While the suffragette and labor movements of the early twentieth century brought about great strides toward equality for white women, for Black women in particular and women of color in general, unpunished sexual violence was and remains a constant threat. Despite the narratives espoused by lynching advocates, white women were not the ones who were most at risk from sexual violence. Black women were expected to adhere to every aspect of respectability pushed on them by Jim Crow laws as well as by community norms established in the wake of slavery. However, it didn’t really matter how Black women and girls dressed or behaved, because white men could and often did assault them for sport.
Unlike white women, Black women had not even the thin veneer of legal protection on their side. It wasn’t until Recy Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old Black mother and sharecropper, was attacked in Abbeville, Alabama, on September 3, 1944, by six white men that the possibility of legal recourse for such crimes even entered the national discourse. The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor was formed by Rosa Parks and several other civil rights leaders of the time to attempt to get some measure of justice for Mrs. Taylor. The crime, which garnered extensive coverage in the Black press, never saw the indictment of the accused, but it did help pave the way for women of color to be able to turn to the law for help.
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FROM ROSA PARKS and the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor to Korean feminists pushing for the Japanese government to pay reparations for victims of the wartime practice of “comfort women,” women of color have always organized to combat sexual violence. More recently groups like Incite! and the Human Rights Project for Girls have highlighted the reality that sexual abuse is a key factor in young women of color ending up in the school-to-prison pipeline. When the work centers on the most marginalized targets of sexual harassment and abuse, it benefits not only their communities, but all communities.
Although there was no real justice for Recy Taylor, we can look at the Daniel Holtzclaw verdict in Oklahoma and see the impact of a history of organizing: Holtzclaw, a former police officer, was convicted of sexually assaulting twelve Black women and sentenced to 263 years in prison after organizers brought media attention to his case, and the police department actually held him accountable instead of trying to minimize or conceal his crimes. It’s not enough to focus on the most visible victims; we must use every opportunity to challenge rape culture at all levels. We must challenge violence from not only those we think of as rapists but also those who administer this system that privileges rapists over their victims, and that normalizes the harassment and abuse of the most vulnerable.
In any given week you can find articles from mainstream, ostensibly feminist sites that turn rape prevention into a circle jerk of not quite victim blaming. They’re filled with tips about how to fight a stranger, what not to wear or drink, and where not to go. Emily Yoffe’s 2013 Slate piece “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk” pushed for a dry campus life for women so they could avoid being sexually assaulted. Sometimes these articles even advocate for forcing victims to testify against their will, as illustrated in Amanda Marcotte’s 2014 Slate piece “Prosecutors Arrest Alleged Rape Victim to Make Her Cooperate in Their Case. They Made the Right Call.” Though these pieces are generally well meaning, they ultimately frame rape as something that a potential victim can prevent if they learn the steps of this peculiar dance that is trying to avoid being possibly assaulted, the immediate response is often one of several questions ranging from “What were you wearing?” to “Why were you there?” to “Had you been drinking?” The answers to those questions can never be relevant—ultimately victims are assaulted because someone chose to attack them.
Instead of tips on how to not be a rapist, how to teach people not to rape, or even on creating therapeutic outlets for potential rapists, we find a half dozen tips on preventing a mythical stranger from raping an able-bodied, alert, physically fit person with excellent reflexes and an exceptional amount of luck.
These tips never address disability, differences in fight-or-flight (or freeze) adrenaline responses, or even the reality that most assailants are known to their victims. Often, the articles are dissected and derided by readers within hours of being posted. So why do they keep showing up? The easy answer is that they make people feel better. After all, if you think you can stop someone from being hurt with a bit of advice, then you can also protect yourself by following the tips. It’s a tidy bit of feel-good magical thinking that absolves us all from confronting the reality of what it will take to end sexual assault. After all, no one has a quick and easy solution for any crime, much less for one like rape, that can manifest in so many ways and often leads to a victim being revictimized during the reporting process.
It’s easy to blame the patriarchy, to rightfully point at the men who rape and hold them accountable. What’s harder is to notice the women who sometimes passively direct rapists toward their victims by contributing to the hypersexualization of women of color under the guise of empowerment. That rape is always the fault of the rapist is true and accurate, but it is also an incomplete assessment of rape culture. Beyond the space that is cultural appropriation, or even the bizarre periodic “accidental” bouts of blackface, there’s the problem of theoretically feminist white women who think “sexy Pocahontas” is an empowering look instead of a lingering fetishization of the rape of a child. The same imagery they claim to find sexually empowering is rooted in the myth of white women’s purity and every other woman’s sexual availability.
There’s nothing empowering about the idea that the road to their sexual freedom is making a fetish costume out of a culture. And I know that some will argue that these are just harmless costumes. While there’s certainly no attire that will protect you from sexual assault, the cultural framework that positioned Black women as un-rapeable exists in a different but similarly dangerous way for other women who are not white. This isn’t about respectability politics, because these outfits are rooted in a mockery of the source cultures that they claim to honor. It’s imagery that is directly offensive in part because it plays on racist tropes that fetishize the bodies of women of color. Things like Victoria’s Secret’s Sexy Little Geisha lingerie campaign, where most if not all of the models were white women. Or any number of Instagram-popular festivals like Coachella, where a nude or nearly nude white woman will post pictures in a fake war bonnet with provocative captions mirroring everything from Chanel’s cowboy-and-Indian-themed fashion show to ads for cologne. Defenders of the imagery will often argue that they mean to honor the nations they think they are imitating and that they are doing no real harm. But the rape statistics for Indigenous women don’t match that argument.
One in three Indigenous women will be victims of sexual assault, and the abuser is most likely to be a white man. Moreover, white men are not only most likely to assault women from this group, they are also the demographic most likely to sexually assault white women. Statistically speaking, white men are most likely of all groups of men to commit sexual assault. But too often it is framed as though the attention of white men isn’t dangerous for women who live outside that narrow range of protection white supremacist rhetoric affords some white women.