Cologne is a throwback to the Central Park Five
How false defenders of women use rape to justify racism
By Meagan Day
The mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve have naturally provoked outrage among German citizens. Some protesters, armed with the knowledge that the suspects in custody are primarily asylum-seekers from the Middle East and North Africa, are using the situation to further a xenophobic agenda.
The Islamophobic right-wing group Pegida held aloft signs reading “Rapefugees Not Welcome,” illustrated with silhouettes of marauding Arab men armed with daggers chasing after a lone woman in distress.
One wonders about Pegida’s and similar groups’ commitment to women’s rights when their male supporters state openly that the assaults were “bad for the women, but good for us, because the people are being woken up.”
Since the dawn of racism, the rape of white women has been used to shore up racist ideology. Most of the time, the predatory nonwhite assailant is hypothetical. Ugly stereotypes circulate about insatiable sexual appetites and pathological violence among men of color. The stereotypes are invoked time and again, untethered from fact and without reference to specific incident, to argue that Mexican immigration is a grave threat to the nation, for instance, or to justify the murder of black churchgoers.
In cases where white women really are sexually assaulted by men of color — as in Cologne, it appears — some social factions seem enthusiastic about the opportunity to confirm this racist stereotype. The difference between bigoted opportunists and advocates for women’s rights is sometimes blurry, but if you listen closely, you can detect a note of obscene delight in the voices of the anti-immigrant right.
The situation in Germany right now calls to mind New York City in the wake of the brutal assault of Trisha Meili, a white jogger who was raped and left for dead in Central Park in April of 1989. Five black and Latino teenagers were arrested and imprisoned. They were later exonerated, when DNA evidence pointed to a serial rapist unconnected to the teenagers.
But in the months following the attack, the white public was almost gleefully convinced of their guilt.
The New York Daily News ran headlines like “WOLF PACK’S PREY” and “Park marauders call it ‘WILDING’… and it’s street slang for going berserk.” The scenario was the fulfillment of a centuries-old white fantasy about dangerous nonwhite men whose dual desire for sex and violence threatened to undo the fabric of society.
Donald Trump, who thankfully has since said nothing misogynistic or racist about sexual assault (oh, wait), took out a full page ad to weigh in on the situation in May of 1989. “How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits?” he opined. “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.”
The city was whipped into a hysteria, haunted for months by the specter of roving bands of oversexed, sociopathic young nonwhite men. Mayor Ed Koch declared the Central Park rape “the crime of the century,” despite the fact that, on that very same night in 1989, a black woman was brutally raped and beaten by multiple armed men.
Racial tensions were high in New York in 1989. It was the year Do The Right Thing came out, and the year the city elected its first black mayor. But the Central Park jogger case set the tone for every other racially charged news story. In August, a black teenager named Yusef Hawkins was murdered by a group of white teenage boys who were allegedly protecting the honor of a white teenage girl. The day after the killing, 300 black protesters marched in the streets. White onlookers spat on them, chanting “Central Park, Central Park.”
The rape allegations against the Central Park Five were completely fabricated. By contrast, allegations may hold up in the case of the Cologne sexual assaults. Whether or not they do, we should be on the lookout for false defenders of women’s rights who use sexual violence to justify racial hatred — like the Pegida member who said last week that Muslims were waging a “sex jihad” that specifically targeted “blonde, white women.”
Germany has absorbed over a million refugees in the past year. If the Cologne assaults become the subtext for the entire German conversation around immigrants — as the Central Park rape became for the racial conversation in New York — we will see much more of the retaliatory violence against asylum-seekers that has already begun.
Want to deepen your understanding of the news?
Follow Timeline on Medium
