The Right to Sex
Feminism in the Twenty-First Century
Amia Srinivasan
Some men are falsely accused of rape; there is nothing to be gained by denying it. But false accusations are rare …
Of the 147 men who were exonerated of sexual assault on the basis of a false accusation or perjury in the US between 1989 and 2020, 84 were non-white and 62 white. Of those 85 non-white men, 76 were Black, which means that Black men make up 52 percent of those convicted of rape on the basis of false accusations or perjury. Yet Black men make up only about 14 percent of the U.S. male population, and 27 percent of men convicted of rape. A Black man serving time for sexual assault is 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than a white man convicted of sexual assault. He is also very likely to be poor — not just because Black people in the U.S. are disproportionately poor, but because most incarcerated Americans, of all races, are poor.
The National Registry of Exonerations, which lists the men and women wrongly imprisoned in the U.S. since 1989, does not detail the long history of false rape accusations against Black men which bypassed the legal system altogether. In particular, it does not record the deployment of the false rape accusation in the Jim Crow period as, in Ida B. Wells’s words, “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized.” It does not take into account the 150 Black men who were lynched between 1892 and 1894 for alleged rape or attempted rape of white women — a charge that included known consensual affairs between Black men and white women — as chronicled in Wells’s remarkable A Red Record. It does not mention the case of William Brooks of Galesline, Arkansas, who was lynched on 23 May 1894 for asking a white woman to marry him, or tell us anything about the “unknown Negro” whom Wells reports having been lynched in West Texas earlier that month for the crime of “writing letter to white woman.” In 2007, Carolyn Bryant admitted that she had lied, 52 years earlier, when she said that a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till had grabbed and sexually propositioned her — a lie that spurred Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his brother to abduct, bludgeon, shoot and kill Till. Roy Bryant and his brother were acquitted of murder, despite the overwhelming evidence against them; four months later, they were paid $3,000 for the story of how they did it by Look magazine. There is no registry that details the uses of false rape accusations as a tactic of colonial rule: in India, in Australia, in South Africa, in Palestine.
It might seem surprising, then, that false rape accusations are, today, a predominantly wealthy white male preoccupation. But it isn’t surprising — not really. The anxiety about false rape accusations is purportedly about injustice (innocent people being harmed), but actually it is about gender, about innocent men being harmed by malignant women. It is an anxiety, too, about race and class: about the possibility that the law might treat wealthy white men as it routinely treats poor people, especially poor people of color. For poor Black men, and for poor Black women, the white woman’s false rape accusation is just one element in a matrix of vulnerability to state power. But false rape accusations are perhaps a unique instance of middle-class and wealthy white men’s vulnerability to the injustices routinely perpetrated by the carceral state against poor Black men, women and children. Well-off white men instinctively and correctly trust that the legal justice system will take care of them: will not plant drugs on them, will not gun them down and later claim to have seen a weapon, will not harass them for walking in a neighborhood where they “don’t belong,” will give them a pass for carrying that gram of cocaine or bag of weed. But in the case of rape, well-off white men worry that the growing demand that women be believed will cut against their right to be shielded from the prejudices of the law.
That representation is, of course, false: Even in the case of rape, the state is on the side of wealthy white men. But what matters — in the sense of what is ideologically efficacious — is not the reality, but the misrepresentation. In the false rape accusation, wealthy white men misperceive their vulnerability to women and to the state.
Excerpted from THE RIGHT TO SEX: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © Amia Srinivasan, 2021. All rights reserved.
