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.A 1970s radical movement that took as its battle cry  SisterhoodIs Powerful was inclined, then, to neglect the relevant differences be-tween, say, black sisters and white sisters.Some movement historiansinsist that women of color were active in antirape work the firstwoman to direct a rape crisis center, for instance, was NkengeTen Digressions on What s Wrong 297Toure and activists like Loretta Ross told Bevacqua that  they werefrequently accused of not being feminist enough for the mostly whitefeminist community and not being black enough for the black com-munity (79).But other historians report that women of color didnot respond to white antirape activism.Angela Davis wrote in 1990that the antirape movement neglected to interrogate the history ofrape charges against black men, and failed to  develop an analysis ofrape that acknowledged the social conditions that foster sexual vio-lence as well as the centrality of racism in determining those socialconditions (qtd.in Bevacqua 39).Further, Davis argued, women of color worried that a successfulantirape movement would disproportionately imperil men of color,who are more frequently convicted of rape even though most (non-militaristic) rape is intraracial.Indeed, as Bevacqua reports, feministsled by Ruth Bader Ginsburg went to the Supreme Court in 1977 toargue that using the death penalty in rape convictions was cruel andunusual punishment; they did so primarily out of fear that the deathpenalty would make it harder to get convictions in rape cases.Butwhen they did so, they argued opportunistically, one might saythat the harshest rape sentences went unfairly to black men.Today, antirape legislation owes part of its existence to race mat-ters.In 1970, the majority of U.S.citizens knew little about rape as asocial issue, and concerned themselves almost not at all with its pre-vention.By 1980, antirape legislation had been written and passed,self-defense classes were commonplace, rape crisis centers had beenfounded in most large cities, and public discussion of rape was wide-spread.Bevacqua credits the network created by the women s move-ment with the lightning-fast acceptance of this feminist concern.Butit is also true, she says, that the antirape movement happened to col-lide historically with the law-and-order agenda introduced by con-servatives in the late 1960s.In the context of a civil rights uprisingoccasionally accompanied by violence, it wasn t difficult to convincemiddle-class whites that a  crime wave had begun, and that theirpersonal safety was at risk even though most violent crime remains,again, intraracial. White fright was fueled so successfully that bythe 1990s, even liberals had to take up the  tough-on-crime banner.Antirape activists forged an uneasy alliance with law-and-order pro-ponents like Senator Charles Mathias (R-Maryland), who sponsoreda 1974 bill to establish the National Center for the Prevention andControl of Rape.298 Conclusions without EndsSince 1973, much antirape legislation has been sponsored orcosponsored by Republican anticrime legislators, even though the jus-tifications for Republican involvement have often been paternalistic,rather than profeminist.Rape activists have not suffered this happily,and have often been forced to compromise their radical agenda to getpro-victim legislation passed.For instance, some government agencieshave refused to cooperate with rape crisis centers unless the centersrequire victims to participate in prosecutions a choice one wouldthink we could all agree should be left to each individual victim.And as we saw with the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments,an alliance that exploits one oppression (in this case racial oppres-sion) to benefit another (sexual oppression) is bound to be fraught.Inthe 1990s, Bevacqua reports, the alliance with tough-on-crime legis-lators was shaken by the Violence Against Women Act.The bill waswritten and sponsored by Senator Joseph Biden (D-Delaware); ad-dressed domestic violence and rape; and brought sexual violenceunder the umbrella of civil rights law by allowing civil suits againstrapists who, a victim might argue, were  gender-motivated to rape.The most radical of the sexual violence laws, it took four years topass and was vilified by the conservative right, as well as by theAmerican Civil Liberties Union, which protested that it is impossibleto tell whether, when a woman is battered or raped, said violence isthe result of gender discrimination.(The Supreme Court would ulti-mately strike down the act.)All of which has taught us, here in (or after?) the third wave offeminism, that we need to smash more than sexism in order to dis-arm rapists.If civil rights legislators, and U.S.citizens, were to understand raceoppression, gender oppression, economic oppression, and oppressionof gays and lesbians as interrelated, interdependent manifestations ofa patriarchal superstructure, one Civil Rights Act would have beenenough, and marginalized groups would not now be reduced to com-peting with each other to benefit separate constituencies.And the superstructure would be that much closer to history.DIGRESSION THE NINTHI don t like the term third-wave feminism [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]