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Last Updated: Oct 21st, 2007 - 09:55:08 |
The chaos surrounding the young African American woman who has accused several members of Duke University’s lacrosse team with rape provides new details to an age-old problem: violence against women of color in the United States. The nexus that few want to talk about intelligently—race, sex, and class--undergirds the court case that began being tried in public, on the news and streets of Durham, North Carolina, not behind closed doors with a robed judge.
It is of little surprise that the small Southern city that is approximately half African American and half White is the site of the crime. This is the same state about which Harriet Jacobs, an ex-slave and single mother of two, wrote of assaults by her slavemaster, a doctor, in the 1863 autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. How sad that over 100 years after chattel slavery, Black women in the American South and elsewhere are being raped at will by men whose White skin and economic class status privilege them over the rest of the population. The so-called “Bible Belt” that boasts of its devotion to God is also host to strip clubs where self-professed “gentlemen” sling dollar bills at young exotic dancers on their lunch breaks, all in pursuit of “life, liberty, and happiness.”
The young woman, a student at the historically Black North Carolina Central University, alleges that several male students at the predominantly White Duke University assaulted her sexually, physically, and with racial epithets at an off-campus party where she and another woman performed as exotic dancers. Stigmatized because she is African American, is a single mother, lacks a college degree, and is a sex industry worker, the alleged victim has the odds stacked against her.
The young woman in this case has suffered from a lack of fervent support from the African American community-at-large. While it is true that Durham Mayor Bill Bell, an African American, stood by the police investigation and that Reverend Jesse Jackson made a generous offer to pay for the woman’s college tuition, many Black folk have taken the position that “she brought it on herself.” Condemnation, misinformation, and rumors from our community attempt to discredit the sister, to cast doubt on the possibility that she could have been beaten, robbed, and sexually assaulted.
Like crabs in a barrel, African Americans are still so oppressed that we feel enraged when one of our own, especially a poor woman, steps out of the shadow of middle-class morality and accuses the oppressor of causing injury. The community that rallied around Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson, and R. Kelly—Black men accused of aggressive, violent acts against girls and women—has tended to villify and brand as whores any woman who charges a Black man of sexual misconduct or rape.
At the heart of our failure to rally around the young woman involved in this case is our deep misunderstanding of the link between misogyny and White male supremacy. To explain the roots of this mischaracterization of the young African American woman, I reference “Jezebel and Mammy: The Mythology of Female Slavery,” a chapter in Deborah Gray White’s 1985 study Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (W.W. Norton & Company, New York). White challenges us to look at the sexual violence acted out on African women in America by White men within a historical context: “The uniqueness of the African-American female’s situation,” she writes, “is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro. Although much of the race and sex ideology that abounds in American has its roots in history that is older than the nation, it was during the slavery era that the ideas were molded into a peculiarly American mythology.”
One cannot consider the Duke rape case intelligently and not consider the negative stereotypes associated with all young African American women of childbearing age and, conversely, the myths of altruistic, heroic White men threatened by Black female sexuality. The author explains, “As if by design, White males have been the primary beneficiaries of both sets of myths which, not surprisingly, contain common elements in that both Blacks and women are characterized as infantile, irresponsible, submissive, and promiscuous. Both Blacks and women have generally been dependent politically and economically upon White men. Both groups are consigned to roles that are subservient, both groups have shared a relationship of powerlesness vis-à-vis White males, and both groups, as a matter of automatic response, have been treated as outsiders and inferiors.”
African Americans and women of all ethnic groups have been subjugated in America for the express profit of ruling class White men. The Duke rape case is as much about the legacy of slavery and the hegemony of rich White men as it is about an individual African American woman being raped.
While there are those who have questioned the young woman’s judgment for working as an exotic dancer, few have asked why the accused White men were at a party where they believed they were entitled to see a woman take off her clothes for their personal enjoyment. Do college-educated, ruling class males deserve to participate in the degradation of women? What about these privileged young men—one who faces assault charges in another state—makes them dissatisfied with heterosexual dating? If the hiring of exotic dancers for bachelor parties before weddings is any indication, the sexual exploitation of young women seems to be an American rite of passage for young men.
How ironic that as soldiers fight to establish democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, women sex workers in America are subjected to violence and are treated worse than animals. The Duke rape case proves that, despite the talk of “liberty and justice for all,” American women are still neither equal to American men nor free. On October 14, 2005, the UN Division for the Advancement of Women released a report on issues affecting women sex workers. They found that “the illegal status of many commercial sex workers increases their vulnerability to violence, exploitation, and disease” (Report for Best Practices Policy Project 1).
In other words, if a female sex worker is assaulted, there is little hope that the perpetrators will be apprehended and punished to the fullest extent of the law. North Carolina District Attorney Mike Nifong demonstrates an admirable sense of duty in pursuing justice in the case, but because of the enduring negative mythology of the Black woman and the media frenzy, there are challenges ahead. Very few rape victims of any ethnic group in the United States, which leads the industrialized world in rape crimes, see their attackers apprehended and prosecuted by the criminal justice system. Defense attorneys and juries nursed on misogynist films, games, and music are most often to blame for turning the responsibility for the crime back on the shoulders of the victim. Rape is unfinished murder, and the second rape occurs the moment the victim is not believed, protected, and supported.
The young African American woman in the Duke rape case, in identifying any of the men who collectively participated in her exploitation and violation, has tremendous courage. Instead of condemning her for her lack of good choices, we should stand with her against an international sex industry that traffics in female flesh and labor, that privileges American money, male ego, and perverse sexual gratification over the sacredness of the feminine body and soul.
Veronica Njeri-Imani is a writer living near Phoenix, Arizona.
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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