In early September 2016, Brock Turner was released from his sentencing three months early after only being convicted of three felony sexual assault charges in March of 2016. The nation was incredibly shocked and dismayed upon hearing this news, seeing as the shock of the brutality of his crime had just started to whiter. Being in college I hear stories about rape and sexual assault far too often. It has become a common discourse held among many colleges today, and in light of the Brock Turner case and our modern understanding of rape culture, a necessary one at that. However, a conversation that is not often brought up are the existing disparities between our rape culture and race. Why is that? And why are these ideas still so prominent within our society?I want to start by defining what rape culture is. Rape culture is seen as a society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or trivializing sexual assault and abuse. It is designed to show the ways in which society blames victims of sexual assault and normalizes male sexual violence. Also stratification, which is the ranking of entire groups of people that perpetuates unequal rewards and life chances in society. Life chances are opportunities and resources individuals have to improve their quality of life.
Historically, racism and sexism have coincided within social systems. Slavery was truly the first system of racial stratification fostering prejudice and oppressive tendencies towards people of color. “Sexual ideology, domination, and violence were central components of slavery. Plantation owners widely used black women as breeders-by forcing them to have sex with male slaves and by raping them. These and other forms of violence were justified by the reasoning that black people were only three fifths human and were sexually debased creatures. After emancipation, control over black sexual activity was substantially reduced, and thus many whites fear black men seeking sexual access to white women (partly a projection based on white male behaviors during slavery). This reinforced the widely held belief that black men had a propensity for sexual violence, and that black women’s sexual deviance made them less desirable and therefore heightened black men’s interest in so-called “pure” white women. These belief, in turn, justified the widely accepted use of lynching and castration as forms of racial and sexual terror” (A). This means of separating groups and creating a hierarchy systematically creates a disparity between race. Race has now become this distinguishing characteristic as a result of social construction. Racism was fostered due to this combination of prejudices and social power, or lack thereof, upheld by this social hierarchy. This ideas become further solidified through other social practices since slavery, such as the media, pop culture, and our criminal justice system. In her novel, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation, Stanford historian Estelle Freedman states, “the rhetoric that African-American men were disproportionately rapists became solidified in the late 19th century, while a similar type casting occurred for immigrant men, Asian men, southern European, and particularly Mediterranean men, whose cultures were depicted as threatening to both white women and young white boys alike. Perpetuated by court cases, news media, and racist popular culture, many African-American men and immigrant men were unfairly criminalized in these trials and effectively shut out of the rights and benefits of full citizenship. By contrast, many of the white men who wrote rape laws, determined who would be arrested and charged with these crimes, and served as judges and jurors on sexual assault cases, not only perpetuated these stereotypes but used them to protect their own status as full citizens. Consequently, rape laws, as Freedman writes, actually ‘contributed to the immunities enjoyed by white men who seduced, harassed, or assaulted women of any race,’ and by doing so, reinforced their own ‘sexual privileges’. The result of this double bind was another double harm: to those men who were disproportionately accused of rape because of their racial or cultural “otherness” and to the women, but particularly women of color, who remained vulnerable to sexual violence with little recourse for legal protection or public complaint.” (C) We sees this perpetuation of racial stereotypes continue to contribute to a system of stratification within our modern day rape culture, signaling women of color as more likely to be promiscuous and inferior and men of color as “sexually voracious and preying on innocent white women reinforces a cultural obsession with black-on-white stranger rape, at the expense of the vastly more common intra-racial acquaintance rape”(B). The fact that these stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in our social system and have become the norm, shifts our understanding from a normative discourse of rape culture towards that of a more racialized discourse.
From this historic and social evidence, rape culture is more easily understandable through a conflict theory approach. The conflict theory seeks to understand societies in general, wherein power and exploitation are inherent. It looks at power, inequality, and domination with power as the base of all social structures. Our current rape culture is centered around this idea of superiority and victimization. It thrives in taking away power from the survivor and putting that individual in an inferior or victim like situation. By singling out men of color as the aggressors of sexual violence, the power remains with the white man and enforces racial stereotypes of people of color having this propensity for sexual violence. In objectifying women of color as overly sexual and deviant again reinforces this idea of white superiority in that violence against women of color is justifiable based on the continued power structure, plating people of color against the white population. This constant comparison between races has limited people of colors life chances and maintained inequality and age-old beliefs of superiority dating back to slavery wherein African-Americans were three-fifth humans and were sexually debased creatures. Our current system not only accepts this, but has continued to provide a platform for these ideas to grow. Based on this we cannot continue to look at rape culture as a single entity but rather a multifaceted entity that encompasses all aspect of society. It is a produce of a social structure so dependent on maintaining the power and status of white men, that it marginalizes people of color and creates inequality. Having this current racialized rape culture inherently limits people of colors life chances because our criminal justice system enables this racial hierarchy to exist. More often than not, men of color are charged with heavier sentences than that of white men who have done the same crime, maintaining this idea of racial superiority. “According to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for 2003, African Americans (who were 12.7 percent of the population in 2003) were arrested for 37 percent of violent crimes (murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault) and 29 percent of property crime (102:288). African Americans are disproportionately arrested for violent crimes and whites for burglaries and property crimes” (A). Our current system of dealing with crime perpetuates racial disparities and allows these ideas to grow and prosper without question.
The harm in ignorantly turning a blind eyes towards conversations of race just makes these disparities acceptable and creates a one-sided look at our rape cultures. In order to understand and combat future problems concerning sexual violence the conversation needs to shift and include other aspects of this issues such as race.
From this historic and social evidence, rape culture is more easily understandable through a conflict theory approach. The conflict theory seeks to understand societies in general, wherein power and exploitation are inherent. It looks at power, inequality, and domination with power as the base of all social structures. Our current rape culture is centered around this idea of superiority and victimization. It thrives in taking away power from the survivor and putting that individual in an inferior or victim like situation. By singling out men of color as the aggressors of sexual violence, the power remains with the white man and enforces racial stereotypes of people of color having this propensity for sexual violence. In objectifying women of color as overly sexual and deviant again reinforces this idea of white superiority in that violence against women of color is justifiable based on the continued power structure, plating people of color against the white population. This constant comparison between races has limited people of colors life chances and maintained inequality and age-old beliefs of superiority dating back to slavery wherein African-Americans were three-fifth humans and were sexually debased creatures. Our current system not only accepts this, but has continued to provide a platform for these ideas to grow. Based on this we cannot continue to look at rape culture as a single entity but rather a multifaceted entity that encompasses all aspect of society. It is a produce of a social structure so dependent on maintaining the power and status of white men, that it marginalizes people of color and creates inequality. Having this current racialized rape culture inherently limits people of colors life chances because our criminal justice system enables this racial hierarchy to exist. More often than not, men of color are charged with heavier sentences than that of white men who have done the same crime, maintaining this idea of racial superiority. “According to the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for 2003, African Americans (who were 12.7 percent of the population in 2003) were arrested for 37 percent of violent crimes (murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault) and 29 percent of property crime (102:288). African Americans are disproportionately arrested for violent crimes and whites for burglaries and property crimes” (A). Our current system of dealing with crime perpetuates racial disparities and allows these ideas to grow and prosper without question.
The harm in ignorantly turning a blind eyes towards conversations of race just makes these disparities acceptable and creates a one-sided look at our rape cultures. In order to understand and combat future problems concerning sexual violence the conversation needs to shift and include other aspects of this issues such as race.
Pictures:
Works Cited:
- “Race, Ethnicity, and The Criminal Justice System.” American Sociological Association,
September 2007, pp.1-22.
- "Racism and Rape." Racism and Rape. National Alliance to End Sexual Violence, 2017.
Web. 20 Mar. 2017.
- Standard, Pacific. "The Long History of the Rhetoric Around Rape and Race." Pacific
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