WHITE SPACE: CAMPUS RAPE IN THE MEDIA

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of j the requirements for the Degree poll ^ |y\ Master of Arts

- & 5 5 In Human Sexuality Studies

by

Jillian Crystal Salazar

San Francisco, California

May 2017 Copyright by Jillian Crystal Salazar 2017 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read White Space: Campus Rape in the Media by Jillian Crystal

Salazar, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in

Human Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University.

Rita M. Melendez, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sexuality Studies

Assistant Professor of Sexuality Studies WHITE SPACE: CAMPUS RAPE IN THE MEDIA

Jillian Crystal Salazar San Francisco, California 2017

Using Critical Race Discourse Analysis, this study examines how campus rape is covered in the New York Times. Four case studies were analyzed involving rapes on college campuses. The race of the victims affected the media coverage: when victims were Black, stories were published during the trial, when victims were not Black, the stories were published after the trial; descriptions of perpetrators focused on their status as athletes not as rapists. Media discourse surrounding campus rape exacerbates racist stereotypes about Black men and Black women while eliciting sympathy and public action for victims who are white or have proximity to whiteness.

Keywords: racism; white supremacy; rape; sexual violence; critical race theory; critical discourse analysis

I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Chair, Thesis Q^mnittee Date PREFACE AND/OR ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I dedicate this thesis to the survivors of the cases that I researched. I poured over your cases, dug beneath the media portrayals of you and tried my best to amplify your words—the ways you wished to be portrayed. I hope that I did you justice. I hope the public will approach future cases with care and remember that there are people attached to these stories. You are all so much more than your stories.

I would also like to thank my incredible readers, Darius Bost and Rita Melendez. Thank you for the care you spent reading pages, and offering critiques and suggestions. My research would not have been possible without your keen eye for detail and pushing my work further than I could have ever imagined. I also owe deep gratitude to Jessica Fields, Calli Johnson, Nicholas Newton, Michelle Parra, Spencer Ruelos, and Avry Schellenbach, all of whom offered crucial feedback and suggestions while this project was in the formative stages. To my writing partners Alicia McPherson, Kathleen Morrison, and Solana Willis, your commitment to show up, shut up, and write together were invaluable. I hope I am half as inspiring as you all were to me. Thank you.

Thank you to my friends and family, all of whom had to make sacrifices for this thesis to happen. Sophia, Gabe, Jesse, Juj, Dominique, and Molly, thank you for your patience and support. I couldn’t have done it without you.

To Igby and Derrick, thank you for being my constant companions from start to finish.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables...... vii

Introduction...... 1

How Does the Media Relate to Campus Rape?...... 6

Overview of Case Studies...... 8

Methodology...... 17

Use of the New York Times...... 17

Collection Procedures...... 18

Analytic Procedures...... 19

Findings...... 21

Timing of News Coverage...... 21

Descriptors of Victims and Perpetrators...... 22

Discussion...... 26

Conclusion ...... 36

References...... 41 LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

1. Overview of Cases...... 9 2. Data Collection Details...... 18 3. Timing of News Coverage...... 22 4. Florida A&M University Victim Descriptors...... 23 5. Florida A&M University Perpetrator Descriptors...... 23 6. Penn State University Victim Descriptors...... 24 7. Penn State University Perpetrator Descriptors...... 24 8. Duke University Victim Descriptors...... 25 9. Duke University Perpetrator Descriptors...... 25 10. Stanford University Victim Descriptors...... 25 11. Stanford University Perpetrators Descriptors...... 26 1

Currently the issue of rape on college campuses draws wide support from the academy and beyond with a wealth of articles, books, documentaries, and news coverage on the topic. The attention to the issue of rape on college campuses has grown steadily since the

1980’s when the topic caught the attention of academics and women’s magazine writers.

The existing literature agrees that the focus on campus rape stemmed from the women’s movement in the 1970’s (Belknap & Sharma, 2014, p. 181). The women’s movement established “gender-based abuses” as legitimate social problems in the 1970’s (Belknap

& Sharma, 2014, p. 181). As existing literature explains, once the foundation of abuses based on gender was laid by feminists in the 1970’s, feminists in the 1980’s were able to show how rape perpetrated against college women was also a legitimate social problem

(Belknap & Sharma, 2014, p. 181). Notable literature pointing to the rape of college women at epidemic levels include Karen Barrett’s Ms. Magazine 1982 article “Date

Rape: A Campus Epidemic” and Robin Warsaw’s 1988 book I Never Called It Rape

(Barrett, 1982; Warshaw & Koss, 1988). The media frenzy over rape on college campuses converged with the new attention to date rape. This was the first time in history that white feminists wrote about the possibility of getting raped by someone known to the victim. The article in Ms. from 1982 states,

For once we were actually dealing with everybody’s favorite racist stereotype, a

black man who jumped out of the bushes and attacked women. The victims got a

lot of support, because everyone agreed that this was a bad thing. But the public

perception of rape continued to be that it was something done by minorities, poor 2

people, outsiders. The next step, the real challenge, was to try and get the same

support for women being victimized at parties by their peers (Barrett, 1982, p.

130).

When Ms. refers to victims’ “peers,” they are referring to white middle and upper class men. Black men who were strangers were not the only potential rapists, now it was considered an epidemic that fellow white male students could rape white women students.

The discourses surrounding campus rape grew out of white feminist scholarship that ignored the writings and contributions of women of color (J. C. Harris & Linder,

2017, p. 84). In her book, At the Dark End o f the Street: Black Women, Rape, and

Resistance—a New History o f the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise o f

Black Power, Danielle L. McGuire highlights the work of Black women in the fight against sexual violence. She writes, “Decades later, when radical feminists finally made rape and sexual assault political issues, they walked in the footsteps of generations of black women” (McGuire, 2010, p. 46). While the contributions of the feminist movement in the 1970’s and 1980’s cannot be understated, it is important to recognize that the roots of their activism began with Black women decades earlier. In her book Killing Rage:

Ending Racism bell hooks (1995) notes,

“There will be no feminist revolution without an end to racism and white

supremacy. When all women and men engaged in feminist struggle understand

the interlocking nature of systems of domination of white supremacist capitalist 3

patriarchy, feminist movement will regain its revolutionary progressive

momentum” (hooks, 1996, p. 107).

I argue, the only way that the anti-rape movement, and specifically the movement on college campuses, can move forward is to re-center women of color.

Black women’s stories and contributions to the campus rape movement are complicated by what Rebecca Ann Wanzo describes as “affective agency—the ability of a subject to have her political and social circumstances move a populace and produce institutional effects” (Wanzo, 2009, p. 3). She explains that that white women have historically had more affective agency than Black women because their stories and suffering outrage the public more than Black women’s suffering (Wanzo, 2009). Hartman has argued that it is through “white or near-white bod[ies]” that we are able to detect suffering (Hartman, 1997, p. 20). Wanzo builds on Hartman’s theory by describing how the nation rallies around white women because they are viewed as deserving of sympathy. When the focus on rape on college campuses began in the 1980’s, Black women were not included in the American imaginary as victims of this epidemic. White women far outnumbered the number of Black women enrolled in post-secondary education (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). When women’s magazines began describing the rape on college campuses as an epidemic, they were describing rape against white women. As mentioned above, the focus on date rape and campus rape epidemic was about white men raping white women, thus intraracial rape of Black women was completely disregarded. Rates of sexual violence at historically Black 4

colleges and universities (HBCU) were not published until 2010, which is 25 years after the study that Ms. Magazine reported on in 1985. The study on campus sexual assault at

HBCU’s cites the dearth of research on the prevalence of rape against women of color

(Krebs, Lindquist, & Barrick, 2010, p. 9). The lack of discussion about the rape of Black women by Black men prompted Aishah Shahidah Simmons (2006) to direct the film No!

The Rape Documentary (Simmons, 2006). In the film, Simmons features Black women’s testimonies of intraracial rape and explores reasons for the silences on the topic of the intraracial rape of Black women including misogyny within racial justice movements, and the desire not to perpetuate racist stereotypes about Black men as rapists (Simmons,

2006).

The fact that the campus rape epidemic has become so far divorced from the needs and voices of women of color is alarming. If conversations about rape do not center women of color, then movements are necessarily missing the root causes of the epidemic.

Angela Davis (1983) reminds us that rape is always already buttressed by racism (Davis,

1983, p. 177). Davis writes,

Racism has always served as a provocation to rape, and white women in the

United States have necessarily suffered the ricochet fire of these attacks. This is

one of the many ways in which racism nourishes sexism, causing white women to

be indirectly victimized by the special oppression aimed at their sisters of color

(Davis, 1983, p. 177). 5

According to Davis, racism has always fueled sexism and sexual violence. The climate of sexism and sexual violence, “rape culture” as it is referred to now, is one of the results of racism. Thus, we cannot talk about campus rape without also talking about racism.

However, the current campus rape movement has not attended to racist histories in the past and continues to ignore the historical effects of racism in the present.

The history of slavery in the United States is related in a fundamental way to rape.

Black women have been subjected to various racist stereotypes throughout American history. West (2008) describes that from the time the first ship carrying enslaved people from Africa landed on the shores of the stolen lands of what is now United States of

America in 1619, Black women were raped by white men (Chrisler, Chrisler, Golden, &

Rozee, 2012, p. 294). The Jezebel stereotype was created in order to legitimize the sexual violence against Black women, and label them as promiscuous and un-rapeable (Chrisler et al., 2012, p. 294). The idea that Black women are “naturally lascivious” (Roberts,

1997, p. 31), “facilitates and rationalizes sexual violence against Black women” (Phillips

& Griffin, 2015, p. 39). While rape in the United States has a history that is tied to slavery, the sexual terror experienced by Black women at the hands of white men did not stop when slavery ended, and instead continued with groups like the Ku Klux Klan that raped Black women in the post-Civil War era (Davis, 1978, p. 25).

Black men are also affected by stereotypes that began as a result of slavery. Davis

(1978) explains how rape laws were designed to protect the property (e.g. women) of upper-class men and that Black men have been disproportionately accused of, and legally 6

and extra-legally executed for rape (p. 24). Further, after the end of slavery, fraudulent rape charges were used to justify violence and lynchings against Black communities

(Davis, 1978, p. 25). Collins (2006) helps us understand why the myth of the Black rapist began. She writes, “the myth of the Black male rapist who lusted after White women emerged during post-emancipation Jim Crow segregation as a tool for controlling Black men who were prematurely freed from the civilizing influences of slavery” (Collins,

2006, p. 166). When Ms. Magazine wrote in 1982 that they were trying to “get the same support” for white women raped by their white male peers, as the white women who were allegedly raped by Black male strangers, they evoke this racist history without ever realizing their complicity in the erasure of Black women’s struggles against sexual violence on college campuses. This racist historical context haunts the contemporary case studies I present in my thesis and further explains why race is inextricably linked to media representations of rape.

How Does the Media Relate to Campus Rape?

I first encountered the story of Betty Jean Owens in the Fall of 2016.1 was taking a course on the History of Sexuality and was assigned At the Dark End o f the Street by

Danielle McGuire. As I read about Owens story, how she was abducted from her college campus, brutally raped, then testified in front of an all-white jury, I was particularly struck that her story was not included in the academic literature on campus rape. I was in the beginning stages of writing my thesis and, as mentioned above, I noted that all of the existing literature marked the beginning of the campus rape movement in the early 7

1980’s. Considering that there were mass protests on the Florida A&M University campus in 1959 in response to her brutal rape, I was shocked that this organizing was not considered the beginning of the campus rape movement.

It was also around this time, November 2016, that Glamour published an article naming Emily Doe, the victim of the Stanford rape case, as a Woman of the Year. It was only a few months prior that Emily’s story was plastered all over the headlines and her victim impact statement went viral. I began thinking about the two cases in relation to each other, how one gained widespread national attention, and the other was relegated to one history book about Black women and the Civil Rights Movement. As McCombs

(2014) illustrates, the effects of the mass media range from influencing public opinion to affecting behaviors (p. 110). The public outrage of the Stanford case led California

Governor Jerry Brown to pass Assembly Bills 701 and 2888, which expanded the legal definition of rape and instated mandatory minimums for crimes when the victim is unconscious (Dobuzinskis, 2016; Ulloa, 2016). It was clear to me that public outrage can be incited by the media and lead to legislative change. My reflections on the Stanford case as well as the case of Betty Jean Owens led me to this study. This thesis explores how the media covers campus rape case. Further, I ask, how does the race of those involved affect how the media covers campus rape cases? Campus rape has become a

‘hot topic,’ but the issue of race has not been substantively addressed as a factor in how much attention a particular case receives. I contribute to the scholarly literature on violence against women on college campuses by bringing the issue of race to the 8

forefront of discussions on whether and how a rape case is represented in the media. My aim is to show the media’s relationship to racist stereotypes and its ability to conjure support for some and skepticism for others.

Overview of Case Studies

The four cases of rape on college campuses I explore are: Florida A&M

University 1959, Penn State University 1999, Duke University 2006, Stanford University

2015.1 chose each case because they met the following criteria: they involved a sexual assault (e.g. the crime that was litigated was sexual assault or rape); the sexual assault was on a college campus (e.g. the victim or perpetrator are college students, or the rape occurs on a college campus); and they were highly publicized (e.g. more than 10 news articles in the New York Times). My goal is to bring together instances of campus rape that included cases that easily come to mind when thinking about rape on college campuses, like Stanford, and cases that do not easily come to mind but fit the same criteria as other campus rape cases, like Florida A&M. My reasoning behind this eclectic archive was to compare the ways that campus rape victims and perpetrators are discussed in the national news depending on how legible they are as a victim. I used content analysis of news articles to explore the types of discourses that exist surrounding campus rape. Below is a brief overview of the four cases I analyzed for this study. 9

Table 1. Overview of Cases Florida Penn State Duke Stanford 1959 1999 2006 2016 Description of co-ed; accuser; woman; victim; Victim girl woman accuser woman Age of Victim 19 18 27 23 Mr. Description of youths; Parker/Nate players; student; Perpetrator(s) defendants Parker men swimmer Age of 16, 18, 19, 20, Perpetrator(s) 20, 24 19 23 20 Race of Victim Black White Black Unknown Race of Perpetrator(s) White Black White White

Case Outcome Guilty Acquitted Acquitted Guilty

Florida A&M University 1959 (FAMU). On May 3, 1959, the New York Times published a story with the headline “4 Whites Seized in Rape of Negro” (“4 Whites

Seized in Rape of Negro,” 1959). The headline, published in the Sunday paper on page

45, was pushed to the left-side margin next to a nearly full-page advertisement alerting readers to a “Spring Clearance Sale!” at the Foam Rubber Center. The news story begins this way:

A Negro co-ed was seized by four armed white youths early today and raped. A

deputy sheriff rescued the hysterical girl and captured the four youths after an

auto chase on the outskirts of Tallahassee. A special police investigator said the

four boys had admitted to raping the girl (“4 Whites Seized in Rape of Negro,”

1959). 10

Before the story broke in the New York Times on Mother’s Day 1959, 19-year-old Betty

Jean Owens attended the Green and Orange Ball at Florida A&M where she was a student (McGuire, 2004, p. 906). She and three of her friends were dressed in black tie attire and were parked near campus around 1:00 AM when they were approached at gunpoint by four white men (McGuire, 2004, p. 906). The four white men forced the two women to get out of the car, and ordered the two Black men to drive away. Ultimately, one of the women was able to flee, leaving Betty Jean Owens alone with her attackers (“4

Whites Seized in Rape of Negro,” 1959). The men abducted Owens, bound and gagged her with a baby diaper (one of the rapists was the father of two young children), and brutally raped her seven times, all before the sheriff arrived to arrest them (McGuire,

2010).

The story of Betty Jean Owens was newsworthy in 1959 for multiple reasons.

First, it involved a brutal, interracial gang rape. Second, there was a large response from the community—on the very next day, May 4, 1959, the New York Times reported on student protests at Florida A&M University demanding justice for Owens (“Negroes

Demonstrate,” 1959). Lastly, as the rape case went to trial, the House Judiciary

Committee in Florida got rid of a bill to abolish the death penalty in a state where capital punishment is a possibility in rape cases (“Death Penalty Curb Defeated,” 1959). This meant that the four men could receive the death penalty in a state where no white man had ever received capital punishment for raping a Black woman. By the time the rapists were found guilty, the story was featured on the front page of the New York Times and 11

was covered by Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights journalist Claude Sitton (Sitton,

1959c). In the end, the four men received life sentences for raping Betty Jean Owens—a harsher sentence than had ever been brought against a white man for raping a Black woman.

I chose to analyze Owens’s story as one of the case studies because her story has not been discussed in previous scholarly conversations about campus rape. Her story does not fit easily into the normative timeline of the campus rape movement because it happened decades before white feminists began organizing against rape on college campuses. I utilize her story to shed light on the anti-rape organizing that occurred in the late 1950’s and was led exclusively by Black students at Florida A&M University, a historically black university. I also utilize her story to show how major newspapers have covered cases of rape on college campuses over time.

Penn State University 1999 (Penn State). On Thursday, August 19, 1999, a young woman was in the process of moving into her dorm room at Penn State University

(Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016). A few weeks prior, a friend had introduced her to a young man, a wrestler at Penn State (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016). She thought he was attractive, and gave him her phone number (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016). He had called her a few times to hang out, but she waited until she had moved out of her mother’s house and into her dorm room to meet up with the young man (Cieply & Fleming, Jr.,

2016). 12

While she was unpacking, the young man began kissing her and taking off her clothes (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016). She told him she didn’t want to have sex because she didn’t know him that well, but she ‘didn’t want to leave it at nothing’, so she performed oral sex on him and then they agreed to meet up for a date the next night

(Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016).

The next night, August 20, 1999, she waited for the young man at the bar where they had agreed to meet at 10:00 pm (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016). While waiting at the restaurant for her date to arrive, a waitress came up to her and said that she looked sad; the young woman agreed, saying that she had been stood up by her date (Cieply &

Fleming, Jr., 2016). Her date did not arrive until midnight (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016).

By this point the young woman was ‘pretty drunk’ and wanted to go home, but her date said that she could come back to his place and sleep since she could get in trouble for being drunk on campus (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016). She remembers someone holding her up as she approached his apartment, someone giving her a T-shirt to sleep in, getting into bed, and falling asleep (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016).

The next thing she remembered was opening her eyes to see her date on top of her and penetrating her vaginally. (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016). Then she woke up again and someone else was penetrating her vaginally, and asking where her date was (Cieply

& Fleming, Jr., 2016). She then woke up alone, put on her clothes, remembered what had happened to her, and tried to leave her date’s apartment (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016).

The next thing she knew she was throwing up in the bathroom (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 13

2016). We know from the testimony of a witness that her date made her clean up her own vomit (Cieply & Fleming, Jr., 2016).

In October of that year, she reported the rape to the police and a few weeks later her date and the other man involved were charged with “rape, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, sexual assault and indecent assault” (Redden, 2016). On October 5, 2001, two years after she first reported the rape, her date was acquitted of all charges, and the other man involved was found guilty of sexual assault (Redden, 2016). From the time that the crime was reported and adjudicated, nothing about the case received national attention—her story was not reported in the New York Times.

Flash forward to August 2016, almost 17 years to the day since the young woman met her date, who arrived two hours late, and after drinking heavily, went back to her date’s apartment, where she was allegedly raped by her date and his friend, who she’d never met. Variety.com, a weekly entertainment magazine, posthumously published an article featuring this woman’s story, as told by her brother. Variety.com had obtained a copy of her death certificate noting her suicide by overdose of sleeping pills (Setoodeh,

2016). The story undoubtedly resurfaced on an entertainment blog 17 years after the incident due to the rise in notoriety of the man who was acquitted in her rape trial. That man was none other than Nate Parker, whose film, “Birth of a Nation,” was set to be released in November 2016. In previous interviews, Parker had been forthcoming about the rape case. However, it was on this day, the day that Variety.com broke the news of 14

the young woman’s suicide from 2012, that the New York Times published the first article about her case.

I chose to include the young woman’s case because, like Betty Jean Owens’ case, it had not been considered newsworthy prior to Parker’s rise to fame. I wanted to investigate why the media chose to cover a case that occurred so far in the past. I was also interested in how the gap in time between the incident and its reportage, and the context of its re-emergence shaped its mediation.

Duke University 2006 (Duke). March 13, 2006, “started off unspectacularly”

(Mangum & Clark, 2008, p. 15). Crystal, a mother of two, and a psychology student at

North Carolina Central University, had not yet received a freelance job for the day, but she began getting ready that morning just in case (Mangum & Clark, 2008, p. 15). She received a call in the afternoon to dance at a bachelor party for about six men. She agreed, and began making arrangements for a ride to the job that would begin later that evening on 610 North Buchanan Street in Durham, North Carolina(Mangum & Clark,

2008, p. 16).

As Crystal approached the house, she was surprised to see “at least 20 guys milling around in the backyard” (Mangum & Clark, 2008, p. 18). This was not the small bachelor party she had agreed to—this “looked more like a frat house with a bunch of teenagers out to have a good time at all costs” (Mangum & Clark, 2008, p. 18). Crystal and the other woman who has hired to dance that night began their dance routine amid shouts of “black bitches”, “n ”, and “We are going to stick this broom up your asses!” 15

(Mangum & Clark, 2008, p. 23). At one point the women were separated, and Crystal claimed that she was “forced into the bathroom with three of the partygoers” (Mangum &

Clark, 2008, p. 26). Mangum claimed that, while in the bathroom, three of the men from the party raped her vaginally and anally, possibly with a “foreign object” (Mangum &

Clark, 2008, p. 123). The other woman eventually found Crystal in the bathroom, helped her to the car, called the police, and Crystal was taken to Duke Medical Center. Over the course of the next few days, weeks, and months, Crystal worked with the Durham Police

Department on their investigation of the alleged rape (Mangum & Clark, 2008, p. 128).

Within weeks, the New York Times published their first article about Crystal’s case (Bernstein & Drape, 2006). On April 18, 2006, after two of the alleged assailants were indicted (Wilson, 2006b), reporters began camping out in front of Crystal’s house

(Mangum & Clark, 2008, p. 129). On April 27, 2006, Crystal left her home to go to a safe house and enrolled her two children in a different school in order to avoid the press

(Mangum & Clark, 2008, p. 129).

The media frequently highlighted Crystal’s story from 2006 to 2007, and on and off until 2016, 10 years after she was allegedly raped. Crystal maintains that from the beginning, she wanted nothing to do with any of the publicity surrounding the case—“All of the media attention felt as traumatizing as being raped” (Mangum & Clark, 2008, p.

128, 134).

I chose to analyze Crystal’s case because her story is one that many think of when it comes to campus rape. The story gained widespread media attention during the trial, 16

because, like the Florida A&M University case, the details of the case were salacious. My hope was to analyze her case with historical and contemporary examples to see how her case compared to others. Specifically, I wondered if there were any echoes in language and timing of coverage from the 1959 Florida case since both women were African

American and the men who allegedly raped them were white. I also wondered how the language and timing compared to a more contemporary example like the Stanford case.

Stanford University 2015 (Stanford). On the night of January 17th, 2015, a young woman was at home enjoying dinner her with her family (Baker, 2016). Her sister was in town, visiting for the night. Though she had planned to have a quiet night at home, she decided to join her sister at a party near their house since she only had one night with her (Baker, 2016). She “made silly faces, let [her] guard down, and drank liquor too fast not factoring in that [her] tolerance had significantly lowered since college” (Baker,

2016). The next thing she remembers is waking up in a hospital and being told that she had been assaulted. After undergoing an exam to collect forensic evidence, she was sent home and told to try and get back to her normal life. It was not until a week later, as she was scrolling through the news, that she learned the details of what had happened to her:

“[she] was found unconscious, with [her] hair disheveled, long necklace wrapped around

[her] neck, bra pulled out of [her] dress, dress pulled off over [her] shoulders and pulled up above [her] waist, that [she] was butt naked all the way down to [her] boots, legs spread apart, and had been penetrated by a foreign object by someone [she] did not recognize” (Baker, 2016). 17

It would take a year and half before the New York Times began covering the young woman’s story. The story was taken up due to public outrage that occurred over the short sentencing that the assailant received after conviction, and after the young woman’s victim statement had gone viral after being posted on Buzzfeed.com. The alleged perpetrator was charged with intent to commit rape of an intoxicated/unconscious person, penetration of an intoxicated person and penetration of an unconscious person

(Fantz, 2016). He was eventually convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious person, sentenced to six months in jail, and released after serving three months (Grinberg, 2016).

The victim statement went viral due to its haunting and graphic depiction of what happened to the alleged victim in her own words (Ruiz, 2016).

I chose to analyze the Stanford case because it was the most recent, highly publicized case of campus rape. I was also interested to see how this case, in which the victim’s race was not reported, would compare to the other three cases where the victim’s race was made public by the media.

Methodology

Use of the New York Times

I used the New York Times as my primary resource for collecting data because as of May 2016, the New York Times had the second highest readership in the United States after USA Today (Cision, 2016). The New York Times archive extends back to 1851; since my archive begins in 1959, the study required a news organization that operated since then. Additionally, the New York Times has received 119 Pulitzer Prizes and 18

citations since its inception, which is more than any other news organization (The New

York Times Company, 2017). The number of Pulitzer Prizes was important in my choice to focus on the New York Times because it was more likely to be considered a credible source of analysis for my readers. Lastly, I chose a news organization that is known for its national coverage (Chermak & Gruenewald, 2006, p. 441).

Collection Procedures

All articles were collected in November and December 2016. Articles were chosen using the New York Times search tool, filtering by keywords and date ranges. The date range that was used was the date of the rape through one year after the last significant update to the case. For three out of four cases, the last significant update to the case was the sentencing. However, for Penn State, this story did not make it into the New

York Times until 2016 when the alleged perpetrator, film director Nate Parker, was nominated for an Oscar. For this case, I collected all articles that were available from the date of the alleged rape through December 8, 2016.

Table 2. Data Collection Details # of Articles Case Date Range Search Terms Analyzed Florida 05/02/1959-06/15/1960 "rape", "Florida" 17 Penn State 08/19/1999-11/31/2016 "rape", "Parker" 14 Duke 03/13/2006-04/12/2007 "rape", "Duke" 16 Stanford 01/18/2015-11/31/2016 "rape", Stanford" 16

The Duke University case had a significantly larger number of articles written compared to the other cases (seventy-one total articles versus an average of sixteen total 19

articles among the other three cases). Due to the large number of articles posted about the

Duke University rape case, I assigned a number to each article that was generated by the

New York Times search (sorted by relevance), then used a random number generator

(Windows Random Number Generator Application) to pick sixteen (the average number of the other cases) cases to analyze. This left a total of sixty-three articles that were analyzed for this study, with an average of sixteen articles per case.

Analytic Procedures

Research on campus rape has focused primarily on prevalence and prevention

(Fisher, Cullen, & Turner, 2000; Belknap & Sharma, 2014; Carey, Durney, Shepardson,

& Carey, 2015; Oliver, 2016). The few studies that have focused on the media representation, have focused on how the media perpetuates “rape myths” (i.e. false ideas about rape, like victim’s “were asking for it”) (Malamuth & Check, 1981), or how media campaigns can help curb drinking on college campuses in hopes that it will lower the amount of sexual violence that occurs on college campuses (Glider, Midyett, Mills-

Novoa, Johannessen, & Collins, 2001). The foundational lens behind most literature on campus rape has historically been gender (Banyard et al., 2007), but little focus has been paid towards race and class differences in addition to gender. Literature about how race affects the various issues surrounding campus rape were virtually non-existent until earlier this year when a book was published that specifically talked about the intersections of race and campus rape (J. C. Harris & Linder, 2017). Taking a gendered approach to the issue of sexual violence seems fairly straightforward considering that 20

men are the primary perpetrators and women are the primary victims (Sinozich &

Langton, 2014); however, Freeman (1993) stresses the importance of examining intersecting oppressions when it comes to sexual violence stating that “adding race and class analysis will inevitably complicate readings devoted to gender, which might obscure meanings that seemed clear at first glance (p. 544).

In response to Freeman’s call for an examination of race and sexual violence, I have taken a Critical Race Discourse Analysis (CRDA) approach in this study. I merge

Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012), which attends to the idea that “racism is pervasive, systemic, and deeply ingrained” (2012, p. 89) with Critical Discourse

Analysis (van Dijk, 1993), which focuses on “the role of language, language use, discourse, or communicative events in the (re)production of dominance and inequality”

(van Dijk, 1993, p. 279). Bringing these two theories together, then, allows me to examine the role of media discourse in the reproduction of racism. Using CRDA as my primary lens for viewing the collected data allowed me to see how the race of the victims and perpetrators in each case affected how (and when) the cases were covered in the New

York Times.

In addition to using CRDA as the foundational lens with which I viewed the collected articles, I also used Grounded Theory as a method to code the articles (Corbin

& Strauss, 1990). I began with open coding to see what themes emerged from the data

(Corbin & Strauss, 1990, p. 12). Next, I went through each article in chronological order and underlined words and phrases from the text that referenced the victim or 21

perpetrator(s). I only highlighted references that were described or paraphrased by the author, but not from quotations of the author’s sources. I made this choice because I was interested in how the author described the victims, perpetrators, and incidents. Journalists are supposed to be unbiased in their coverage and represent the views of the media organizations who employ them. Hence, it was important for my analysis to focus on the descriptions used by the authors and not their sources.

Examining the descriptors used for the victims and perpetrators led me to analyze when each case became “newsworthy” (i.e. began being covered in the New York Times).

I noted when the incident occurred, when the sentencing occurred, and other important events to the case if applicable, and compared these dates to the date of the first article published in the New York Times.

Findings

Timing of News Coverage

Analyses indicate that the timing of when each case was covered in the New York

Times is of importance. Specifically, when Black women accused white men of rape

(Florida and Duke), the accusation and trial were newsworthy. The New York Times began covering the Stanford case when the perpetrator received a short sentence. For the

Penn State case, the New York Times only began covering this case when Nate Parker had the potential to win an Oscar for his movie Birth of a Nation. The crime was reported in

1999, but the New York Times did not report on the case either when it was originally 22

reported, in trial, or when Mr. Parker was acquitted. The New York Times also did not report when the alleged victim committed suicide in 2012. It was not until August 16,

2016, as Mr. Parker began taking interviews about his new film that Deadline.com and

Variety.com published an interview with the alleged victim’s brother stating that she had committed suicide.

Table 3. Timing of News Coverage Date of Date of 1st Time Between 1st Article and Case Rape Article Sentencing Florida 05/03/1959 05/03/1959 1 month before sentencing Penn 08/21/1999 08/16/2016 >15 years after sentencing Duke 03/13/2006 03/29/2006 >1 year before sentencing Stanford 01/18/2015 06/06/2016 4 days after sentencing

Descriptors of Victims and Perpetrators

Florida A&M University 1959 (Florida). While analyzing the articles for the

Florida A&M University (Florida) case, the descriptors that were used for the victim and perpetrator were most significant. Out of the 63 times she is referenced in the news articles, she is referred to most often as co-ed (n=28) and girl (n=28). I also noticed that her race is often mentioned as a descriptor (n=21) (e.g. “they abducted the Negro girl”;

“A 19-year-old Negro co-ed testified today”). Of all the descriptions, she was described with the following terms less than five times: victim, student, Negro. 23

Table 4. Florida A&M University Victim Descriptors______References to Victim (N=63) Percentage co-ed (n=28) 44% girl (n=28) 44% race mentioned (n=21) 33% victim (n=l) 2%

Out of the 72 times that the alleged perpetrators were mentioned, they are never referred to as “rapists”. Rather, they are referred to most often as youths (n=31), defendants (n=13), or men (n=10). Their race is referenced often as well (n=24). They were described with the following terms less than five times: boys, suspects, attackers, student, the four, teenagers, whites.

Table 5. Florida A&M University Perpetrator Descriptors______References to Perpetrators (N-72) Percentage youths (n=31) 43% defendants (n=13) 18% race mentioned (n=24) 33%

Penn State University 1999 (Penn State). Out of the 30 times the victim is referenced, she is most often referred to as accuser (n=14) or woman (n=l 1). She is referred to as a victim twice (n=2). Her race is mentioned only once (n=l). The only other term used to describe her is student (n=4). 24

Table 6. Penn State University Victim Descriptors______^____ References to Victim (N=30) Percentage accuser (n=14) 47% woman (n=l 1) 37% victim (n=2) 7% race mentioned (n=l) 4%

Out of the 120 times the alleged perpetrator is referenced, he is most often referred to as Nate Parker or Mr. Parker (n=l 13). His race is mentioned only once (n=T).’

Other terms used to describe him and the other man accused of raping the woman less than five times were: men, wrestler, and student.

Table 7. Penn State University Perpetrator Descriptors______References to Perpetrator (N=120) Percentage Mr. Parker/Nate Parker (n=l 13) 94% race mentioned (n=l) <1%

Duke University 2006 (Duke). Of the 104 times the victim is mentioned in the news articles, she is most often referred to as woman (n=53) or accuser (n=29). Her race is mentioned six times (n=6), and she is referred to as a victim only once (n=l). Other terms used to describe her less than five times were: stripper, dancer, single mother, and student.

1 Nate Parker’s race is only explicitly mentioned once, however, most articles included a photo of him so that his race is apparent to the reader. Mr. Parker is also fairly well-known as a Hollywood actor, so many would be aware of his race. Lastly, the news coverage around his movie, Birth of a Nation, focuses closely on the climate of hostility towards Black film makers and actors in Hollywood. In other words, only one article explicitly states Mr. Parker’s race as African American, however, it can be deduced based on multiple details that he is African American and thus his race does not need to be mentioned explicitly in the news coverage. 25

Table 8. Duke University Victim Descriptors

References to Victim (N=104) Percentage woman (n=53) 51% accuser (n=29) 28% race mentioned (n=6) 6% referred to as victim (n=l) <1%

Out of the 47 times the perpetrators are referenced, they are referred to most often as players (n=30) (i.e. “lacrosse players”). Their race is mentioned six times (n=6). Other terms used to describe them less than five times were: members (as in ‘lacrosse team members’), and attackers.

Table 9. Duke University Perpetrator Descriptors______i___ References to Perpetrators (N=47) Percentage players (n=30) 64% men (n=5) 11% race mentioned (n=6) 13%

Stanford University 2015 (Stanford). Of the 62 times the victim is referenced, she is most often described as “victim” (n=33) and woman (n=25). Her race is never mentioned as a descriptor. She is referred to as a college grad, former student, and a ‘new

Rosa Parks’ less than five times.

Table 10. Stanford University Victim Descriptors______references to victim (N=62) Percentage victim (n=33) 53% woman (n=25) 40% race mentioned (n=0) 0% 26

Out of the 34 times the perpetrator is referenced, he is referred to most often as student (n=15) or swimmer (n=T 1). There are references made to his race and class privilege, but never as a descriptor (i.e. “the white swimmer). He is referred to as a defendant, attacker, suspect, and assailant less than five times.

Table 11. Stanford University Perpetrator Descriptors_____ references to perpetrator (N=34) Percentage student (n=15) 44% swimmer (n=l 1) 32%

In sum, across the cases I found that the Stanford victim was referred to as a victim far more times than the women in the other three cases. Except for the Penn State case, the perpetrators were most often referred to in ways that highlighted their participation in sports teams at elite universities.

Discussion

The timing of news coverage, as well as the descriptors used to describe victims and perpetrators were implicitly biased and relied on stereotypes about Black women as un-rapeable, Black men as rapists, white women as legitimate victims of rape, and white men as less likely to be rapists. Whiteness, and proximity to whiteness, allows white men to avoid harsh criticism in the media and allowed white and non-Black victims to gain public support and sympathy. The perpetrator who was Black was unable to avoid media 27

criticism, and the victims who were Black were unable to gain sympathetic media coverage of their rape cases.

Wanzo helps us understand why it is that Black women’s stories of brutal sexual violence did not stir the nation like the story of the Stanford rape victim or the alleged victim of Nate Parker.

White female bodies have historically mobilized affect as subjugated bodies in

need of rescue or as moral voices who generate sympathy; women and their

advocates have utilized this problematic privileging of white womanhood as has

the state. These bodies can also be the means by which national rhetoric about

victims, villains, and heroes are constructed. This is a problematic mechanism for

political action—subjects are seen as in need of rescue in relation to how close

they are to white female bodies. Citizens often warrant sympathy because they are

white female victims, close to the hearts of white women, needing to be protected

like white women, or working in the service of the white nuclear family (Wanzo,

2009, p. 4).

Whiteness becomes central in determining one’s legibility as a ‘campus rape victim’. We see this play out for the victim in the Penn State case, who achieves the status of victimhood in the media coverage in 2016. Her whiteness and her suicide stand in for her rapist’s acquittal. Indeed, the media hype was not so much about the rape allegations, but her suicide. The suicide of a white woman who accused a Black man of raping her is the 28

reason for the media frenzy: “The episode (i.e. the rape allegation) was already known, including by the studio backing the film, but on Tuesday Variety gave it new life by revealing that Mr. Parker’s accuser committed suicide in 2012 at the age of 30” (Barnes

& Buckley, 2016). The media interpreted her suicide as an effect of having been raped.

The media spotlight on her suicide then shores up her whiteness and feeds into the myth of the Black male rapist. The Stanford victim is treated similarly in the media—the frenzy is around the injustice towards her. There was a guilty sentence, but it was not enough—“The case has spurred a national uproar because of a sentence criticized as far too lenient” (Stack, 2016). The assailant faced up to ten years. Though the prosecutors in the case asked for six years, the judge ultimately took the advice of the probation officer in the case who suggested six months (Gagnon & Grinberg, 2016). The mandatory minimum sentence in California is two years, but judges can weigh a defendant’s prior record in deciding to bypass the minimum sentence (Gollom, 2016). These victims’ cases were covered after the trial. The media attention is less about the lurid details, and more about the legal injustice faced by young (white, middle-class) women who are victims of sexual violence. The public outrage is about a judicial system that is too lenient on the men who rape young college women.

While we do not know the race of the victim in the Stanford case, the media coverage operates as if she is white, or in proximity to whiteness. Ahmed (2007) explains that one does not have to be white to reap the benefits of whiteness: 29

Whiteness is not reducible to white skin, or even to ‘something’ we can have or

be even if we pass through whiteness. When we talk about a sea of whiteness’ or

‘white space’ we are talking about the repetition of the passing by some bodies

and not others” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 159).

The concept of ‘white space’ here then would refer to the category of “campus rape victim” where some bodies pass through and others do not. In this study, the Stanford and

Penn victims pass, but the Florida and Duke victims do not. The Stanford victim does not have to be white, she only has to be able to “move with comfort through space, and to inhabit the world as if it were home” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 159). If we imagine one’s legibility as a college rape victim as dependent on their proximity to ‘white space’ (due to being defined in the academy as having its origins in the white feminist movement, and for a group of victims that has historically been white), Emily Doe, comfortably inhabits this world as evidenced by the media coverage.2 The press referred to her most often as a victim (which they did 33 out of the 62 times she was references in the articles, compared to the other victims who were referred to as victims less than three times). While details about the case that could have sowed doubt about her credibility made their way into the articles (such as the fact that she had been drinking prior to the assault), the media still covered her story in a sympathetic way. As we know from Rebecca Wanzo, whiteness has historically conferred victim status to white women. For example, article after article

21 should note here that “moving with comfort through space” does not refer to her proximity to whiteness as protecting her from bodily harm. She experienced a great deal of bodily harm that I do not intend to minimize. When I write of “comfort” I am referring to the category of victimhood and how her story fit into the category of “campus rape victim” much more easily that the Florida or Duke victims’ stories. 30

notes instances where she was valorized by various public figures such as Joe Biden who called her a “warrior—with a solid steel spine” (Bromwich, 2016), or a Stanford law professor who called her a “new Rosa Parks” (Fuller, 2016), or House Representative

Ann McLane Kuster who said, “We are all Emily Doe” (Aguilera, 2016). This statement,

“We are all Emily Doe” illustrates what Ahmed describes as the familiarity of whiteness:

Some bodies more than others are recruited [into whiteness], those that can inherit

the ‘character’ of the organization, by returning its image with a reflection that

reflects back that image, what we could call a ‘good likeness’. It is not just that

there is a desire for whiteness that leads to white bodies getting in. Rather,

whiteness is what the institution is oriented ‘around’, so that even bodies that

might not appear white still [can] inhabit whiteness” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 158).

For the purposes of this study, the ‘institution’ that whiteness is oriented around is the white feminist anti-violence movement. Congresswoman Kuster confirms that Emily

Doe’s image reflects back the image of a proper white subject of the white feminist anti­ violence movement. She has successfully inhabited whiteness despite, or perhaps in spite, of her racial anonymity. The fact that we do not know her racial identity means that she is the default, whiteness. As Ahmed states, “If to be human is to be white, then to be not white is to inhabit the negative: it is to be ‘not’. The pressure of this ‘not’ is another way of describing the social and existential realities of racism” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 161). Her presence in the media as anonymous takes on an ‘everywoman’ quality; she is white so she can stand in for women’s humanity. There are no cultural markers to suggest she is 31

anything other than white, and for the American imaginary that assumes white until proven not, she is assumed white.

It is the state of being ‘not’ that helps us understand how Black victims were described in the media coverage. Just as proximity to whiteness allows some near-white bodies to move comfortably through white space, “the effect of this ‘around whiteness’ is the institutionalization of a certain ‘likeness’, which makes non-white bodies feel uncomfortable, exposed, visible, different, when they take up this space” (Ahmed, 2007, p. 157). Indeed, when Black women publicly accused white men of rape, claiming their indignity, and their humanness as women, they became more proximate to the ‘white space’ of college rape victim. Yet their racial difference remained at the forefront. For the

Florida and Duke victims, their race precluded them from ‘reflecting back that image” of whiteness, the “good likeness” that “the institution is ‘oriented’ around”. For example, most articles described Owens’ assault as: “The rape of a Negro co-ed by four white men” (“Death Penalty Curb Defeated,” 1959), or “Four white men charged with raping a

Negro college girl” (“4 Arraigned in Rape; White Youths Enter Pleas of Not Guilty in

Florida,” 1959). Never was racial bias in the media so stark as in the Duke case where multiple articles described her difference in this way, “The woman is black; the students are white” (Wilson & Glater, 2006), or “The woman, a 27-year-old single mother of two and a student at a nearby university, is black” (Bernstein, 2006), or “The woman is black;

46 of the team’s 47 members are white” (Macur, 2006). Whereas the white or near-white victims’ proximity to whiteness pulled them towards sympathy-worthy victimhood, the 32

other two victims’ Blackness prevented them from fully inhabiting the space of whiteness. The Black victims’ stories were covered during the trial and the media attention was more about the inconceivability of Black women accused white men of raping them.

Whiteness also served to protect the white perpetrators from harsh media coverage. In her influential work, “Whiteness as Property,” Cheryl I. Harris (1993) put forth the theory that whiteness is a “set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany being white” and “whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over times, these expectations have been affirmed, legitimates, and protected by the law”

(C. I. Harris, 1993, p. 1713). In other words, being white is more than the color of one’s skin—the color of one’s (white) skin gives them social and cultural capital and is recognized as a possession that makes one legible as a right-seeking subject. She builds on Hacker (1992) and his argument that not all white men will gain every benefit of whiteness, but no white man will ever fall as low as a Black person. White America

“cannot guarantee full security to every member of its own race. Still, while some of its members may fail, there is a limit to how far they can fall” (Hacker, 2003, p. 29). The

‘whiteness as property’ concept and the idea that white people can only fall so far is helpful in understanding how the media covers white victims and perpetrators. For example, while no media attention was given to the background of the victim in the

Florida case, multiple articles shed light on favorable details about the perpetrators’ backgrounds. One alleged rapist in the Florida case was described as “a normal, 33

intelligent, decent, reputable, 18-year-old boy” (Sitton, 1959a). Another was referred to as “a telephone lineman with a wife and two small children” (Sitton, 1959d). While one article described the men’s guilty sentences as ‘progress’ (Sitton, 1959d), they did not receive the death penalty, in a state where thirty-seven Black men had received capital punishment for rape of white women between 1925 and 1959 (Sitton, 1959b). The men in the Florida case did not ‘win’ their case, but they did not fall so far as to receive the death penalty, like the thirty-seven Black men tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for rape.

The Duke case is a prime example of the privileges of whiteness. In an article published on June 12, 2006, a law professor at the University of Virginia said of the case,

“It is an extremely difficult kind of case. It’s very difficult to win. It will turn so much on credibility” (Wilson & Glater, 2006). It was the word of three “members of the Duke lacrosse team [who] are well-off young men from out of state” against “the accuser [who] is a 27-year-old black woman who was bom and raised in Durham” (Wilson, 2006a)

“which is largely middle class with a population that is about 45% black” (Wilson,

2006b). Additionally, all four of the perpetrators in the Duke case were named

“innocent,” an unusual move on the part of the state. The North Carolina Attorney

General not only dropped the charges against the defendants in the Duke case, but took the extra step to announce that the defendants were innocent (Beard, 2007).

The benefits and privileges of whiteness were bestowed upon the alleged rapists in the Stanford and Duke cases in the form of descriptors. They were most often referred to as ‘players’ (as in ‘lacrosse players’, ‘student’ or ‘swimmer’ rather than being referred 34

to as a defendant, suspect, or rapist. It must also be noted that swimming and lacrosse are sports that are overwhelming white (Leonard, 2007; Lloyd, 2016, p. 39), thus even when the alleged perpetrator’s race is not explicitly stated, it is implied based on the whiteness of the sports that they play. In this way, the University affiliation acted to shield the blow of calling rapists “rapists.” Assigning the title of rapist to a Duke or Stanford student threatens the nation’s white heteropatriarchal future as embodied in the star athlete. The nation’s investment in white masculinity is harmed by rape allegations, thus the media’s reluctance to report them as such. Even though the Stanford rapist did receive a guilty sentence, his whiteness spared him from serving too long of a sentence for fear that it would “have a severe impact on him” {People o f the State o f California v. Brock Allen

Turner, 2016).

The whiteness of the defendant in the Florida, Duke and Stanford case ultimately allowed them to evade the full brunt of the media or legal consequences of their actions.

The same cannot be said of the defendant in the Penn State case. Compared to the defendants in the other three cases, all of whom were white, Parker’s subjectivity as a

Black man led to harsh criticism in the media despite his acquittal. Sara Ahmed’s concept of stickiness is helpful in understanding how Parker was treated in the media. In her book, The Cultural Politics o f Emotion, Ahmed (2014) writes,

[W]e can think of stickiness as an effect of surfacing, as an effect o f the histories

o f contact between bodies, objects, and signs. To relate stickiness with historicity

is not to say that some things and objects are not ‘sticky’ in the present. Rather, it 35

is to say that stickiness is an effect. That is, stickiness depends on histories of

contact that have already impressed upon the surface of the object (Ahmed, 2014,

p. 90, emphasis in original).

The historical myth of the Black rapist has been impressed on the surface of Black male bodies. Even if the court ultimately ruled that Nate Parker was not guilty, and a line in the article states that he was accused and later acquitted of rape, the media has historically marked the surface of the black male body as sexually predatory and this historical discourse sticks to Parker’s body. While the legal record shows that he was acquitted (i.e. not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and therefore innocent under the law), her suicide years later sows doubt in the public mind about whether justice was served in her rape trial. Time after time, the New York Times covered her suicide in a way that cast doubt about Parker’s acquittal. For example, Parker’s acquittal was often cushioned between his being accused and her suicide: “Mr. Parker was accused and later acquitted of raping a fellow student while at Penn State. It was revealed that Mr. Parker’s accuser later committed suicide in 2012 at the age of 30” (Barnes, 2016); or “In 1999 he was accused

(and acquitted) of rape on campus. The accuser years later committed suicide” (Morris &

Wortham, 2016). Coming back to Ahmed’s concept of stickiness, the history of white women accusing Black men of rape sticks to these Parker’s and the deceased white women’s bodies. White women’s historically privileged status sticks to the accuser’s body, even posthumously. Her rape trauma and suicide foster public recognition of her claims to victimhood, despite the court’s ruling. Additionally, the acquittal is couched 36

between two inculpatory details, the accusation and the suicide, as if to lead to the reader to think: If he didn’t do it, then why did she accuse him? If he didn’t do it, why did she kill herself? For Parker, the acquittal is not enough to prove innocence for the public. The suicide of a young woman weighs more heavily in the public’s mind, as evidenced by

“calls to boycott the film, and in Los Angeles a smattering of posters for ‘The Birth of a

Nation’ depicting Mr. Parker as the rebellion leader Nat Turner, were altered to read

‘Rapist?’ by a street artist” (Barnes & Buckley, 2016).

Conclusion

In sum, the media coverage of campus rape cases can be helpful for some and complicated for others, specifically when those others, whether they are alleged to be victims or perpetrators, are Black. In the Stanford case, media coverage around the short sentence as well as coverage of the victim’s statement led to widespread social support for the victim. The sympathetic media coverage and public outrage even led to legal action in the state of California which introduced mandatory minimum sentencing when victims of sexual assault are unconscious. One could argue that the media coverage surrounding the Penn State case was also sympathetic to the deceased victim. However, according to the family of the victim, they were suspicious of the motives for media coverage 17 years after the case, only after Parker was being nominated for an Oscar. For the Black victims in the Florida and Duke cases, they drew media attention simply for accusing white men of raping them. The timing of the media coverage and lack of anonymity offer evidence of Black women’s failed “affective agency”—the media did 37

not confer them with the status of victim in their coverage. Throughout most of the coverage, the perpetrators received softened descriptions alluding to their status as students or as star athletes at elite institutions, while the victims in these cases (most of whom were also students) were relegated to descriptions that made them seem older than the perpetrators or at times relied on other descriptions such as “stripper” or “accuser.”

Overall, in the four cases that were covered, the media portrayed more favorably victims who were not Black. The media also portrayed perpetrators more favorably when they were not Black. My study demonstrates that it is newsworthy for Black women to accuse white men of rape, and for white and Black men to be accused of raping white (or near-white) women.

The implications of racially divided coverage of campus rape are significant. The coverage in the four cases reinforced racist stereotypes that figure Black women as

“unrapeable” and Black men as rapists. In the same year that the New York Times wrote that the Stanford case represented progress for rape victims, a Black man who had been acquitted for was tried again in the court of public opinion after he was nominated for an award for his film about slavery. The media coverage surrounding rape on college campuses perpetuates racist beliefs that white women victims are deserving of our sympathy and Black women victims are deserving of our skepticism. In her introduction to the anthology Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-

Violence Movement, Jennifer Patterson (2016) writes that the mainstream conception of a victim “is (assumed) to be a white, cisgender, heterosexual, virginal woman—the perfect 38

survivor” (Patterson & Gossett, 2016, p. 6). When the media grants victimhood to

(assumed) white victims, it exacerbates normative conceptions of who can or cannot be a victim. The fact that two Black university students, like the victims in the Florida and

Duke cases, could not be granted victimhood and empathy from the media is because otherness overshadows the category of victim. The category of campus rape victim is presumed to be ‘white space’; in other words, it is reserved for white or near-white victims. When Black women were hailed as campus rape victims, their otherness was hyper-visible and they were unable to full occupy a category reserved for those who claim whiteness as property.

Beyond conceptions of empathy, Kimberle Crenshaw (1991) points out that in the case of violence it is not just a matter of recognition, but about life and death. She writes,

The problem is not simply that women who dominate the antiviolence movement

are different from women of color but that they frequently have power to

determine, either through material or rhetorical resources, whether the

intersectional differences of women of color will be incorporated at all into the

basic formulation of policy. Thus, the struggle over incorporating these

differences is not a petty or superficial conflict about who gets to sit at the head of

the table. In the context of violence, it is sometimes a deadly serious matter of

who will survive-and who will not (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1265). 39

The fact that women of color are not given legitimacy in the media, and thus in the public consciousness, can be a matter of life and death for women of color. If the consequences were not so dire, it would be comically ironic that the category of campus rape victim is reserved for whiteness, considering that it was Black women who began organizing around campus rape decades before white women did. That the Stanford victim was called “a new Rosa Parks” then becomes less ironic, and a more violent erasure of Black women survivors. Rosa Parks’ long history of advocating for Black women who were survivors of rape is not being evoked in this comparison. Rather, they are drawing a problematic analogy between the historic fight against racism and contemporary issues like rape on college campuses as the civil rights issue of our time.

The limitations of this study are that only one of the four cases in the archive was of a case that was litigated in the last 10 years. Future research should analyze a more updated archive of cases that have been litigated and covered in the media in the more recent years. A more recent archive may uncover more balanced media portrayals of victims of campus rape regardless of their race. Despite the limitations, the archive spans almost 60 years and shares glimpses of various stages in the anti-rape movement.

My hope is that these findings encourage media viewers to be critical and reflective of coverage of campus rape cases. When a rape case gains national attention, readers should ask what it is about the case that is newsworthy. If the case has not yet been litigated, readers should be mindful of how relations of difference often prevent certain women from achieving the status of victim. I also recommend being critical of the 40

language used to describe victims and perpetrators. Are perpetrators being described in terms of their status as students rather than their status as defendants in a case? This detail is important because it affects the way readers imagine them as either perpetrators or not.

If they are not imagined as perpetrators, then it may lead readers to question the validity of victims’ accusations. What does it mean for us as readers to view a headline about a

“champion swimmer” versus an “alleged rapist?” Lastly, in terms of cases that gain national attention much later than they have been litigated, it may be helpful to ask why.

Is it to get justice for a victim or are there ulterior motives?

In conclusion, the movement against rape on college campuses should be more attentive to the power dynamics and historical narratives that shape media representations of women of colors’ experiences of sexual violence. It was the decades of organizing by women of color that made it possible to consider issues like sexual violence as legitimate social issues. When the anti-violence movement organizes behind white victims and not

Black victims, everyone suffers. 41

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