Rape, racism & the media
WW COMMENTARY
By
Shelley Ettinger
Published Mar 17, 2011 9:16 PM
This article is based on a Read Red blog at http://tinyurl.com/4dvz7ap.
The New York Times ran an appalling March 9 story about a gang rape in east
Texas that left me sickened and shaken. The victim was an 11-year-old girl.
There were, reportedly, 18 rapists. Eighteen! They included some star
high-school athletes as well as some sons of locally prominent families. At
least one of them videotaped the assault with his cell phone. The video was
shown around by the bragging rapists, and that’s how the crime eventually
came to light and they were brought to justice.
These facts weren’t the only appalling thing about the Times piece. The
story itself descended into the worst despicably sexist terms in its
characterization of the child who was so terribly brutalized and defiled. The
newspaper found it necessary to comment that she was known in the neighborhood
for wearing inappropriately mature clothes and makeup and for hanging out in
the wrong places. Yes, that’s right — the report implies that this
11-year-old child was a slut; she was asking for it; she deserved to be
destroyed. This aspect of the report was picked up quickly by a number of
commentators, who have denounced the Times for its disgusting blame-the-victim
insinuations.
But there’s another aspect. After my first read and my first reaction,
which was rage and horror, I cooled down a little and started to think, started
wondering. I referred above to “facts” — but I know better
than to rely on the bourgeois press for the truth. I used the phrase
“brought to justice” — but I know there is no justice under
capitalism, and especially not in rape cases, not for the victims of sex
assault, nor for the young men who might be arrested and charged whether they
did it or not. Yes, I’m talking about race: What I started wondering most
of all was just who these 18 alleged rapists were. So I did a quick search and
found some other, earlier, local articles about this case.
Almost immediately, a series of mug shots appeared on my screen of young
African-American men. The victim’s picture of course isn’t
available, but I guessed that she too is Black because if she were white
we’d have heard much more about this case much sooner; quite possibly
we’d have heard about a lynching. Later reports say that the victim is
Latina. As it is, knowing that all the alleged rapists are Black makes this a
story not only about what we Marxists call the woman question, but also about
the national question.
Now reread this from the Times piece: “The video led the police to an
abandoned trailer, more evidence, and, eventually, to a roundup over the last
month of 18 young men and teenage boys.” A roundup of African-American
youths.
The rape of this child was a heinous crime. It’s almost impossible for me
to believe that this roundup by the Cleveland, Texas, police, a force made up
overwhelmingly of white men, is not another crime — a racist crime. That
is, that some of those arrested are innocent, picked up for the crime of being
young Black men. And that they’ll be railroaded into prison where
they’ll join so many other young Black men locked up for the crime of
being poor and oppressed. So now there will be two crimes: that against the
child and that against those who had nothing to do with it, but were rounded
up.
This is not the Glen Ridge rape. That case was beautifully analyzed in the 1997
book “Our Guys” by Bernard Lefkowitz. In 1989 in Glen Ridge, an
affluent white New Jersey suburb, a bunch of star athletes gang-raped a
mentally challenged girl — and almost the whole community united to
defend and protect them. The victim and her family were made pariahs. The
rapists were treated as heroes or, at worst, good guys who made a minor
mistake. Not one of them ever served serious time.
Here, in contrast, we have cops rounding up Black youths. If there have been
confessions, we have the likelihood that they were coerced. That some of them
might be false confessions. That some of those rounded up didn’t do it.
This is the United States. There is no way that justice will be done. (Nor do I
think that any trials, convictions and imprisonments of those who actually did
commit the rape will constitute justice, for none of that will address or
redress any of what’s wrong with this society, any of the real causes of
these crimes.)
Don’t get me wrong. I remain enraged and shaken about the unspeakable
crime that was committed. I can’t stop thinking about the 11-year-old
girl and how she’ll manage to survive on into adulthood — if
she’ll manage to survive. Both the brutal misogyny of the crime and the
sexist reporting of it make me want to scream and shout. But I won’t join
the rush to judgment against those accused. Because when Black men are accused
of rape, especially in a case like this when so many are accused at once, and
in small-town Texas [with a sordid history including the KKK and police
brutality — WW] no less, you can be assured that racism too is involved.
There is a long history of Black men being made into poster images for rape,
whether the victim is Black or white, and of rape charges being used to justify
racist violence and scapegoating. This goes back to slavery times and then the
Klan and Jim Crow in the terrible lynch-law era. Then there was the Scottsboro
case back in the 1930s. And more recently, the case of the Central Park jogger,
for which the New York Police Department rounded up a bunch of Black youths who
were demonized and caricatured as, basically, animals who had carried out what
the media called a “wilding” — and who, despite their
protestations of innocence were tried, convicted and imprisoned only to be
exonerated years later after losing most of their youth to prison.
I recently read Jeffrey B. Perry’s excellent book on Hubert Harrison, the
first of a projected two-part biography of this great Black radical of early
20th-century Harlem. In the book Perry repeatedly returns to the lodestar of
Harrison’s political life: the principle (and practical necessity) that
fighting racism must be paramount; that as long as white supremacy reigns,
there can be no class unity. A socialist revolutionary must always remember
this. The Cleveland, Texas, rape case is the latest reminder.
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