This Is Not Tawana Brawley
| April 20th, 2006Why 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.
Also posted on my blog
April 20th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
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.
This comment was written by odanu.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
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.
This comment was written by Blac(k)ademic.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
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?
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April 20th, 2006 at 5:32 pm
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.
This comment was written by odanu.Report this comment to the moderators
April 20th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
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,
This comment was written by SeaworthyViolin.SeaworthyViolin (usually a lurker)
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
bean–
i have seen the whole film (on tuesday in fact)
This comment was written by Blac(k)ademic.it will be available for purchase soon. look at her website.
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:17 pm
odanu–
This comment was written by Blac(k)ademic.i misread your posting. it wasn’t clear to me.
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:21 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
rob, where in the hell did you get that idea from?
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:38 pm
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?
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
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?
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April 20th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
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?
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April 20th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 8:47 pm
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!”
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April 20th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
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?
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April 20th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
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.
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April 20th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
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).
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April 20th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
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…
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April 21st, 2006 at 2:08 am
because ‘that’s really your tribe.’ The rage that stems from a society that doesn’t allow for a blurring of edges.” Angry Bear’s PGL sets Peggy Noonan straight (and sends her to time-out corner) Asterism: Mideast tyrants living in the pastAlas: The Duke la crosse case is not Tawana Brawley redux Daniel Drezner: Update on the Israel Lobby debate Mark Schmitt: The “Real McCain” and the Cult of Authenticity MyDD: Why Net Neutrality matters Digby: Like Father Like Husband: Chastity belts for the 21 st century
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April 21st, 2006 at 5:19 am
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 6:03 am
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 6:16 am
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 […]Continue reading at Alas, a blog … posted 6:09 pm at Alas, a blog
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April 21st, 2006 at 6:17 am
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 6:24 am
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 6:38 am
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).
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April 21st, 2006 at 6:51 am
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 7:05 am
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 7:24 am
… 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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 7:38 am
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 8:10 am
>
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 8:28 am
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 10:09 am
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
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April 21st, 2006 at 10:12 am
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.
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April 21st, 2006 at 10:16 am
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.
This comment was written by Radfem.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 10:30 am
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.
This comment was written by Mandolin.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 10:35 am
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.
This comment was written by Radfem.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 11:39 am
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.
This comment was written by RonF.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 11:53 am
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
This comment was written by Heart.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 12:13 pm
“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
This comment was written by Heart.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 2:17 pm
RonF:
You’re allowed to comment in that thread.
This comment was written by Daran.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Alas, a blog: This is not Tawana Brawley 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.
This comment was written by abyss2hope: A rape survivor's zigzag journey into the open.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 3:22 pm
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.
This comment was written by ginmar.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 3:47 pm
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.
This comment was written by Radfem.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 4:50 pm
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.
This comment was written by azbballfan.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 4:51 pm
blac (k) ademic makes an excellent point regarding one topic of trash talk in the alleged Duke rape case. Also posted inAlas, a Blog.
This comment was written by The Dees Diversion.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 6:44 pm
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.
This comment was written by Mike.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 7:25 pm
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.
This comment was written by Lanoire.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 8:58 pm
exactly, lanoire.
This comment was written by Blac(k)ademic.Report this comment to the moderators
April 21st, 2006 at 11:05 pm
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
This comment was written by Blac(k)ademic.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2006 at 4:06 am
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?
This comment was written by ginmar.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2006 at 9:20 am
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.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2006 at 10:17 am
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.
This comment was written by nonwhiteperson.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2006 at 10:50 am
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
This comment was written by nonwhiteperson.Report this comment to the moderators
April 22nd, 2006 at 12:02 pm
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.</