Jesse Jackson weighs in with a calm and rational voice on race, sex, class and the Duke rape scandal. Jackson reminds me of some of the reasons I am always inclined to believe a woman when she says she has been raped. This country reeks of misogyny, as well as racism and classism, and so has a very long and a very shameful history of disbelieving women, especially poor and black women.
In my view, the expectation of disbelief is one of the primary reasons that so few women report rape. As a member of the class of people that is so commonly disbelieved, I choose to believe women until there is a very good reason not to.
Yeah, I believed/believe Anita Hill too.
Snippets from:
Duke: Horror and Truth
by Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
“Divorced Mother Of Two, Working Way Through College, Allegedly Raped, Abused By Gang.” Had the headline read that way, the fury would have been great. The facts that the police didn’t arrest anyone, that the gang was not talking, that it took two days for the police to search the scene of the crime would have added to the anger.
But that’s not how it was reported. Rather, it was reported that a black stripper was accusing members of the Duke lacrosse team of rape after she and another woman were hired to dance for them at a party. That method of reportage put race and class in the center of the story. Predictably, the right-wing media machine has kicked in, prompting mean-spirited attacks upon the accuser’s character. Rush Limbaugh called the two women strippers “hoes,” and later apologized saying “I regret you heard me say that.” And Michael Savage referred to the alleged victim as a "Durham dirt-bag" and "dirty, verminous black stripper". And, it is in this tense atmosphere that the accuser flees from home to home, fearing for her safety. The players got lawyers immediately, who advised them to talk to no one. Duke University boosters hired big-time legal gunslinger Bob Bennett – who counts the Catholic Church as well as then-president Bill Clinton among his clients – to step in as spokesman for the newly-formed “Committee for Fairness to Duke Families”. . . .
We know that the two women were abused. The accuser says they were met with racial slurs, and stopped dancing and decided to leave. “We started to cry,” she said, “we were so scared.” They left, but team members came out, apologized, and convinced them to come back. A neighbor reports seeing them leave and then come back, and confirms hearing racial slurs.
The accuser says once they returned, they were separated and she was pushed into a bathroom by three men, strangled, raped, kicked and beaten. The players deny that that happened, but they immediately retained lawyers and stopped talking. The woman was picked up afterward by police, who reported her as “passed out drunk.” Admitted to a hospital, tests showed injuries consistent with rape and physical assault.
The team was notorious for its gross behavior. 15 of the 47 players had been previously charged with misdemeanors ranging from underage drinking to public urination. After the party one player sent out an email saying that he planned on inviting strippers over and then “killing the b…. as soon as they walk in and proceeding to cut their skin off,” an act he said would be sexually satisfying.
Black women; white men. A stripper; and a team blowout. The wealthy white athletes – many from prep schools – of Duke; and the working class woman from historically black North Carolina Central. Race and class and sex. What happened? We don’t know for sure because the Duke players are maintaining a code of silence.
The history of white men and black women – the special fantasies and realities of exploitation – goes back to the nation’s beginning and the arrival of slaves from Africa. The patterns associated with this history arouse fears and evoke too many bad memories. . . .
But Duke is alas probably no worse than other schools in the way African American women are too often perceived. As Rebecca Hall of the University of California in Berkeley, who studies images of African American women in the culture, states, “Turn on a music video. A black woman is somebody who has excess sexuality….It’s excess sexuality that white men are entitled to.”
In the wake of the Duke scandal, black women across the country report on how often they are harassed or treated as simply objects available to hit on by white men. This image is magnified in our culture – and not simply by white producers, but on black music videos and black networks as well.
The Duke scandal should lead colleges across the country to hold searching discussions about racial and sexual stereotypes, exposing the myths that entrap so many. But it shouldn’t take the brutalizing of a mother of two to raise these issues. Justice must be pursued at Duke. But Duke should not be treated as an isolated extreme – but as a goad to probing discussion and concerted action to lift students above the hatreds, the fears and the fantasies that still plague our society.
Graphic found at RAINN.
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