of Tansy Tucker, the daughter of a woman named Patsy—–were not worth the loss of a good worker. In the Tucker case, the daughter’s state of chastity was not known, but the mother’s was, and basically because the mother was ‘loose’ the daughter was assumed to be as well—to the defendant’s benefit. It appears that the belief that any whore cannot be raped crosses racial lines.
Sorry, but the reason I brought up Eldredge Cleaver is this: how privileged are you when men of color regard you as either somebody else’s possession, or a possession they can stomp on to rectify what privileged men have done? Nobody wants to touch that one, because it’s typical male behavior. White guys have done it to black women for centuries. Cleaver explicitly acted upon it. Conservatives believe in it.
Is Brawley the real problem here? Or is the way that case was handled, followed by other cases? Mike Tyson raped not a white woman, but a black one…and he got the community support, not the victim, who received death threats…from her own community. OJ Simpson was a wife beater, yet what was the issue at trial? His race, not his sexism. Sometimes a man is just a man, and acts like other man, and treats women like other men do…-horribly. For me, the issue remains women first. If men attack them for being women, then I don’t care what color the man is. How come the only time the property crime aspects of rape become apparent is when the color line gets crossed?
Men of all kinds still regard women as property—specifically, that of other men. The belief that some women lie is still acceptable–as long as they’re lying about the other kind of guy.
Lanoire, here are some links on the shooting of Tyisha Miller in Riverside, California:
The Mysterious Death of Tyisha Miller
Thousands protest Miller’s death
Maxine Waters condemns officers decision to shave their heads
Here are some links on LaTanya Haggerty, shot to death by Chicago Police Department officers:
City pays out $18 million in Haggerty’s death
Shooting of LaTanya Haggerty
Lanoire, my links post is awaiting moderation but I included links on Tyisha Miller(Riverside, CA) and LaTanya Haggerty(Chicago).
Don’t know what banned word I apparently posted, lol. :o
I think for White women this is true most of the time, except when they are beneficiaries of their racial privilage which is a lot of the time too.
But each women defines the above differently and if women of color believe that race trumps gender or one does not trump the other, or that it depends on the situation, are they wrong? Or are they wrong, because a White woman says so, based on her own position in society’s heiarchy?
After all, in your right to make your assertion of how gender trumps race for ALL women, which is trumping which? Race or gender?
I think that’s why relationships among members of our gender are as fragmented as they are, because we are forcing all women to make our choices, perhaps because as Whites, we believe that we are entitled to do this?
I don’t know and will probably understand why doing this is more important than anything else in feminism. Which is probably why I’m not a feminist, of the capital letter kind.
The discussion here is interesting, but I think that it is important to come back to the original post. When Tawana Brawley is brought up in this case, I get the impression that a false leap of logic is coming. It cannot be assumed that because one black woman lied about rape that any other black woman who complains of rape is suspect. There is a big difference between what an individual does and the state of a group of people. This doesn’t just apply to rape accusers, but to a lot of the discussion here.
We could bring up countless counter examples to the statement that white men have greater privileges in our society then non-whites or women. That’s because individuals routinely buck the system. But we need to be reminded that there is a system that weights people and the weights are highest for whites and men. Of course there are plenty of white men who are neither rich nor privileged in any meaningful sense, still statistically the chances of having a highly paid job, running a company or political office are much higher if you are white and male. That is played out in boardrooms and political institutions across the country. We have a small number of female senators and only one black senator. The rest of the chamber is filled with white men. White men still make up the vast majority of CEOs and board members.
In contrast, the rate of unemployment among black men is staggering. Women across the board still make something like 75 cents on the dollar to men. We can debate the mechanisms in society that contribute to this state of affairs and conclude that they are varied and far reaching into both sides of the debate. The fact is that the system rewards those who fight for a better life, but the fight is harder if you aren’t white or male.
Tuomas:
It’s not just numbers convicted, but severity of sentencing. When I looked at this issue a while back, I found that men received longer sentences on average than women in every category of crime according to the UCR. By comparison, blacks received longer sentences in every category except one. Moreover, the report felt it necessary to comment upon the differential between blacks and whites, but not between men and women
Digging up the statistics to support this claim at its most general would take a lot of time an effort, so permit me to focus upon just one aspect of the CJS – the death penalty.
According to the Death
Penalty Information Center, during the period for 1977 through 2005:
My emphasis. According to this report, (see table 7), there were an estimated 59,996 female murderers and 395,446 male murders in the period 1976-1998, meaning that women account for more than 1 in 8 (13%) of murderers. (This is not strictly comparible to the DPIC figures as they cover a different period.)
Me:
When I looked at this issue a while back, I found that men received longer sentences on average than women in every category of crime according to the UCR.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/wopris.htm.
This isn’t the source I looked at before, but it stands for the same propostion: “For each category of offence, women received shorter average sentences than men. For property offences, female prisoners has a mean sentence 42 months shorter than men; for drug offences, 18 months shorter; for violent offences, 39 months shorter.”
Muddying the issue is the observation that male prisoners are more likely to be repeat offenders, and to have a history of violent offending, which obviously would affect sentencing. It’s not clear to me what the results would be if you control for history.
Different studies have found different things; some studies find there’s no significant difference, some fine that men are sentenced longer for the same crimes. The best-done study I’ve seen accounted for many factors but still found that being male, or being black, or both, were significant disadvantages when it comes to criminal sentencing. (I’ve been meaning to post about this.)
Radfem wrote:
Don’t know what banned word I apparently posted, lol. :o
:-P
Actually, it was the links. Any post with four or more links has to be approved before it can appear. (Spammers often use lots and lots of links).
Toumas,
Thinking about this further, I think I may have been overly harsh, as I think that you may simply be being (ironically) overly totalizing in what is actually a weak denunciation of totalizing.
So are you actually not saying that you think that privilege doesn’t exist because it can’t be measured (although, of course, it can be, and is), but rather saying that statistical demonstration of privilege shouldn’t be read in a totalizing manner?
I think this is a much less extreme argument than what you have seemed to be making, although I think it is still not entirely correct.
From the innumerable statistical patterns of privilege, we can theorize a larger and less measurable structure. Like all social structures, we do not have the freedom or power to perform experimental tests of any significant size or value of the strucutre of privilege, and so are forced to accept evidence predominantly from observation.
So we posit a larger structure of privilege, interlocking across race/sex/class/etc lines, and we posit that, all else held equal, in almost all circumstances, being on the up side of one of the lines of privilege gains an individual advantage. Certainly, all else is never held equal, and certainly, there will be circumstances in which the lines of privilege prove largely irrelevant (neither race nor sex nor class will save you from an on-rushing bus) or where one line of privilege outweighs another (perhaps even (as Daran argues) ones where class or age outweighs race or sex, although I think those are rare). We do not, generally, claim to have even a partial calculus of privilege (as odanu described). No one has a calculus of social interaction, so this isn’t a big surprise or much of an indictment.
Some people, at some times, distill the complexities of privilege down to simple totalizing statements. These are easier to communicate, and are the ground work of the complexities. They say “women are” or “men are.” Some, when challenged, will agree that of course it is all very much more complex than that, and some, when challenged, will say, “No, listen men are privileged. If you aren’t willing to accept the basics, there’s no point talking about the complexity.” Others, of course, will say “Fuck that noise, don’t come to me whining about how men have it bad.” All three are right.
Of course, when you start painting all feminists with the brush of either of the second two responses, you are yourself totalizing, but that totalizing can’t even be argued to point at a significant truth. It is simply incorrect and obscurantist.
And actually going back to the original topic, I think it is worth pointing out that the parallel going on here isn’t between how when a black women lies about being raped people dredge up the mythological version of Tawana Brawley’s story, and how people don’t dredge up the mythology of white women lying about being raped in the age of lynching when a white woman lies about being raped.
Mary Doe didn’t lie about being raped, and yet still the mythology of Tawana Brawley gets dragged out and kicked around, as though the fact that one black woman (well, a 15 year-old) somewhere once lied about being raped by white men means that no black woman should be believed when she accuses white men of rape, no matter how much evidence she has. When a white woman (truthfully) accuses men, either black or white, of rape, there are still plenty of ways in which she will be dragged through the mud, and a million myths will still be dragged out and kicked around to explain why she can’t be believed (the men were popular, she was a stripper, she was drunk, she had a criminal background, she must of had some scheme, most of the trash we’ve seen dragged up and tossed around in this case as well), but rarely will she face the added burden of the mythology of the evils of lying white women, rarely will her race be made into that additional burden of rape denying and excusing mythology that it is being made into for Mary Doe.
Which is nothing more than what blac(k)ademic said originally, but I think the “are you saying white women lie about rape?” argument is really not the core of the original post.