Eighty years before Jane Doe was sexually assaulted by seven fraternity brothers at Cornell, Recy Taylor was gang-raped by six white men in Abbeville, Alabama. Despite both women reporting these assaults to police, neither was adequately investigated or prosecuted; both received legal re-assessment after persistent women—Rosa Parks, in Taylor’s case, and four brave student journalists in Doe’s—spent years doing those investigations and building a case.
Taylor’s rape was part of the racial reign of terror of Jim Crow, while Doe’s reflects the contemporary persistence of rape culture and its pervasive presence in colleges and universities. It might thus seem strange to turn to Taylor’s rape as a resource in this moment, particularly as national attention on the Cornell case highlights patterns of treating such “elite” cases as important injustices, while similar cases targeting Black women (like the rape of Kendall Francis at LSU earlier this year) slip under the radar. But there are critical lessons from Taylor’s case—and more importantly, from our collective amnesia about Taylor’s case—that might be essential to understanding the discourse now unfolding around both the Cornell and LSU cases.
In Women, Race, and Class, Angela Davis names the centrality of the myth of the Black rapist not just as justification for the racial terror of lynching, but also as part of the bedrock of our collective conception of rape. As Danielle McGuire notes, “unsubstantiated rumors of black men attacking innocent white women sparked almost 50 percent of all race riots in the United States between Reconstruction and World War II.” This myth, Davis argues, was always a cover story, centering the rape of white women by Black men while training us to look away from the systematic rape of Black women by white men, and the institutional structures designed to protect white rapists. Davis reminds us that in seeking to render rape legible as a profound violation, early feminist theorizations of rape often drew on the myth of the Black rapist, treating it as a “paradigm case” of rape and constructing rape through narratives in which rape was a violent attack, and rapists were savage outsiders. (Susan Brownmiller, for example, evoked Emmett Till in order to articulate rape as a drive to possess and have power over a victim). Since then, feminists have in many ways been working to correct this theorization in order to better track the ways that sexual violation often operates through—rather than against—institutional and social hierarchies.
The myth of the Black rapist is still with us, in both familiar and new forms. Donald Trump, who once invoked the paradigmatic form of the myth when he took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to publicize the allegations against five men of color in the Central Park jogger case, now wields the same mythology to justify immigration crackdowns on the grounds that immigrants are rapists, or anti-trans policies by conjuring illusory fears about trans rapists in women’s bathrooms and locker rooms. Evoking these myths serves both to justify the scapegoating that stabilizes his regime—just as the myth of the Black rapist once justified lynching and racist laws—and to provide cover: in telling us that immigrants and trans women are rapists, Trump implicitly reminds us that therefore, he cannot be a rapist. If “rapists” are savage outsiders, monsters in alleyways and bathrooms, then whatever he (and other members of his administration) has been accused of, they are not “rapists” in the relevant sense.
The Cornell rape case is a stark reminder that our institutions still enable and protect sexual predators, that despite decades of feminist activism around Title IX and rape on campus, colleges and universities are still designed to prioritize their own interests rather than the rights of victims, and to protect the rights of the promising young men who remain the measure of these institutions’ success. The Cornell case’s leniency for the men accused of assault reflects the logic we saw on display in the case of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer caught raping another student, whose defense at trial included the claim that he was a “good kid” who didn’t deserve to have a promising future derailed by “20 minutes of action.” This logic reflects the assertion that these “good kids” cannot be reduced to being rapists, precisely because they do not reflect the cultural imaginary of the rapist operationalized in Trump’s attacks on immigrants, trans women, and the Central Park Five.
As intersectional feminists have been reminding us for generations, when we construct a concept or a theory or a social movement, it matters what we take the “paradigm case” of the relevant injustice to be: the case we assume to be “paradigmatic” will orient and shape our concepts, theories, and movements, will determine what we take the problem to be, and what kinds of transformations might address it. Davis argues that we, as a culture—and as a feminist movement—have tacitly taken the myth of the Black rapist as our paradigm case of sexual violence, such that we understand rape to be paradigmatically a violent crime committed by savage outsiders. This justifies a spectrum of scapegoating—from lynching to violent ICE raids to trans bathroom bans—and it provides cover for predators who do not fit this mold, whose rapacity is a protected feature of movie studios and private islands and Greek life at universities. The institutional protection and “himpathy” we offer such predators is part of the structure of this myth: if rapists are savage outsiders, then those who are not savage outsiders cannot really be rapists, or if they are, then that is not all they are. We practice not giving up on these predators—protecting their promising futures, their cultural legacies—even as we perform collective and institutional reckoning with the wrong of rape by disproportionately reporting on, investigating, prosecuting, and imprisoning those who can be cast in the mold of the savage outsider.
In this moment, as we sit with the social and institutional failures that protected the Cornell 7, it is worth asking ourselves what our collective conception of rape might be if we took Recy Taylor as our paradigm case, rather than the myth of the Black rapist. As Danielle McGuire argues in her excellent At the Dark End of the Street, Recy Taylor’s case provoked a national movement, led by Rosa Parks, which laid much of the organizing groundwork of the Civil Rights movement. There is, perhaps, an alternate version of our history in which this is the heroism for which we celebrate and remember Rosa Parks, that this is the paradigm case of both racial and sexual violence in our collective memories and movements. It is worth asking how we might have theorized rape if we had begun from Recy Taylor’s story, how much more quickly and systematically we might have conceptualized sexual violence as operating through institutional and social hierarchies, and recognized how often promising young men are predators amongst us, trained to see themselves as entitled to the bodies of others and protected by powerful men and the institutions they control.
Recy Taylor’s story was important in part because it was paradigmatic; in 1944, the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender called it “Dixie’s most blatant rape case.” Taylor’s case sparked a national movement as an example of the systematic sexual violation of Black women as a practice of racial and gendered terror: as Rosa Parks knew, its symbolic power lay in its ability to shed light on the broader pattern. Tarana Burke would build on this insight in proposing the phrase “Me Too” as a way to name the systematic prevalence of sexual violence against Black women and girls, inspiring a broader cultural reckoning with the ways that sexual violation is primarily practiced through and protected by social and institutional hierarchies. These practices point to the importance of paradigm cases that encourage us to attend to the systemic structures through which sexual violence operates, and to build collective practices of resistance and accountability that challenge and subvert these institutional structures. There are concrete lessons from this paradigm case that are useful for the students and feminists now organizing in response to the rapes of Jane Doe and Kendall Francis.
First, the rape of Recy Taylor serves as a stark reminder that there is no individual mechanism for protecting ourselves against rape. Those who argue that women should know better than to go to fraternity houses, than to drink or do drugs, than to walk home down a dark street, are conceptualizing rape as a question of risk management—a problem for individual women—rather than as a systemic practice of violence. This approach does not just frame rape in terms of victim-blaming: it obscures the degree to which the best hope for avoiding rape is, implicitly, to hope that some other woman is raped, not you. But Recy Taylor’s story should remind us that male predation and sexual entitlement has always been organized through an assumption of sexual access: As I’ve argued elsewhere, our conception of sexual consent and women’s bodily autonomy has always been premised on a raced and classed hierarchy, so that the right of some women to refuse is premised upon the inability of other women to do so. Thus, while the myth of the Black rapist constructs the rape of white women by Black men as a profound violation, Black women like Recy Taylor are raped systematically, interchangeably, and with impunity. Recy Taylor’s rapists enacted this hierarchy by pressing dollar bills into her hands after they assaulted her, so that they could later tell police that she was a prostitute. Jane Doe’s assailants texted their fraternity brothers about “free pussy” upstairs and then spread the word that she was a slut. In both cases, the practice of gang-rape ensured that the men could corroborate one another’s testimony about the victim’s unrapeability, and keep the subsequent investigation focused on the stability, credibility, and culpability of their victim.
Second, the formulaic, systematic nature of these rapes themselves should remind us that this is not a question of individually monstrous men, but of the systems and social practices through which men are trained to become rapists, and the social hierarchies they take themselves to be maintaining through this practice. The white men—some of them teenagers—who raped Recy Taylor had been taught to do so, just as under enslavement white men were trained by their fathers and grandfathers, as well as by the social norms of the time and the economic structure of slavery, to rape slaves. College fraternities and athletics remain core pipelines to social, political, and economic power, which train, enable, and protect men in predatory practices as part of the structure of that power.
Third, the practices of resistance that shaped the response to Recy Taylor’s rape offer models for contemporary organizers. Taylor reported her rape not to the sitting sheriff, but to the former chief of police, who had a better record for taking Black testimony seriously; Rosa Parks acted as an agent of the NAACP to investigate both the rape and the failures of local law enforcement in prosecuting it. Both women worked around the institutions they knew were designed to silence them, relied on practices of collective organizing, and built a national movement that put pressure on those institutions by making them an example of a broader pattern of systemic and institutional violence. Cornell and LSU’s failures are not isolated incidents, but reflections of the ways that university responses to sexual violence are designed to protect the interests of the institution, not the victim. This is an opportunity to name and challenge the logics of that system, and to build independent and perhaps insurgent models of accountability that center the needs, experiences, and expertise of victims, and remain focused on the systemic and institutional structures that train, enable, and normalize sexual violence.
The Gender, Sexuality, and Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender, gender identity, and sexuality, issues of gender and sexuality injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender and sexuality injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series co-Editors Elisabeth Paquette or Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse.
Jordan Pascoe
Jordan Pascoe is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Binghamton University. She is the chair of the APA Committee on Women and Gender and co-director of the Society for the Philosophy of Sex and Love. She is the author of Kant’s Theory of Labor and The Epistemology of Disaster and Social Change, and of several articles about sexual violence and the limits of the consent model.
