Why So Many Feminists Believe the Myth of Dangerous Black Men

On intersectionality and feminism; the myth that Black men assault more frequently, that other myth of Asian men are both effeminate yet misogynistic.

unknown literary canon is a reader-supported newsletter dedicated to feminist education and lesbian literature, poetry, art, and history. if you would like to support this project, please like, share, comment, and if you have the means, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Any and all form of support are deeply appreciated!

Angela Davis speaks at a street rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, 4th July 1974, by “Bettman”.

On Intersectionality

I hesitated to call myself a feminist for the longest time. It seemed to me that the movement belonged to other people; blonder, richer women. You know the type: when she goes missing, the social media and mainstream news outlet erupt in an outpouring of concern and grief.

I’ve been contacted by the media. I’ve had reporters from several “prestigious” mainstream newspapers and news magazines contact me; conservative, liberal, and others in between. I’m sure you’ve already guessed the ones I’m talking about.

I’m disappointed in all of them: that these reporters have all reached out to me, felt entitled to take up hours of time through two or three interviews a piece¹, yet none have bothered to finish the work of publishing something about the reason they’re contacting me: that I know that a disproportionally high number of Asian-American² women are assaulted in the bay area and the industry that thrives here.

In choosing what to report, they’re actively perpetuating the idea that it’s white women who are disproportionally harmed, and not the reality that it’s women of color even more so. This is the use of racism as a mechanism to control the behavior of white women, to keep them closer to home, away from people of color and the movements that fight for greater equality. It perpetuates the idea that Andrea Dworkin wrote about: that it’s important for white women to align themselves with the patriarchy because the world is dangerous for them and the patriarchy protects them. That undergirds ideas like white women’s tears³. It ignores that black women are subject to rape at higher rates⁴ than white women, and that indigenous American women (and first nation Canadian women) are more highly to be raped than any other racial/ethnic category of woman.

The idea that white women are to protected gave rise to another insidious, dangerous idea: that white women were historically threatened by Black men. Today, the myth of an outsized threat by Black men still exists, but it also grew to include men of other racial/ethnic categories: Arab/Middle Eastern, South Asian, Latin-American⁵. No where is this more clear than anti-immigrant movements throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States, and that Asian men in particular are seen as both threatening yet also unfuckably effeminate.

Taken together, these ideas - of what a victim looks like, of what a perpetrator looks like - contributes to transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, sexism and racism, and more. These particular -isms and -phobias keep the bulk of us that don’t have much power in the grand scheme of things separated, scared of one another, fighting and calling each other out instead of working against larger oppressive powers.

The photo above is of bell hooks, photo credit: The Bell Hooks Institute.

Angela Davis: Feminism for All

While the term intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Angela Y. Davis⁶, Audre Lorde, and other Black, Latinx, and other feminists of color were exploring the concept earlier. In the introduction to Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, bell hooks wrote of how she upset her fellow students in a gender studies class became when she spoke up about race and gender influencing a child’s fate (the class wanted to stick to the idea that gender alone influenced it).

“Feminist thought and practice were fundamentally altered when radical women of color and white women allies began to rigorously challenge the notion that ‘gender’ was the primary factor determining a woman’s fate.⁷”

In Women, Race & Class, Angela Y. Davis explored the history of Black women and men in the United States, and the history of oppression and racism toward them. This begins with slavery, the lack of access to education and the limited job/economic prospects following emancipation, how Black women and men were too often subject to racism by white suffragettes (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony), how Black people fought for access to education and were continually denied, to the point where white women who joined in their efforts were threatened as well. The two women Davis returned to repeated were Ida B. Well, who published an anti-lynching newspaper, and Mary Church Terrell, one of the most educated Black women of her era; both fought for access to education for Black people.

Until most feminist theory, Davis’ book is rich with historical example to illustrate. It also showed that Black men, such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois helped and supported Black feminists, which she contrasted with white men working against feminism. Her work is built off the premise of building and supporting movements. As you can imagine, it’s a highly effective approach.

Throughout the history of this country, black women have manifested a collective consciousness of their sexual victimization. They have also understood that they could not adequately resist the sexual abuses they suffered without simultaneously attacking the fraudulent rape charges as a pretext for lynching⁸.

Davis described the historical rape of Black women. Through slavery. Following slavery, the lack of access to education and racism meant that a disproportionally higher number of Black women went into domestic service⁹. The lack of choice in employment meant that a Black woman who declined her employer’s (or employer’s husband) sexual advances was left with little choice: if she didn’t give into the harassment, then she and her family faced the consequence of dire poverty. It wasn’t much of a choice, all too effective in historical silencing of Black women.

If you haven’t read the story of Joan (pronounced ‘Jo-Ann’) Little, you might want to. When Little was raped by a prison guard, she used his ice pick in self-defense, and only one of her blows killed him. Little was the first woman to be acquitted of murder committed in self-defense against a sexual assault. This didn’t just happen: it was the result of activism and deep support, in that other imprisoned Black women spoke up about Little’s rapist history of assault, through community leaders speaking up about the issue, and through funding Little’s defense. Angela Davis was one of the leaders that spoke up. Little’s story is one of personal bravery and strength, but it’s also one of a community coming toward to create the change in the world they wanted to see.

Little wasn’t the only Black woman to suffer institutional rape. Davis also described the gang rape of a seventeen-year-old girl by 10 (!!) Birmingham police offers. These are but a small sliver of the total; as I wrote above, Black women are raped at higher rates today. If you clicked on the sources I linked, they would reveal that between 1994 - 2010, the rate of reported rape has increased for Black women.

Davis again

The Myth of the Black Rapist

Despite this, various second-wave feminists argued that they were threatened by Black men, who raped them at higher rates. This is the myth of the rapists (one of the chapter titles in Davis’ Women, Race & Class). In her groundbreaking Against Our Will: Women and Rape, Susan Brownmiller argued against Emmett Till, the fourteen year old who was brutally murdered for whistling at a white women. Brownmiller argued that the whistle was “just short of physical assault”, and that Till and his murderers were both guilty because of their “concern about their rights of possession of over women¹⁰”

Again, Till was a fourteen year old from Chicago visiting the deep South. He was in a culture that he didn’t understand. He was hardly someone who was “concerned” about “possessing” white women. Second, white men are not and cannot replace our legal system; they cannot judge and sentence someone for a crime. To do so is itself a crime, and that Till’s murderers were acquitted by an all-white men Southern jury is but one of the travesties of our legal system. And later, the woman who alleged that Till whistled at her, that piece of evidence that Brownmiller considered “just short of” rape? Carolyn Bryant admitted she lied about the whole thing.

That’s Brownmiller’s book was long considered groundbreaking in the realm of rape is a tragedy. The last chapter of the book, “A Question of Race”, further expanded on Brownmiller’s racist theories. She wrote of how the:

mythified spectre of the black man as rapist to which the black man in the name of his manhood now contributes.

Unfortunately, that idea became all too commonplace. It’s one that Black Surinamese-Dutch author Astrid Roemer wrote about in her fictional On a Woman’s Madness. It’s an idea that Shulamith Firestone expanded on in the influenced second-wave The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, where she posited that white women were mother figures, white men father figures, and Black people were children. Her idea of the Black man as rapist was that Black men had Oedipal complexes: rape their mothers, kill their fathers. There were more so-called feminists that expanded on these ideas: Jean MacKellar and Diana Russell were two that Davis included in Women, Race & Class, with Russell expanding the myth to include “Chicano and Native American Indian men” (this is a direct quote of the description that Davis used; I chose not to update the terms to those we’d use today).

This myth is problematic in many ways. It was used against Black men for lynching; though Davis wrote that the majority of Black men lynched in the South were accused of murder, and only 16.7% of rape. Of the myth Davis wrote:

…myth of the Black rapist is conjured up as a justification for the recurrent waves of violence and terror¹¹.

The myth haunted us after Davis’ book was published: with the Central Park Five, young Black New Yorkers were falsely convicted of raping a white woman. The victim still believes in their guilt, even after a not-Black man confessed to raping her alone. The current US president took out a full-page ad to support the myth and declare the Central Park Five rapists, beginning his ascent in politics on a white supremacist platform. Another false conviction was that of Anthony Broadwater, who spent sixteen years imprisoned for the rape of popular author Alice Sebold¹². These aren’t isolated incidents, they’re just famous ones: DNA exonerations disproportionally freed Black man convicted of rape. Yet, as Andrea Dworkin said about conservative women fearing lesbians, none of these facts about Black men and false accusations will interrupt the psychosexual fantasy that some people have of Black men being more likely to rape.

Today, Black people are still all too often blamed for crimes committed against them. Think of the racist canards against George Floyd following his brutal murder. Whether or not he was a petty thief or drug addict does not and should not matter: police officers cannot act as judge, jury, and sentence him to death on the spot. Again, in theory, to do in the United States is an illegal act. Would those who justify his death online do so if he was white? What about if he was an undocumented immigrant?

In The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan wrote of a problem at Colgate University: that only 4.2% of the student body was Black, but 50% of the accusations of rape were against Black men. She further wrote:

Why is it when white men rape they are violating a norm, but when brown men rape they are conforming to one?¹³

Amia Srinivasan: Feminism for Men

Of herself, Amia Srinivasan wrote: “I knew I had succeeded when a friend remarked that I wasn’t really Asian. I was white, ‘because you’re cool’. I also have friends who joke that I’m ‘basically white.’ Maybe it isn’t a joke.¹⁴”.

In an interview in the Paris Review, Srinivasan tells the interview “I had no relationship to feminism growing up. I remember distinctly a French teacher in school—I guess I was in sixth form—asking which of us identified as feminists. And we looked at her as if she was asking, Which of you identify as Levelers? Right? Some historical category that just seemed completely inappropriate and also deeply unsexy. And then, when I was an undergraduate, I’m horrified to say that among the mainstream humanities students, feminism wasn’t seen as something very intellectually serious.”¹⁵

These two quotes, taken together, tell us something about Srinivasan, the way she sees herself and the way she wants other to see her. Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex (subtitled “feminism in the twenty-first century”) is the only “feminist” book that men repeatedly recommend to me. I put feminist in quotes because I am surprised Srinivasan is considered a feminist.

The thing is: she’s not against feminism. She’s instead someone who is advocating for equity in sexual relations. It’s a sociological book, but one that’s been put into a category it doesn’t fit into. To do so, her essay focuses on men in a way that no other feminist literature I’ve read does.

The Right to Sex is a book of essays; the first essay is The Conspiracy Against Men. Here, she immediately launches into false accusations against men. Srinivasan begins that essay by saying that a woman who came forward about a rape years later was demonstrably false. She admits the man is “narcissistic and manipulative”. Without other evidence (outside the accuser waiting to come forward and the guy being a jerk, so Srinivasan wrote that the accuser had a reason to “lie”), has decided the accuser lied. Srinivasan’s opening is telling of the rest of her book.

The reason that men recommend this book to me: its generally sex-positive, and its sympathies lie with them. In the titular essay, The Right to Sex, she brought the undesirability of Asian men in varying contexts. There’s the of the “world’s most famous incel”, Elliott Rodger. Srinivasan explained how he had been bullied by boys and men, yet, felt rage at the girls and women who denied him sex. He felt bad about himself because of boys and men, he expected women to make him feel better (analysis mine). Then there’s undesirable Asian man. Grindr and “sorry, no asians” on dating profiles. In The Politics of Desire, she described, at length, the West’s view of Asian men as undesirable. In Talking to my Students About Sex, she sympathizes with men who feel as if they are supposed to perform as well as porn stars.

Look, I get it. That Asian men are underprivileged in the dating market is a matter that deserves attention. I think bell hooks better articulated what Srinivasan (I think) was trying to do:

Women active in the feminist movement have not wanted to focus in any way on male pain so as not to deflect attention away from the focus on male privilege. Separatist feminist rhetoric suggested that all men share equally in male privilege, that all men reap positive benefits from sexism. Yet the poor or working class man who has been socialized via sexist ideology to believe that there are male privileges and powers he should possess solely because he is male often finds that few, if any, of these benefits are automatically bestowed on him in life¹⁶.

To bell hooks’ list “poor or working class man”, I would add men of color, and that addition is usually added by feminists of color (hooks, Srinivasan, Davis included). In The Will to Change, bell hooks (link to my notes on the book) wrote about an analogous movement of thinking that was about the challenges men face under the patriarchy. It’s since died out - which is unfortunate. Unlike the men’s right movement of today (which is about how women oppress men, eg., denying them sex or reducing access to children post-divorce), the men’s movement of the 1970s aimed to address how the patriarchy hurt men, and how men could be act toward the betterment of humankind and also be personally happier.

Another example: the questions the handling of one of India’s most famous rape case: that of Nirbhaya, the 23-year-old student who was abducted, raped, tortured, and killed in 2012. Srinivasan instead (indirectly) pled for sympathy for the rapists, in that punishment for the rapists would be tantamount to punishment for his family, and the primary reason he was punished was that he raped a woman of a higher caste¹⁷. Apparently, Srinivasan has forgotten that this man didn’t consider his wife and child when he decided to rape, torture, and brutally murder a woman who was simply out and about with a male friend and wanted to catch a bus home. She argues that he wouldn’t have been punished if he had raped his wife. Correct: martial rape is not illegal in India. However, her argument gets sloppy. Wouldn’t the feminist line of thinking advocate for the equality and safety of all women? That instead of withdrawing all consequences for rape, that the rape of wives, lower caste women, the impoverished be taken as seriously as the rape of higher caste woman? Instead of keeping a rapist in society as a provider¹⁸, a better solution would be governments and societies that supported (economically, but with other resources as well) women without male partners and their children.

Srinivasan’s viral essay (The Right to Sex) that led to this book cites Rebecca Solnit’s essay Men Explain Lolita to Me. Solnit wrote: “you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you” just as “you don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you”. Then, Srinivasan proceeds with the sandwich analogy (even after admitting it’s a weak analogy): that if your child came home and told you other people all shared their sandwiches, but not with your child, then you’d be upset. Especially if your child were “brown, fat, or disabled” (p 86 - 87).

I think the best response came from Rebecca Solnit. Solnit’s response:

Srinivasan is arguing that maybe everyone should have a sandwich, and maybe they should, but my one point was that, when you yourself are the sandwich, you have the right to decide who gets a bite of you.

A “sandwich” is an object with no agency, will, or ability to self-determine. It reminds me of the similarly terrible analogy of “consent as tea”, which fails for many, many people outside the West, as tea is nearly forced upon guests, or you feel compelled to drinking tea as a guest because declining would be a terrible faux pas.

Sex is a verb, not a noun, and humans are not tea or sandwich (strangely English, these analogies) - we’re not objects to be shared on a playground. It cannot be a right, I cannot see how a government can regulate access to sex in the way they can, say, health care or access to education. Race, sex, fatness, ability, class, money, success, intelligence, etc., undoubtedly enter the equation of what each of us finds attractive or not. That is influenced by our larger culture: unconscious bias or blatant racism, sexism, classism, etc. So let’s address the larger culture and ensuing oppression instead of in-fighting about who is willing to fuck whom.

Srinivasan’s work is very much of its era, her thinking in line with middle class millennial excess: a call to individuality and introspection. It’s rest alone as a resistance, instead of rest as self-care before doing harder work necessary for greater change. I kept going back to the idea of privilege as I read Srinivasan’s work. That Srinivasan returned to the individual over the systemic, combined with her earlier view that feminism lacked intellectual rigorousness and her take on being adjacent to whiteness, led me to believe that she doesn’t want to take on the powers that be.

Her thought process missed the forest for the trees. Rather than focusing on systemic oppression, the oppression by those in power of everyone else, she focused on dynamics between people. Asian women toward Asian men, and vice versa, white gay men to Asian men, cis-lesbian toward transwomen. She doesn’t step back and think about why it might benefit the more powerful to keep the less powerful fighting amongst each other instead of fighting together against our collective oppression.

Srinivasan’s book as a contribution to feminist theory isn’t as effective as say, Andrea Dworkin, Angela Davis, or bell hooks. Dworkin, Davis, and hooks offer a path forward instead of staying in philosophical weeds (Srinivasan is a philosopher and professor at Oxford University). Their work serve as a call to action and activism, to working together against forces that would oppress us. When Davis wrote about white women who helped Black women, she did so with admiration. When Dworkin wrote about right wing women and their allegiance to the patriarchy, she wrote with empathy. They also both write of all groups through the lens of feminism, and with greater empathy for all - especially the working class and impoverished - groups that Srinivasan mostly left out of .

False Accusations, Women of Color, and the Anti-Rape Movement

The lived intersectionality of feminists of color can result in the inclination to speak on race and gender, and thus, they provide a more sophisticated, nuanced view on feminism. Through the works of Davis, Srinivasan, and others, a trend emerges: that feminists of color are caught between the desire to stop rape, especially since the threat of rape against them is higher than the threat against white women, and their sympathy and desire to protect and defend men of color. With Srinivasan, this resulted in the defense of men of color in gender relations. Davis presented the more nuanced, balanced view: she firmly stated that Black men also rape while also addressing false accusations against Black men as the specter haunting us today.

That false accusations are so rare and yet so heavily affect Black men is extremely unjust and downright horrifying In The Conspiracy Against Men, Srinivasan wrote of a UK Home Study that showed that only three percent of 2,643 rape reports were “probably” false, and none led to a false conviction. I know of a study from the University of Utah that showed similar numbers in the U.S. Srinivasan also wrote that the chances of being falsely convicted for murder are five times higher than being falsely convicted of rape. We also know this through DNA exonerations. Davis wrote that of the 455 men executed for rape between 1930 - 1967, 405 were Black men. The US legal system accepts that about 10% of convictions are false, what they didn’t tell me law school was that those false convictions disproportionally affect Black men and men of color¹⁹.

I’ve mentioned (repeatedly, sorry regular readers!) that I’m a survivor advocate and fairly involved in preventing rape. What I’ve found is that 68% of the survivors I’ve spoken to are Asian-American. I’m in California; our Black and indigenous populations are lower than the national average. However, our Asian-American population, particularly in the bay area and in and around tech, are much higher. What I’ve also found is that 88% of the accusations I’ve received are against white men. At the same time, survivors are much more afraid of repercussions when it comes to reporting their white rapists than they are of the far fewer Black, South Asian, and Middle Eastern men reported to me. Race affects reality of rape and reporting of rape all the way through.

In Women, Race & Class, Davis wrote of the “conspicuous” absence of Black women in anti rape movement. That they’re kept away because of false accusations and other racially-charged views against men of color is terrible. The word “conspicuous” is telling also.

Today, there are Black women and indigenous women and other women of color that are active in the fight against rape. My mentors on survivor advocacy have been a Black woman and an indigenous woman (the latter passed away recently). Yet, we’re far less conspicious, we’re not the ones that take the lion’s share of credit for the work.

As one example, you could refer to the way reporters have contacted me yet refused to finish their investigations and reports, rendering my work less visible and meaning I’m working with less community. Someone like me, a woman of color in the West, speaking up about harms to women of color in the West, still attracts less attention and far less support in the feminist movement here. Yet, here I am, writing to you personally instead of using institutional support. Which means that I’m still quite hopeful that I, even as a woman of color, will be able to affect the sort of change I look to make in the world.

1. At this point, there’s absolutely no way I’d trust the media to give us an accurate view of rape.

A while ago, I kept running into an independent news photographer at a coffee shop I’d frequent (to drink decaf coffee, I’m ridiculous). He suggested that if no one was willing to report on this, I should do it myself. So I did, and it was read over 80,000 times.

2. When I say “Asian American”, I mean all parts of Asia: East Asian, Southeast Asian, South Asian, the Middle East. However, most of the survivors I’ve spoken with are East and South Asian.

3. the notion that a white woman crying and complaining about a woman of color - when it’s the white woman who acted inappropriately toward the woman of color - will be effective in silencing the woman of color because the world at large is going to believe and support the white woman

4. U.S. DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Female Victims of Sexual Violence, 1994-2010,” 2013. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvsv9410.pdf

Originally, I had found more information on higher rates of rape of Black women on July 24, 2022 from RAINN https://www.rainn.org/news/many-black-survivors-reporting-raises-complicated-issues. HOWEVER, in response to the current presidential administration, RAINN has recently removed several links referring to trans folks, and sexual assault of racial minorities (and has been publicly criticized for doing so). RAINN has been accused of racial bias in the past (see this Business Insider report). Fortunately, the link was archived in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20241222172054/https://www.rainn.org/news/many-black-survivors-reporting-raises-complicated-issues

5. And of course, included indigenous/native peoples under colonialism.

6. Angela Davis’ current partner is a woman - Gina Dent. Meaning that Davis is queer. bell hooks said that she was “queer” in an interview, but that she had been celibate for seventeen years.

7. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (1984, reissued New York: Routledge. 2015), introduction.

8. Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. (New York: Vintage Books. 1983). p 183.

9. Ibid, p 93.

Davis wrote that in 1899 Pennsylvania, 91% of Black women were domestic workers (meaning maids, laundry women, et al). The only state in which Black women were not majority-employed in domestic service was Delaware, to give you an idea of how widespread the problem is.

10. Ibid, p 179.

Davis quotes directly from Brownmiller’s work, and I took the quote from Davis.

11. Ibid, p. 173.

12. Sebold was raped - the wrong man was convicted of her rape. The woman at the center of the Central Park Five rape was also raped, the wrong group of boys were convicted for this as well.

This isn’t that women are lying about being raped per se, it’s that the wrong men are too often convicted. Think of the (fictional) To Kill a Mockingbird - it’s something akin to that.

13. Srinivasan, Amia. The Right to Sex. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2021). p. 12.

14. Ibid. p. 109.

Srinivasan is the same ethnicity as I am: Indian, she grew in several places around the world (excluding India).

15. Haas, Lidija, and Srinivasan, Amia. A Woman and a Philosopher: An Interview with Amia Srinivasan. The Paris Review. September 22, 2021.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/09/22/a-woman-and-a-philosopher-an-interview-with-amia-srinivasan/

16. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (1984, reissued New York: Routledge. 2015). p. 75.

17. Castes are Hinduism’s very strictly structured class system. Indians - Hindus actually, only 79% of India’s population are Hindus - are born into a caste in a way that’s much more formal, with labels, than classes in the West are.

18. To clear up: I am not for the death penalty. Nor am I a huge supporter of carceral justice - the idea that locking someone away and releasing them after a period of time is a sufficient means to deter crime or keep society safe. At the very least, if we’re locking people way and releasing them, we as a society should try to actively have programming and support such that the person can change into someone who more safe for others to be around.

I believe that there should be some consequences for rape (and other crimes in which a victim is effected in a life-altering way - such as domestic violence, murder, etc.); and I do not believe that the solution is to allow someone who was credibly found guilty of a crime to continue with their life in the way they did prior to that crime.

19. We did, however, study racism by police officers, eg., in depth studies of LAPD and NYPD.