Who are these rape laws really for?

Rape is both one of the fastest-growing violent crimes and under-reported crimes in the United States. Of course the federal government (being the “protective” presence that it is) does have rape laws in place for the benefit of the people. But what you probably didn’t know is that these rape laws were originally created for the main purpose of protecting the wives and daughters of wealthy, white upperclass men.

So one may ponder, taking into consideration the severe lack of Black rights post-emancipation, where did this leave the women of color?

The “license” to rape stemmed from the sexual coercion that dictated the relationship between slave and slave master, allowing not only the economic domination of Whites, but also fortified the phenomenon of white supremacy and established an enduring pattern of institutionalized sexual abuse. Only the naive could fool themselves into believing that the abolition of slavery included the end of sexual violence toward Black women — their sexual abuse was perpetuated post-civil war through group rapes by the Ku Klux Klan and years after by the racist exclusion of Black women from the protection of rape laws. Even today the interactions of race and gender continue to victimize Black women, as evidenced by the case of white police officer Daniel Holtzclaw abusing his badge to wrongfully arrest then rape numerous marginalized Black women and was convicted in December 2015 for multiple counts of rape and sexual abuse.

But the sexual abuse of Black women isn’t just limited to the hands of the White male, but are also at the hands of Black men. White supremacy ideology not only originates sexual violence toward Black women, but is also the foundation of the oppression of the Black man — stripping away any expression of “male supremacy” and consequently forcing him to accept that the only way to obtain and retain is by force. As a result, Black women are subject to sexual violence and domestic abuse by both White and Black males. But this intersectionality of race and gender goes as far as to not only condemn Black women to such violence, but White women as well. The “privilege” of White men to sexually assault Black women with impunity encourages them to employ the same treatment onto White women, making these women indirectly victimized by the same racist oppression aimed at women of color. Crenshaw’s Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color exposes that today’s perpetuation of sexual violence toward women is due to structural problems that exist via the intersection of various oppressions of race, gender, and class (examples: class poverty, employment and housing discrimination based on both race and gender).