to be black, I spoke to Mariame Kaba on the phone.[61] Based in Chicago, Kaba is an antiviolence organizer who founded the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women. Her work is not about sports but rather about violence. She echoed Carrington’s points, telling me she’s “dubious to the reaction to [these cases] versus the reaction to white [players] who commit violence,” because when it is black men we are discussing, there are implications of these men being “inherently violent,” and that makes for an easy leap to saying “they should be locked up, we need to manage and control them.” This is particularly true when the crime is sexual assault.
I then called up Louis Moore, a professor of history at Grand Valley State University, to talk about a historical phenomenon that he called “black men as the natural rapist.” Moore told me, “If you just look up ‘negro’ and ‘lynched’ in any kind of history database, most of the time [the lynching was justified by] an accusation of rape never founded because there was no due process.” What this means, Moore said, is that in all discussions of rape culture in the US, no matter how far back you go in history, “race is always forefront of the conversation just because of the history of race and alleged rape in America.” A paucity of black men on many campuses feeds into an image that they are outliers in the community. People “think they are on campus for two reasons,” Moore said, “affirmative action or athletics. So there is this sense that they don’t belong, sense that they never belonged, and when the crime happens it becomes, ‘See, I told you so.’”
This is all heightened when we talk about black male athletes in particular. Carrington told me that he traces the outlier status of black athletes within sports, even when they are a numerical majority, to the history of integration of sports in this country. He says that black athletes—ever since Jack Johnson became the first black heavyweight champion in 1908—have been painted as “angry, rebellious, violent, uncontrollable.”
This is further troubled when talking about cases where a black athlete is reported to have raped a white woman. The lynchings that Moore mentioned were often justified under the racialized and paternalistic gendered scare tactic of saying that the women these angry, rebellious, violent, uncontrollable natural rapists attacked were white. That horrific part of US history and the ongoing racial disparities within the criminal justice system mean that accusations of black men sexually assaulting white women carry within them additional cultural baggage that has to, at the least, be acknowledged in these conversations. Fears about powerful black men being punished via false accusation are not irrational or dramatic; they are borne of actual experience.
In cases where people do not know the race of the accuser, it’s often assumed that it is a white woman. (This narrative, it should be noted, erases and ignores black female victims, which is an ongoing issue within these conversations as well as in victim-centered antiviolence campaigns.)
Lisa Lindquist Dorr studied the history of the myth of black men raping white women in White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900–1960.[62] This narrative enforced, Dorr argues, a racist and sexist system of power by reifying “white women’s subordination to white men and the social, economic, and political power of whites over blacks.” In the complicated gendered and racialized postslavery South, white men were in control of everyone else; the appearance of protecting white women from black men helped cement that reality.
The system of power that gave that myth force is still with us. In June 2015, after Dylann Storm Roof reportedly said, “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go,” before murdering nine black people in a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, Jamelle Bouie wrote succinctly, “Make any list of anti-black terrorism in the United States, and you’ll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of black rape.”[63] From Emmett Till to the Central Park Five, the history of young black men wrongly accused or convicted of harassing or raping white women is ever-present. Till was just fourteen in 1955 when a group of white men in Money, Mississippi, brutally mutilated him before killing him, supposedly because he spoke with a white woman and maybe whistled at her. Decades later, the Central Park Five were four young black men and one young Latino who were arrested and charged with the rape and assault of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989. After coercive interrogations by the police, they each confessed to some part of the crime and were convicted and sent to jail. Just over a decade later, another man confessed to the crime and DNA evidence supported his account. The convictions for the five were vacated in 2002, though each had already served his sentence.
A 2012 study by Samuel Gross and Michael Shaffer from the University of Michigan School of Law looked at 873 exonerations in the United States between 1989 and 2012.[64] They found that race did play a significant role in exonerations in sexual assault cases: while 25 percent of prisoners convicted of sexual assault were black, African American men made up 63 percent of the exonerations in these cases. And of all those exonerations of black men, nearly three-quarters involved a white victim. The reason for this, they found, is not malicious lying but rather eyewitness misidentifications. Gross and Shaffer say that for rape cases, “The false convictions we know about are overwhelmingly caused by mistaken eyewitness identifications—a problem that is almost entirely restricted to crimes committed by strangers.”
Additionally, Shaffer and Gross found that rape, compared to other crimes (except robbery), has the lowest rate of people lying and it leading to false convictions. Perjury and false accusations led to 64 percent of homicide exonerations, 74 percent of child sex abuse exonerations, 43 percent for other violent crimes, and 52 percent for exonerations of nonviolent crimes. Looking at all 873 exonerations cases, half were due to perjury or false accusations. When it came to sexual assault cases, that number was only 23 percent. In other words, compared to other types of crime, people who report rape are much less likely to lie.
In the end, this is what the study tells us: it is both a myth that black men rape white women at some extraordinary level and that women lie profusely to falsely convict men. Yet the system, as it is set up, seems to suggest both things are true. Many people in this society believe these things to be true.
This is a particularly damaging intersection of racism and sexism, then, for both women and black men. As Byron Hurt wrote on December 5, 2013, in a piece for NewBlackMan (in Exile) about the Jameis Winston case, “It is true that Black men continue to be cruelly stereotyped as rapists. As a Black man, I carry that label—and all of the other stereotypes associated with Black men—wherever I go in our country. However, it is also a stereotype that women lie about being victims of rape more often than not. According to FBI statistics, less than 3 percent of all rapes are falsely reported.”[65]
Yet the exoneration study shows that false convictions for rape are most likely made when the woman does not know her perpetrator and when there is a mistake in his identification; it is not done with malicious intent. That does not mean the woman is not racist or that because the intent is not malicious that the effects of a racist system do not have terrible real-life consequences for black men.
It’s important to note one potential horrific consequence for men behind bars, whether they committed a crime or not: they can become victims of sexual violence themselves as prison rape is at crisis levels in the United States. According to Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, the data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that “a prisoner’s likelihood of becoming a victim of sexual assault is roughly thirty times higher than that of any given woman on the outside” and “inmates in state and federal prisons and local jails all reported greater rates of sexual victimization involving staff than other inmates.”[66] Kirsten West Savali has argued that ignoring prison rape further marginalizes the struggle to get people to care about mitigating or ending sexual violence altogether.[67] “Until we create safe spaces for these victims, for all victims, to be truly seen and heard,” West Savali writes, “rape culture will continue to be viewed as a ‘woman’s problem’ or a ‘man-hating, feminist agenda’—something society has always found easy to deny or vilify, and ultimately ignore.” These things are complicated
