White Rapists & 'Colored' Victims

how the roots of rape are tied to power & vulnerability, and how to end rape.

Joanna Bourke, author of Disgrace: Global Reflections of Sexual Violence

The Shame & Stigma of Rape

The hardest part of coming forward and speaking about rape is the stigma and the shame. Oh, I don’t only mean that stigma that’s been around as long as recorded history, that anyone who comes forward is crazy and a liar, there’s that too. What I’m talking about is how too much of the uninformed public thinks that if you’re a survivor, you’re constantly in pain and suffering. It’s how if you dare to speak up about sexual assault, the new stigma is that you’re damaged goods because of the trauma.

It’s that every time I get on the phone with a professional contact or a survivor I’m helping, they ask me how I started doing survivor advocacy/anti-rape work. Then, we have to pause while they give me their very well-intentioned and sincerest condolences and I try to quickly change the subject because I’m afraid they’ll think I’m crazy if we linger over it too long. Because frankly? I’m proud that not only did I “survive” rape (as if I any other choice except surviving) and everything that followed - but I turned it into a positive. I used that as inspiration to help other survivors, for activism, and made it my life’s work to stop rape.

I don’t want your pity, because nothing makes me shut down faster than being pitied. I want my strength acknowledged, I don’t think of myself as someone to be pitied. I want the pity and shame to be put back where it belongs, onto the people that perpetuate rape and rape culture. As Giséle Pelicot, French survivor of serial rape, famously said:

“I wanted all woman victims of rape – not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels – I want those women to say: Mrs Pelicot did it, we can do it too. When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame, it’s for them.”

Until we stop misplacing the shame and fear of speaking openly about rape, we can’t do what needs to be done to stop it¹.

The fear of shame that sexual violence will bring on one’s self and one’s community precedes any actual attack. This makes sexual violence a particularly effective tool of oppression - it terrorizes individuals, families, and communities that have not been directly molested.²

I spend a lot of days speaking about rape. I’m writing this piece to speak up to one of the patterns I’ve seen, one that’s backed up by history and data: that the roots of rape lie in culture, and in power and domination. Rape is most often a person with systemic power over another choosing one of the most heinous acts imaginable as a display of that power and domination over someone who is more vulnerable. We see this in the way that race and rape intersect, in particular, but we see it through other intersections.

White Rapists

Most histories of feminism suggest that women began speaking up about sexual assault during second-wave feminism, or the 1970s. Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975), Susan Grifin’s Rape: The All-American Crime, and Diana Russell’s The Politics of Rape were landmark books and essay on the subject, Take Back the Night marches were arranged. Then, third wave feminism gave birth to the #metoo movement.

The reality is the second-wave is when white feminists, that is, a category of white, middle class, heteronormative feminists that focuses on feminism for (so #notallwhitewomen are #whitefeminists) began speaking up. In her Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center, bell hooks defined white feminism as

“the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle- and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life.³”

As Angela Davis pointed out in both her 1983 book Women, Race & Class, and her 1975 essay Joan Little: The Dialetics of Rape, Black women had been speaking up and fighting against their rapes in the movement against racism and sexism for well over a century.

During the 1866 Memphis TN race riots, violence was rampant. Five Black women: Frances Thompson, sixteen-year-old Lucy Smith, Lucy Tibbs, Rebecca Ann Bloom, and Harriot Amor spoke at a Congressional hearing about the sexual violence they were subjected to by white men during the riots⁴.

In Joan Little: The Dialetics of Rape, Davis wrote of not only about the prison rape of Joan Little, who killed her prison guard rapist, but of Cordella Stevenson, who had been raped and then lynched in the American South of in the 1900s. We also know that it was common for slave masters to rape their slaves. This was rape that was financially profitable, because the half-white offspring of rape would fetch a higher price in slave trade.

Is this because of racism? In part. A Swedish study shows a significant relationship between “modern racism” and blaming rape victims, which they believed to be a form of sexism⁵. There’s a connection between racism and misogyny (the dislike, contempt for, and ingrained prejudice against women), as both are ideologies of domination. Last week, Cody Wayne McCollom, 37, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, was sentenced to 60 years in prison for the repeated rape of a fourteen year child. The week before, Jeremy Skibicki, who also frequented white supremacist websites, was sentenced to life in prison for the rape & murder of four Canadian indigenous women.

Reading the above examples I gave, I suppose you could say that that was history, or that those are a few extreme examples. I mentioned that I am a survivor advocate. The very first mini-essay I ever wrote - outside of an assignment or something I kept private - went somewhat viral. Over 100,000 views because it was shared by some thought leaders and reporters.

The topic was the relationship between race and rape that I’ve seen in years of advocacy. That over 68% of the highly educated, extremely professional middle class survivors that reached out to me were Asian-American women. The men who rape are equally educated, and sometimes multi-millionaires and heads of large companies. They were often serial offenders, who raped multiple women. Thus, the rapes were that of power and opportunity. They were of targeting based on stereotypes of Asian-American women (submissive, more likely to stay silent or not be believed).

What I didn’t include in that first essay is that 88% of the rapists they reported to me are white men.

Rape Around the Globe

It’s too simple, however, to merely say that rape by white men is rooted in racism alone.

Today, Black women continue to be sexually assaulted — and, in some cases, even murdered—by white men who know that, in all likelihood, they will never have to face the consequences of their crimes⁶.

It’s the latter part of Davis quote - have to face the consequences of their crimes - that I believe explains why white men raped Black women historically. Because of the interplay between race and rape, white men are more likely to get away with raping women of color than they would white women. White men have the power to “get away with it”, whereas Black men are disproportionality falsely accused of rape⁷.

An example of this phenomenon comes from American law, which ruled and upheld through 1968 that the rape of non-indigenous women would be subject to a higher penalty under the law⁸. Today, American Indigenous woman experience more sexual abuse than any other racial group in the United States. Although RAINN (the largest anti-rape non-profit in the US) has removed the article from their website in the post-election, data from the Department of Justice also shows that Black women are higher risk for rape⁹. This isn’t only an American phenomenon: in South Africa, Black women were 4.7 times more likely to be raped than their white counterparts¹⁰.

Going outside of the United States, the way that power and vulnerability allow for rape to flourish shows up under certain conditions. Joanna Bourke’s Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence has several examples of this:

• After the 2010 Haitian earthquake, about one-third of the Haitian population was raped. “Large proportion” of the rapes were committed by UN peacekeepers¹¹.

• In the Winter Soldier’s Commission, American soldiers blamed racism and the trauma of war for raping Vietnamese women. That doesn’t explain why they also raped 1/3 of American women serving alongside them¹².

• South Africa has higher levels of rape per capita during peacetime than any other country in the world. In Cape Town - population 2.5 million, there are ten new cases of “corrective” rape of lesbians, bisexuals, and trans women¹³.

• In India, there is an ongoing problem of the rapes of “third gender”/intersex/trans women by police officers. There have also been high profile cases of police officers raping women over a period of decades in the country.

• In the Congo, the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 22% of men were raped during the (1997 - 2002) war, and 30% of women¹⁴.

• Regarding sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in the U.S. between 1850-2002: four out of five victims were boys¹⁵.

• During both US slavery and the sexualized torture of detainees during the US’s “War on Terror”, white women victimized Black slaves and Middle Eastern detainees¹⁶.

Notice what happened through the incidents I related? That I started off with the rape of women, then got into the rape of LGBTQ+ folks, and then the rape of men and boys by men, then the rape of men by women? And notice the overall pattern? That in each of those stories of systemic rape, the parties enacting the sexual violence had power over the parties they abused. This was irrespective of gender: women were abusive, too, when they had greater power than the men they abused.

I am overall a fan of second-wave feminism, although it suffers two major problems¹⁷: (1) a lack of inclusivity and an over focus on white feminism. This is perhaps why I gravitate toward the Black and Jewish feminists of that era: Angela Davis, Andrea Dworkin, bell hooks, Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective, Adrienne Rich. The second problem was the anti-sex, separatist part, the part that blamed men for systemic lack of equality for women. This continues to be a problem with third wave white feminism, the attitude that it’s the intrinsic nature of men to be awful and that women are superior. That attitude/belief is rooted in white feminism, which puts white men in opposition to white women, and leaves out the intersections of identity.

Feminist thinkers of color have the lived and learned experience of intersectionality. The attitude isn’t one that feminists of color of all eras shared, including Angela Davis, bell hooks, Amia Srinivasan, and Kumari Jayawardena. In Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, Jayawardena who acknowledged the work that men have done in the feminist movements of the “third world”. In Women, Race & Class, Angela Davis acknowledges the work of Frederick Douglass and the contributions of W.E.B duBois in helping Black women fight sexism.

The problem with that is one that bell hooks frequently brings up in her work¹⁸:

This is the most painful truth of male domination, that men wield patriarchal power in daily life in ways that are awesomely life-threatening, that women and children cower in fear and various states of powerlessness, believing that the only way out of their suffering, their only hope is for men to die…Women and female and male children…have wanted them dead because they believe that these men are not willing to change...It is not true that men are unwilling to change. It is true that many men are afraid to change.

And in Disgrace, Joanna Bourke (a white, British feminist who book Disgrace is very intersectional) writes further of the harm that male bashing instead of acknowledging the fears and constraints that men face does:

…male bashing doesn’t help us understand the complexity of aggressive sexual encounters. It is certainly not conductive to engaging in constructive dialogue with boys and men¹⁹.

Today, globally, one out of five women is a survivor of sexual violence. An estimated one out of thirteen men in the US are, and about one out of four non-binary people. What these numbers, taken with the data we have on women of color experiencing more sexual violence, shows is that the more vulnerable a person is, the more likely they are to be the victim of sexual violence.

In her work on intersectionality, Kimberlé Crenshaw described why. It is not simply the sum of racism, sexism, classism, disability, caste, religion, but that these factors are compounded. The more factors a person lives with, the more vulnerable they are to rape and a host of other societal ills.

Another factor we should add to that list of vulnerabilities is if someone is a survivor of sexual violence. To be raped also makes one vulnerable: research suggests that a person who has already experienced rape is more likely to be raped again than someone who never been raped. A survey of people who reported sexual violence to school officials found that almost 40% of students who experienced sexual violence took a leave of absence, transferred or dropped out entirely. In Sexual Justice, Alexandra Brodsky found related that even if a student graduated after they were raped, they were much more likely to have a GPA below 2.5 (out of 4.0), which is likely to have a detrimental effect on their careers. The effects of rape may not result in a lifetime of constant pain and suffering, but the effects last over a lifetime in a society that does not do enough to support survivors after the fact.

What Can We Do To Stop Rape?

The failure of so many ‘good people’ to listen to those who have suffered abuse is something to lament. So, too, is the reluctance of many of us to join movements aimed at eradicating sexual violence. ²⁰

Joanna Bourke wrote that in 1970s Britain, only one in three cases of rape that were reported to the police ended in a conviction. Today it is fewer than one in twenty. In the US, only 25 out of 1,000 rapists will serve any time in jail.

So what can we do? The most obvious thing is to work to fix the intersectional causes of rape: sexism, racism, classism, homophobia/transphobias, disability prejudice…and the -isms and -phobias. So now, through this essay, you can see why I write about intersectional feminism, emphasis on the intersectional: not only because of my lived experience as a lesbian of color, but because my work/activism showed me that women of color are greater risk, and experience greater inequality.

In Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence, Joanna Bourke pointed out that some countries have higher rates of rape than others. South Africa’s is one of the highest, Italy’s is higher (26% of all women, of over one of out four) than the U.S.’s, India’s is lower than the U.S.: India has 24,000 rapes out of a population of 1.2BN, and the U.S. has 83,400 out of 330MM (in 2011).

We can look to the work of anthropologists such as Peggy Reeves Sandy, Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke, and Christine Helliwell²¹, in communities through North and South America, Oceania, Asia, and Africa. In particular, Watson-Franke’s work suggests that cultures that are less dichotomous, with less emphasis on gender binary roles, that have greater equality amongst men and women, also have far fewer incidents of rape. As well, cultures place little less value on aggression; because women, too, commit sexual violence when they are in contexts that encourage aggression (eg, enslavement, war). Lastly, among the Gerai in Indonesia, to rape someone would call into question the rapist’s virility — that is, the shame is put on the person who raped instead of the person who was raped.

And so we go back to the idea of shame. It seems to me that if we’re going to stop rape, we need to feel shame over different things. More shame for raping someone than being raped, for starters. But also, less shame being vulnerable to racism, sexism/misogyny, transphobia/homophobia, classism, ableism. A less stratified, less elitist, society, one that doesn’t divide humans into haves and have nots, and shame the have nots.

For all of those things, as with everything I address both here and in my life, everyday, I believe the answer is education. I’ve been an advocate, accountability facilitator, and I educate communities, teams, and “leaders” on how to change culture, become stronger together, and to recognize the early warning signs of harassment and assault. I’ve seen attitudes toward sexual assault change post-#metoo, as people learned more the realities of sexual assault. Unlike most people, I can literally point to more than one instance through I which I was able to intervene and stop a rape, both in progress and from likely happening.

Hating one another isn’t the answer; dispelling ignorance and fear that eventually leads to hate is. By that, I don’t mean replacing one hate (say, misogyny) with another (say, man-hating). I mean hate, period.

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

― James Baldwin

And that’s not easy. But I’m trying. I hope you are, too.

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1. If you’re a long time reader, you might notice that I do not use trigger warnings. This is because (1) studies show that they don’t work (eg., add “TW/CW: rape” is enough to be a trigger on its own), and (2) until we’re willing to have hard conversations that feel emotionally tough sometimes, we can’t do enough to stop rape.

2. Bourke, Joanna. Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence. (London: Reakiton Books Ltd., 2022). p 29.

3. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. (Boston: South End Press, 1984. Republished, New York: Routledge, 2015). p 1.

4. Ibid. p 26.

5. Sjöberg M, Sarwar F. Two Sides of the Same Coin: The Relationship Between Modern Racism and Rape Blaming Attitudes among Swedish Students and Community Members. Psychol Rep. 2022 Feb;125(1):545-564. doi: 10.1177/0033294120978158. Epub 2020 Dec 13. PMID: 33308009; PMCID: PMC8793297.

6. Davis, Angela. Joan Little: The Dialetics of Rape. 1974.

From ed. Shulman, Alix Kates & Moore, Honor. Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution & Still Can. (New York: Library of America. 2021). p 281 - 286.

7. This isn’t to say that Black men don’t rape, they do. They are more likely to be falsely accused, and much of society believes Black men to be dangerous (which is a danger to them). It’s also that much of society thinks white men are safe…which isn’t necessarily true.

8. Bourke, p. 58. This was upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

9. 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

10. Bourke, p. 65.

11. Bourke, p. 44.

12. Bourke, p. 35.

13. Bourke, p. 64.

14. Bourke, p. 80 (ish)

15. Bourke, p. 80.

16. Bourke, p. 80, 108 - 110.

17. You could also say that the sex wars were a third problem, since they tore the movement apart from within. I didn’t include them because I didn’t want to take away from the point of this essay with a long detour into explaining the sex wars.

18. hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004). p. xv - xvii

19. Bourke, p. 105.

20. Bourke, Joanna. Disgrace: Global Reflections on Sexual Violence. (London: Reakiton Books Ltd., 2022). p 8.

21. Bourke, p. 191.