From Mark Anthony Neal
To date no charges have been filed in the so called “Duke lacrosse rape case”. The results of a DNA analysis taken after the alleged attack suggest that the members of the Duke lacrosse team were not involved in the attack, though the local district attorney will continue to pursue the case. As such I am less interested in trafficking through declarations of guilt and innocence in the case, but rather interested in illuminating the various perceptions that have been and will continue to be projected onto the body of the black woman who is the focal point of this case. As has been reported so far, the accuser is a full-time student at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and a single mother of two. The young woman and a friend were purportedly hired to dance at a bachelor party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in Durham—a residence shared by several of the lacrosse team players.
Though some have downplayed the significance of race in this case—violence against women is violence against women—the intersections and race and gender are palpable. As Greg Garber notes in his fine coverage of the case for ESPN.com, the default request for exotic dancers at mainstream escort agencies is often white women (preferably blonde and big-breasted). Thus in all likelihood, regardless of what happened inside of 610 N. Buchanan Blvd, the young men were hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed. If these young men did in fact rape, sodomize, rob, and beat this young women, it wasn’t simply because she was a women, but because she was a black woman.
UCLA and Columbia University Law professor and critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw explains the uniqueness of discrimination against black women in her seminal essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”. According to Crenshaw: “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction , and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling in any number of directions, and sometimes, from all of them.” Using the traffic intersection as a metaphor, Crenshaw argues that black women often “experience double discrimination—the combined efforts of practices which discriminate on the basis of race and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as black women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as black women.”
Of course there are historic discourses that have constructed black women as hypersexual insatiable, and exotic—such discourses have often been employed as the rationale for racialized sexual and rhetorical violence against black women. Contemporary examples of such discourses can be found in the flippant and hateful on-air comments by national radio personalities Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boortz, who described the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse case and U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, respectively, as a “ho” and a “ghetto slut”. Though it is often the music videos of hip-hop artists that are targeted for the degradation of black women’s bodies, these videos—like the syndicated shows of Boortz and Limbaugh, television networks like BET and MTV, and recording labels—are simply the vehicles for the corporately controlled circulation of black women’s bodies as such . The message is clear: black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them. Thus it should not be surprising that a generation of young white men, for whom the consumption of hip-hop has been second nature, would find a black exotic dancer desirable or in the worse case scenario, sexually available to them, even if she resist their advances. But the Duke lacrosse rape case is not simply about centuries old dramas across the color line—It also about the tensions within black communities about which black bodies deserve protection and defense
As the “identity” of the young black woman in the case began to be constructed in the media, it was revealed that she was an “exotic dancer” and un-wed mother of two. These facts should be irrelevant in a sexual assault case, but as is well known, defense attorneys often seek to demonize rape victims—in the courts and in the media—so that the integrity of the victim is called into question. The goal is to have the public and juries to believe that rape victims bear the burden of responsibility in their assaults. As scholar Wahneema Lubiano recently opined, this is part of the tenuous status of being a women in American society; If you are not “at home” under the “supervision” of a father or a husband, it is open season on your body. Already there have been attempts to portray the young woman who was raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten as immoral on the basis that she was a “stripper” and an unfit mother, who left her two children home while she performed. |
