“WE LIVE IN A COUNTRY FULL OF RACISM, BUT NO RACISTS; RAPE, BUT NO RAPISTS.”

[ismnotwasm]

As a society, we (mostly) acknowledge that corrosive, potentially deadly racism, as an abstract concept, exists. But of course, everyone worth mentioning abhors it! How can you call this a racist society, when we have a 50-year-old Civil Rights Act and a Black president and everything? Michael Brown, Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, were all killed in unfortunate individual misunderstandings. Or, if you insist on finding a pattern here, the unfortunate result of the victim’s bad choices.

Same goes for rape—we believe it’s a horrible thing that definitely happens, and to be sure, no one is in favor of it. So when feminists talk about “rape culture,” they’re just being their usual, hysterical selves, exaggerating to the point that reasonable people can’t take them seriously. But as soon as someone says they were raped—whether it’s a woman in college, a male celebrity, or an 11-year-old girl, we react with disbelief, immediately trying to reframe the story as an unfortunate individual misunderstanding. Or, if you insist on finding a pattern here, the unfortunate result of the victim’s bad choices.

We live in a country full of racism, but no racists; rape, but no rapists. And the common denominator is power. To believe a rape survivor’s word over that of her male classmate, colleague, teacher, or superior officer is to upset the natural order of things, privileging the voice with less cultural authority over the one we expect to have all the answers. Likewise, believing Dorian Johnson’s testimony over Darren Wilson’s means rejecting lessons we’ve been taught from childhood, both explicitly (the police are there to help you) and implicitly (White people are more trustworthy than Black people).

We will go to truly amazing lengths to stick to this pattern of individualizing the problem and/or finding ways to blame the victim. As Katherine wrote recently, in piece that also connected these victim-blaming dots, that’s because to do otherwise would challenge our belief in the “just world hypothesis” — the fantasy that we live in a fundamentally just world in which terrible things must happen for a reason — which serves as a security blanket we wrap tightly around our eyes.

http://feministing.com/2014/12/11/we-live-in-a-country-full-of-racism-but-no-racists-rape-but-no-rapists/

[YoungDemCA]

1. K&R.

Thanks for this thread.