Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (57 page)

N.gro. by a system of moral based
.
on guilt, hatred, and human '

·
qnJaV'-t

Hrnton's concept of human denial implies that free access to
1
W,pite.
women, or indeed, to any woman, i some sort of inalie
·
nabfo
mle.
right ·that has been . inhumanely deniedi to·bfacU!1He states as doctrine without questioning the implications, "Any oppressed group, when obtaining power, tends to acquire the females of the group that has been the oppressor." To Hernton and to many black intellectuals (shades of the white Helene Deutsch ) the role of the white woman is eagerly complicitous: "A Negro is more prone than anyone else t
.
o comply with the white woman's fantasies of rape and martyrdom." With a twist, this too was the theme of Jones Baraka's Dutchman.

But Hernton's analysis was tame compared to the pronuncia mentos of Frantz Fanon, the darling of the New Lef t. Rape runs as a curious subtheme in all of Fanon's writings. As a doctor of psychiatry and a student of colonialism, Fanon was in an excellent position to make a substantial, original contribution to the world's

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AGAINST OUR WILL

understanding of rape as a means of oppressing native women in Algeria and the Antilles, but Fanon's concern, to which he returns again and again ( it is something of an obsession ) , is with the native man and the
white
woman. "Whoever says rape says Ne gro," he
J
announces in
Black Skin, White M asks
in preface to his morbid rehash of the super-Freudian "A Negro Is Raping Me" theory of white female masochism propounded by Marie Bona parte and Helene Deutsch.

Here is Fanon's rendition of the familiar theme: "When a woman lives the fantasy of rape by a Negro, it is in some way the fulfillment of a private dream, of an inner wish . . . it is the woman who rapes herself . . . . The fantasy of rape by a Negro is a variation of this emotion: 'I wish the Negro would rip me open as I would have ripped a woman open.' " One cannot but be affected by the private anguish and personal confusion of Frantz Fanon when one reads these lines: "Basically does this fear of rape not itself cry out for rape? Just as there are faces that ask to be slapped, can one not speak of women who ask to be raped?"

Purely and simply, this radical theorist of third-world libera tion was a hater of women. With an arrogance rarely matched by other radical male writers, Fanon goes on, "Those who grant our conclusions on the psychosexuality of the white woman may ask what we have to say about the woman of color. I know nothing about her."*

• Nor did he ever take the trouble to find out. In Fanon's
  politik,
  rape of third-world women was a devious colonial trick to emasculate third-world men.
  The
  Wretched of
  the
  Earth reports several cases of "mental disorders" that Fanon attributes to the French colonization of Algeria. Case One, Series A: "Impotence in an Algerian following the rape of his wife." A twenty-six year-old fighter for the National Liberation Front discovered he had become impotent when he tried to conduct an affair in a foreign country where he was sent on a mission. During interviews with Dr. Fanon, the patient ex plained that his wife had been raped by French soldiers while he was fighting for liberation. The Algerian's problem, in addition to his impotence, was that he didn't want to see his violated wife. He confessed, "Of ten, while 1 was looking at the photo of my daughter, I ·used to think that she too was dis honored, as if everything that had to do with my wife was rotten.
  If
  they'd tortured her or knocked out all her teeth or broken an arm I wouldn't have minded. But that thing-how can you forget a thing like that? And why did she have
  to
  tell me about it all?" The FLN figh ter then asked Fanon, "Would you take back your wife?" The best Fanon could answer was "1think I would . . ." and a concession that he was not quite sure.
  

  Fanon's haughty dismissal of "the woman of color" was more than matched by Eldridge Cleaver in his early raping career. "To refine my technique and modus operandi," wrote the man who was to become a Black Panther theorist, "I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto . . ."
  

  No -comment I might interject at this point seems adequate. Cleaver sheds no further light on his unusual form of target prac tice, although he implies in a sudden spurt of fancy language that he never got caught for raping black women because he was operat ing within a milieu of high crime, continuing in the same sentence, ". . . and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey." Thereaf ter follows his extraor dinary rationale:
  

  ,&aper was .an iinsurrectionary act
  It
  delighted me that·l 'was
  

  . -.
  decyng. and· tra
  .
  mpling upon
  .
  the
  ,
  white· man
  :
  s law,. upon his system
  

  ,
  f
  valµes, and that
  I
  was defiling his women-and this •point,
  I
  be.:
  

  

  lieve, was the. most
  .
  stifying to me beca
  _
  use
  I
  was vecy .resen
  _
  tf u.l. 9ver
  -.
  the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman.
  

  -
  i
  felt J:was, gtting.revenge .
  ..
  

  Cleaver also reports in Soul on Ice that later on in the solitude of prison he found he could no longer "approve the act of rape": "I lost my self-respect. My pride as a man dissolved . . ." This was as close as he ever got to an apology to women, white or black, but it was not a very meaningful apology. Years later he blithely told an interviewer for
  Playboy,
  "I was in a wild frame of mind and rape was simply one of the weird forms my rebellion took at that stage. So it was probably a combination of business and pleasure."
  

  As Fanon had his Jean-Paul Sartre and Calvin Hernton his Nat Hentoff, Cleaver, too, had his champions and interpreters among the white male literati.
  "It
  takes a certain boldness on Cleaver's part," the critic Maxwell Geismar raved in his introduc tion to
  Soul
  on Ice, "to open this collection of essays not merely on rape but on the whole profound relationship of black men and white women. There is a secret kind of sexual mysticism in this writer which adds depth and tone to his social commentary; this is a highly literary and imaginative mind surveying the salient aspects of our common life."
  

  The spectacle of white radicals and intellectuals falling all
  

  

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  AGAINST OUR WILL
  

  over each other in their rush to accept the Cleaver rationale for rape was a sorry sight in the late nineteen sixties and
  _
  early seventies when the Neanderthal · slogan, "All black prisoners are political prisoners," was raised as a rallying cry of the New Lef t. As an indication of how far this ideology traveled, I clipped and saved a printed exchange that
  New
  York
  Times
  reporter Tad Szulc con ducted with Soledad Brother George Jackson shqrtly before Jack son's death during the San Quentin riot. Szulc appeared to have bought Cleaver's "insurrectionary" excuse for raping white women, for he carefully asked George Jackson, "Aren't any black people guilty of crimes in American society? Aren't any of them crimi nals-for example, a black man who rapes and murders a black woman?" Jackson, for his part, did not appear unduly concerned with what he sloughed off as "the relatively small percentage . . . of thrill crimes" committed against black women. He countered in political jargon, "Every revolutionary theoretician and psychiatrist accepts as elementary the tendency of violence to turn inward when the oppressed can find no externalization . . ."
  

  The recurrent nightmare in the eighteenth-century slavehold ing South had been the white male dream of black men rising up to rape "their" women, and in the second half of the twentieth century the black man in his fiercest rhetoric seems intent on fulfilling that prophecy. This cannot be chalked off to the chickens coming home to roost, payback for injustice past, or the pressure cooker of "human denial" that finally explodes. Nor does the postulation that males of an oppressed class tend to "acquire" the females of the oppressor class when the opportunity arises suffice as full explanation. In the past the acquiring of women, largely through marriage, has been a useful gauge of progress, and it is true that on this level women have been consciously complicitous, giv ing their bodies to the oppressed male as their small contribution to eliminating inequalities and "making things all right," a logical extension of woman's traditional service role. But we are talking about rape, the one-sided acquisition, and male power politics. It is also historically observable that oppressed males take on the values of those who have oppressed them. When Eldridge Cleaver quotes a prison buddy who says that the white woman has been dangled before him "like a carrot on a stick," this is what he is talking about. We white women did not dangle ourselves, yet everything the black man has been exposed to would lead him to this conclu—
  

  A QUESTION OF RACE
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  253
  

  sion, and then to action, in imitation of the white man who raped "his" woman.
  

  So well is this political lesson understood that today's white radical male, imbued with Marcuse's theory of rising expectations, feels it would be reactionary on his part to question a black man who felt it was his insurrectionary right to rape.
  ( It
  is unfashion able in extreme white radical circles to question any misguided aspiration articulated by blacks.) When the women's movement first began to discuss rape as a feminist issue, those women who still identified themselves with the male lef t reacted like their brothers with noncomprehension or hostility. (They have since shown signs of change. ) And again, it was the interracial aspect, the fear of playing into the hands of racists, or an undifferentiated sympathy for the criminal as society's victim that dictated their emotional response.
  

  A fascinating psychiatric study of thirteen young white victims of rape in Boston and Washington, each of whom "had moved into a low-income ( not necessarily black ) community to imple ment her conviction about 'doing something real' in contemporary society," revealed a reluctance on the part of the victim to prose cute her rapist, or even to report the crime, stemming partially from her political belief that her rape was "an extension of the social struggle of black against white or poor against rich." Sandra Sutherland, co-director of the Metropolitan Mental Health Skills Center in Washington and the senior author of the study, con cluded that this self-sacrificial, altruistic response "was no doubt a product in part of the same internal factors which led the women to live in low-income areas in the first place." (Several of the women, despite their rationalizations and repressed angers, were traumatized by what had happened to them. They lef t the neigh borhood centers and poverty programs in which they had been working and retreated back to their middle-class environments. )
  

  

  A young white woman with radical politics who had been raped by a black youth on Manhattan's lower East Side told New York
  Post
  reporter Roberta Brandes Gratz, "I just can't throw off history. I feel like I'm being used to pay off the old debts to men falsely accused in the South of raping white women. Even my friends were reluctant to see me press charges."
  

  "Locking up individual rapists may satisf y our urge to retali ate," a member of a Los Angeles anti-rape group agonized in Sister,
  

  

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  AGAINST OUR WILL
  

  a women's newspaper, "but will this lead to the further oppression of all people, and Third World people in particular?"
  

  Interracial rape remains a huge political embarrassment to liberals. A recognition of the long history of the white man's overkill for "the one crime" has lef t many whites with deep feel ings of guilt. The fight against capital punishment waged by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was based in large measure on the discriminatory application of the death sentence to blacks con victed of raping white women. A civil-libertarian movement to protect the rights of defendants has led many people, Jessica Mitford among them, to question the very idea of imprisonment, and most particularly, it seems, for rape.
  

  The shock to liberals in
  1971
  when the women's movement first began to discuss rape was profound. I remember the looks of incredulity and the charge, "Why you're on the side of the prose cution," as if that per se was evidence of racism and reaction. But liberals are nothing if not elastic in their ability to absorb new ideas. Two years later the director of the New York Civil Liberties Union expressed his confusion over whom to root for now that the right of a woman not to be raped had been perceived by him as a political issue. "It's a little bit like cowboy-and-Indian movies," he admitted.