Duke Rape Case Brings Out Historical Stereotypes

Crisis, The, Jul/Aug 2006 by Wiggins, Lori D Roberts

Rape and racism are as historically akin in America as power and privilege, especially in the South, where a culture of oppression, often exacted in the form of human exploitation and violence has governed race relations for centuries.

There was a time in history when no consideration, neither in courts of law nor public opinion, would be given to the case in Durham, N.C., of three White Duke University lacrosse players accused of raping a Black exotic dancer. The alleged victim, a 27-year-old student at historically Black North Carolina Central University and the mother of two children, would have had nowhere to turn.

As the Duke case winds its way through the legal system, it's a vivid and sobering reminder of how our history is as much our present as it is our past.

"Even though the laws have changed, the stereotypes have stayed in place. African American women's bodies in this society still are not valued," says Reanae McNeal, an international performing artist and playwright, whose one-woman play, Don't Speak My Mother's Name In Vain, deals with the sexual assault of African American women.

Since before the institution of slavery, when Africans' native-nakedness, polygamy and tribal dance rituals were misinterpreted as evidence of uncontrolled hyper-sexuality, Black women have been portrayed as promiscuous "Jezebels."

The subsequent sexual victimization of African American women predates slavery and has survived the progress of the emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the civil rights eras and continues today.

That's why what's happening in Durham is "profoundly revealing," says Timothy B. Tyson, a senior scholar of documentary studies and adjunct professor of divinity and history at Duke University.

"There is a widespread and growing suspicion that something has gone very wrong in our society that this story reflects, regardless of the legal particulars," says Tyson of the case. "We act like we're in some kind of conservative period. But in truth ... we are in an environment that is much more free than it is just and safe."

- Lori D. Roberts Wiggins