consequences of their actions for other communities. Whether it is contributing to hypersexualized narratives around women of color, ignoring the dangers faced by those communities, or undermining those who come forward, they sometimes flex what power they do have in ways that are oppressive while they continue to imagine themselves as victims with no power to oppress.
When you can’t count on solidarity for women in danger, when bystander intervention isn’t a solution because white female bystanders may feel that a Black woman’s plight doesn’t deserve their attention because race has a more powerful effect than gender, then we aren’t really battling rape culture. And the battle will continue to evade us until we fight the internalized -isms inherent in the movement.
When Lena Dunham felt the need to dispute the claims of actress Aurora Perrineau, a victim of sexual assault who happened to be Black, because the accused was her friend, it had everything to do with race, whether Dunham admits it or not. Perrineau had accused Murray Miller, an executive producer on Dunham’s Girls show, of having sexually assaulted her, and Dunham flew to the man’s defense, citing “insider knowledge” that rendered the claim false. A year later, Dunham was issuing an apology, one that tap-danced around the ease with which she seemed to offer support to everyone who was the “right” kind of victim, or more accurately, the “white” kind of victim, until she was challenged repeatedly. Most of the apology centers on herself, and even the part that specifically addresses Aurora Perrineau centers on Dunham and her own journey.
To Aurora: You have been on my mind and in my heart every day this year. I love you. I will always love you. I will always work to right that wrong. In that way, you have made me a better woman and a better feminist. You shouldn’t have been given that job in addition to your other burdens, but here we are, and here I am asking: How do we move forward? Not just you and I but all of us, living in the gray space between admission and vindication.
It’s painful to realize that, while I thought I was self-aware, I had actually internalized the dominant male agenda that asks us to defend it no matter what, protect it no matter what, baby it no matter what. Something in me still feels compelled to do that job: to please, to tidy up, to shopkeep. My job now is to excavate that part of myself and to create a new cavern inside me where a candle stays lit, always safely lit, and illuminates the wall behind it where these words are written: I see you, Aurora. I hear you, Aurora. I believe you, Aurora.
Public acts of racism appear bolder and more numerous in the Trump era, but it’s important to remember not only that they’re not new but also that the real harm is often done in private. When we ask why victims don’t report assault, why conviction rates are so low, and whose fault it is that rape culture persists, the answers are disheartening and interconnected. “They won’t get justice,” “We don’t care about protecting victims or punishing their attackers,” and “Everyone’s,” because ultimately it is all down to the insidious ways that rape culture is built and sustained in some of the same places, from homes to schools to churches, where it does the most harm.
And though I have largely focused on the objectifying narratives around the bodies of women of color and how mainstream feminism fails to engage them, I am in no way saying that sexual violence is only a concern of cis women. While cis women experience some of the highest rates of sexual assault, trans and gender-nonconforming people also face a heightened risk. And from a college campus to the military to a prison, no place is safe. Mingled among the victim-blaming tropes that position location as a factor for victimization is the reality that rapists attack in any environment where they think they can succeed.
And attempts to place bans on women in the military and trans women in bathrooms, or to assert that people who have been imprisoned deserve to be subjected to sexual violence, is just feeding into rape culture from different angles. Assertions that sex workers can’t be assaulted or that they exist as a release valve to prevent sexual violence are