Don’t “Take Accusations of Rape Seriously.”

I want to take this moment talk about what I think is one of the most pernicious piece of thinking to go unchallenged in the minds of well-intentioned people of our age. But I must also warn that this post is a bit meandering, as there is a lot I feel the need to express on this subject, and I think this is an issue that probably requires a bit of circling the idea — rather than simply stating it — to express it best.

That said, I want to talk about the thinking that makes people say things like this:

“I take accusations of domestic violence very seriously.”

“I take accusations of racism very seriously.”

“I take accusations of rape very seriously.”

But before I do, I want to begin by framing why I think this is the issue we need to be thinking about right now — after Charlottesville — when blatant, vicious, open racism is on display. And for that purpose, Dr. King said it more elegantly than I could ever hope to:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter From A Birmingham Jail (1963).

Bringing this lens to bear on the election of 2016, I fear that many of us have spent far too much time doubting that the “White Citizen’s Counselor” could still exist in this day and age. To that end, much handwringing has been done to explain away or minimize the fact that Donald J. Trump sits in the Oval Office because of a rage of horrifying depth that a Black Man was in the White House for eight years. But there is no real question this is at least part of what drove the election.

But Dr. King is right. These people are not difficult to understand:

“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”

It is the moderates who denounce explicit bigotry in no uncertain terms, but deny the existence of anything larger. To put a fine point on it, it is the Senators tweeting rejection of explicitly racist violence after voting to confirm Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

So that brings me back to the person who wrings his hands by saying, “I take accusations of ____ very seriously.” And to discuss it, I want to tell a short story.

The first time I consciously heard the disconnect in this statement was in a discussion I was having with a (former?) friend. He had taken up the abuser’s side in a relatively public proceeding regarding intimate partner violence between two students at my law school, while I had been acting as an informal advocate and advisor of sorts to the survivor. We were talking at some social function that we’d both attended, after the university had found the abuser responsible, and had not spoken in some time.

In explaining why he didn’t immediately believe the survivor when she’d told him what happened to her, he said simply,

“Well, I take accusations of domestic violence very seriously.”

It seemed reasonable when I first heard it: Domestic violence is serious. It should be taken seriously. What’s wrong with that? But it sat poorly with me — something in this is off.

I eventually came to this answer: All seriousness is relative. When you say you take accusations seriously, you are saying you take the violence itself less seriously. To view such accusations with automatic skepticism, you are giving abusers the benefit of the doubt — not the survivors. I could speak endlessly about the issues around intimate partner violence, but I wanted to talk about racism.

Put simply, the exact same is true of racism. When you are taking accusations of racism seriously — when you are reluctant to call things racism — you are not taking racism itself seriously. It is uncomfortable to tell people their actions, beliefs, and habits are racist. They will resist. They will take your accusations of racism very seriously.

But it is these people that can be convinced. They are the ones who think they are taking racism seriously by taking the accusations seriously, and perhaps they might be made to see the racism underlying that stance. After all, Dr. King — who leveled his most severe critique not at the KKK, but at the white moderate — was eventually canonized and lionized in the American psyche. And I truly believe it is THAT kind of thinking that makes America great.