But in passing in a New Yorker article, Harvard Law School criminal law professor Jeannie Suk drops a bombshell: on average, male students accused of sexual assault look less like Haven Monahan than like, say, Heisman Trophy-winner Jameis Winston. From The New Yorker:
Shutting Down Conversations About Rape at Harvard Law
BY JEANNIE SUKThis is a piece on a subject about which I may soon be prevented from publishing, depending on how events unfold. Last month, near the time that CNN broadcast the documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which focuses on four women who say their schools neglected their claims of sexual assault, I joined eighteen other Harvard Law School professors in signing a statement that criticized the film’s “unfair and misleading” portrayal of one case from several years ago. A black female law student accused a black male law student of sexually assaulting her and her white female friend. The accuser, Kamilah Willingham, has graduated from the law school and is featured in the film. The accused, Brandon Winston, who spent four years defending himself against charges of sexual misconduct, on campus and in criminal court, was ultimately cleared of sexual misconduct and has been permitted to reënroll. The group that signed the statement, which includes feminist, black, and leftist faculty, wrote that this was a just outcome. …
But last week the filmmakers did more than understandably disagree with criticism of the film, which has been short-listed for the Academy Award for best documentary. They wrote, in a statement to the Harvard Crimson, that “the very public bias these professors have shown in favor of an assailant contributes to a hostile climate at Harvard Law.” The words “hostile climate” contain a serious claim. At Harvard, sexual harassment is “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including verbal conduct that is “sufficiently persistent, pervasive, or severe” so as to create a “hostile environment.” If, as the filmmakers suggest, the professors’ statement about the film has created a hostile environment at the school, then, under Title IX, the professors should be investigated and potentially disciplined.
It’s funny how you used to hear all the time about the dangers of any “chilling effect” on freedom of expression, but now you hear all about how allowing freedom of expression creates a “hostile environment” and the phrase “chilling effect” has vanished.
Professor Suk goes on to argue that the current campus atmosphere of Always-Believe-the-(self-proclaimed)-Victim is disproportionately bad for black men:
It is as important and logically necessary to acknowledge the possibility of wrongful accusations of sexual assault as it is to recognize that most rape claims are true. And if we have learned from the public reckoning with the racial impact of over-criminalization, mass incarceration, and law enforcement bias, we should heed our legacy of bias against black men in rape accusations. The dynamics of racially disproportionate impact affect minority men in the pattern of campus sexual-misconduct accusations, which schools, conveniently, do not track, despite all the campus-climate surveys. Administrators and faculty who routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases, including my colleague Janet Halley, tell me that most of the complaints they see are against minorities, and that is consistent with what I have seen at Harvard. The “always believe” credo will aggravate and hide this context, aided by campus confidentiality norms that make any racial pattern difficult to study and expose.
That’s not exactly transparent prose, so let me elucidate: what Professor Suk has privately heard from professional campus rape experts and what she has seen at Harvard is that most of those accused of sexual assault don’t look like Haven Monahan, but are instead minorities. And the context of the paragraph suggests that a large fraction of this minority majority of accused student rapists are black.
COMMENTS:
* All there is here is a massive wreck at the intersectionality of feminism and black. There aren’t enough non-existent white men like Haven Monahan to blame all the time.
One of my pet theories about the genesis of the mania about rape culture is that this is how white men in frats get the blame for black men raping white women on campus.
* “It is as important and logically necessary to … recognize that most rape claims are true.”
How does she know? How does anyone know? I find it hard to see how anyone does. She surely can’t mean that most claims result in a conviction in a court of law, does she?
* It is a good thing Jeannie Suk is
1) female
2) Asian
3) tenured
or she would already be a non-person.
The Overton Window truly is shifting. Trump has show that you can tell the truth.
* The left cares about rape in the same way they care about slavery. We know slavery was bad 150 + years ago , it still gets more air time in the usa media than the 650,000 people living in slavery in present day Islamic republic of Mauritania.
* The demographic thing suggests that the accusations are more likely to be true than some of us have assumed — otherwise it’s unlikely that the numbers would closely track real world sexual assault demographics, rather than the demographics of the men histrionic, sheltered coeds are most likely to hook up with.
* Possibilities, neither of which are things that can be said in public:
1. Black college boys are more confident that she wants the D. Often this may be true, sometimes it’s not. (Applies especially to athletes, super-especially to star athletes)
2. Drunk Janet gets a case of jungle fever, hungover Janet would never do that to Brad. That Jamal is a rapist.
* When a black man rapes a white woman, everyone needs to keep it quiet because it violates that man’s civil rights to have to deal with the sheer horror of being accused of rape. The victim doesn’t have any civil rights because she is white.
Likewise, if we tell white women that black men are targeting them, we’re preaching hate. Supposedly 91% of rape victims are white. Liberals may say “well, minority rape victims are less able to report the crime for fear of revenge” while trying to convince us that most wife-beaters are beer-guzzling white males.
I think soon we will realize that mainstream American liberalism is all about race, and even the feminists will find themselves at cross-purposes. There will be associations of “women of color”, but they will be more focused on protection for rape victims and battered women’s shelters than on getting Equal Pay or maternity leave legislation through Congress. Just like environmentalism lost the war against aggressive immigration, white feminists will lose the battle against all of the non-white men.
* I bet, if you asked her, she’d say that, while the reports against black men are mostly true, there are a higher number of actual rapes by white men, but they never get reported because our racist patriarchal system makes women afraid to report rapes by white men. They’re just too intimidated by the power white men have over them.
* Pretty hilarious the way the left demands that cops stop shooting people… so of course crime skyrockets in black neighborhoods and lots more black people die. The left also demands that we punish gun crime more harshly and pass lots of new anti-gun laws… which of course if enforced will fall heavily on black neighborhoods and send lots more black people to jail. And here we have the left demanding that rape be punished more severely and all accusations be believed… which means lots more innocent black guys getting railroaded by the system. Just insane.
* As with a lot of Korean & SE-AZN profs her command of the American professional idiom is terrible: “the filmmakers did more than understandably disagree with the criticism”–what’s she saying, that the flavor of their disagreement was not “understandable” (N.B. she relies on its weasel-word bureaucratic connotations, not literal meaning)? Or that it was a better-than-understandable kind of disagreeing and if so, whence her protest?
* Right, the “not classic French prose” of Suk had me thinking at first that she was Vietnamese and engaging in some payback.
Her main stylistic problem is that she qualifies her sentences as she writes them, instead of using subordinate clauses or separate sentences. It’s as if she is speaking linearly and has to front load all of her qualifications as she moves along so she won’t be shouted down. Two ways to fix that: #1 – Speak more simply. #2 – Start with the neutral sentences and build to the debatable ones.
“the filmmakers did more than understandably ….. ” means that, hey, some people made a film, and they were criticized, and they disagreed — this is understandable. But they went further and accused anyone who criticized the film of enabling hostile environment, etc. etc. There are a lot simpler ways of expressing this.
Another problem with her style is her dependence on endless qualification: not just germane qualifications, but sidebar references to all kinds of things that could easily be left out. Try to make one point at a time. A third problem is her reliance on jargon: “mass incarceration”? Brother.
* “The dynamics of racially disproportionate impact affect minority men in the pattern of campus sexual-misconduct accusations….”
The woman who wrote that is a professor at Harvard Law School. Let that sink in. That might be the worst sentence ever to appear on this blog.
* She is attempting to say that there’s a contrast between the racist attitude that disbelieved the rape claims of women against color, and the racist attitude the believed rape accusations against men of color, and she is trying to use the latter against the former. Which is fine, that argument has been made on this blog many times in the past year. But there was a much better way of doing it. Moreover, by invoking “mass incarceration” she is merely pandering.
