Angela Davis, “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting”

Posted: Thu, Sep 19, 2024

Recap

The traditional legal theory of rape: rape is a property offense committed by one man against another man.

The second-wave feminist response: rape is a form of male domination over women; it is a [sexual vs. violent] offense committed by men as a gender against woman as a gender.

  • The biological version (Brownmiller): this is driven by the penis.
  • The political version (MacKinnon): this is driven by heterosexuality as a political institution.

Davis’s intervention: rape is as much of a symptom of heterosexism as it is a symptom of racism and capitalism; these systems of domination are all intertwined.

Rape as a tool of racism

The mechanisms that Davis identifies:

  • For Black men: the need to justify the heinousness of post–Civil War lynching -> the myth of the animal-like Black rapist, which focuses on the “barbarousness” of “ravishing” white womanhood -> the presumption of guilt + the white woman’s tear.
  • For Black women:
    • Under slavery: rape was used as a tool of domination by white slavemasters—a reminder, a weapon of terror; the capacity of white slavemasters to rape without impunity was also an expression of their “property rights.”
    • Post emancipation: the myth of Black men’s animal-like sexuality -> a myth of Black women’s promiscuity -> white men’s access to Black women’s sexualized bodies.

Rape as a tool of capitalism

  • For bourgeois/capitalist men: near impunity to rape; sexual access to those working for you is an expression of one’s social standing (and the social conditions of work are set up to facilitate this); sexual and economic exploitation is of a piece.
    • One exception is that the likelihood of consequences significantly increases when the rape targets someone of the same social standing.
  • The proletarian/working men: some impunity to rape; rape provides otherwise dominated men an opportunity to dominate—“a bribe, an illusory compensation for powerlessness” (p. 29).
    • For the white male proletariat in particular: the (hetero)sexism and racism work together to generate a feeling of “racial affinity—or even solidarity—with the bosses he should have been challenging” such that “white workers’ hostilities toward their employers could be defused” (p. 27).

Denialism about rape under socialism? P. 24.