Racism and Rape Culture in the Modern United States
I’d like to preface this blog post with a bit of an apology. By writing this post, I am not trying to act as if we should cease fighting to bring rape culture to light. I will likely be tackling gender issues in later blog posts. In this post, however, I’d just like to examine the ways in which we portray black men and white men differently in articles about rape. This portrayal does not forgive either the white or the black rapists in the world. They are disgusting, and they deserve to be persecuted. This post is merely an attempt to force people to be more conscious about the more subversive narratives they give in to when they post these articles.
I remember that I first became enlightened regarding this issue during the Fall semester of 2013. I am a fan of the Florida State football team and became concerned when star QB Jameis Winston became involved in a sexual assault investigation. I felt that it would be criminal to dismiss the plight of the victim in this case, but I also felt that there was some prejudice against Winston due to his race. These conflicting narratives troubled me. At this point, I went and talked to my mentor Michael Hunt about this issues. He explained to me that issues of race, gender, and class are often concurrent, and they don’t always line up in the most convenient ways for those of us who like to fashion ourselves activists.
To examine the Jameis Winston case specifically, let’s look at it compared to the Ben Roethlisberger investigation. Roethlisberger is a fellow NFL QB who happens to be a white male. People were very quick to forgive and forget the Ben Roethlisberger sexual assault investigation. Roethlisberger was not convicted on any charges, though he was suspended for his actions. This case is rarely brought up these days. Winston on the other hand, continues to be criticized for this investigation. It is impossible to go to a comments section on the QB without seeing people cracking jokes about how he is “looking for his next victim.” Winston also was not convicted, and, unlike Roethlisberger, Winston was not suspended for any amount of time for his actions. While I do not support the actions of either quarterback, I find it suspicious how the public has viewed them as so radically different.
I’d now like to turn my attention to Jared Fogle, John Duggar, and Tyler the Creator. This is related to something specific which I saw as a trend on Facebook recently. Fogle and Duggar were both recently ousted as child rapists. Despite this, most pictures of them in articles depict them as smiling and generally non-threatening. While we are disturbed and disgusted by these men, we do no view them as animalistic in the pictures we show of them. We still show them as human beings. I’m honestly okay with this, as I feel it shows something about the banality of evil, a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt in her post-World War II study Eichmann in Jerusalem. I believe it is important for the public to see that rapists exist all around us and that they often do not appear evil or inherently threatening. That being said, the portrayal of Tyler the Creator by the media raises some serious questions. Tyler is a rapper who often talks about raping women in his music; he recently went on a rant at a concert in which he said he would rape a woman who spoke out against his music. Tyler the Creator claims that this is a form of satire. While I do not believe Tyler’s lyrics are okay from a feminist point of view and while I do believe that his music is supportive of rape culture, we must acknowledge that Tyler has never been accused of rape or sexual assault. Despite this, articles that show pictures of Tyler often show him growling at the camera. They try to portray him as animalistic. While these pictures are officially from Tyler, they are not the only pictures that Tyler has published, and I would not call them the majority. Regardless, media outlets almost always pick these pictures of Tyler to pair with such stories, while they pick pictures of Fogle and Duggar which portray them smiling. In a similar way, articles about Jameis Winston which relate to his case emphasize his physicality, putting emphasis on the white phobia of the black body.
Now it’s time to examine how this fits into a historical narrative about race. I’ve got a feeling that if you grew up in the United States, you probably had to read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee at some point in your teenage high school years. Do you notice a similarity between the book and these cases? Both reflect society’s fear of black men sleeping with white women. They view the black body as being more threatening than the white body, more threatening and certainly more sexual. This is not meant to imply that, like the character in Lee’s novel, these men are innocent. I cannot pass judgement on their cases. The narrative connections are clear though. In the Old South, black men were often accused of raping white women falsely in order to justify their lynching. The real reason behind these lynchings was often something completely separate, such as a black man having a more successful business than a white man or a black man’s unwanted presence in a mostly white town. These Old South lynchings bear a striking resemblance to the modern portrayal of black men in rape cases. They are viewed as more threatening and more violent. This historical trend, which we like to think has been left by a society that we perceive as post-racial, is actually quite prevalent in our modern society. The racist trends that existed in America’s past have not gone away; they have merely re-branded themselves.
Now that we’ve discussed these trends that are prevalent in both American history and the modern United States, the question remains of how we can improve modern society? The simple answer is to be more conscious about what we post. While we may support the primary message of an article, it is important to look past that and consider what subversive message that article contains. There are always subversive messages in the culture that we consume. It is our job as thinking human beings and intellectuals to question what the media feeds us. Consider race, gender, and class even if the article only seems to be focusing on one subject. We cannot promote equality for one of these factors without considering the effects on the other two. They are nearly always connected.
Go into the world. Make change. Fighting is worth it. Believe.
