Thoughts on Sebold, Part 2

 

Photo Credit: https://trauma-recovery.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/shutterstock_61860736.jpg 

From what I’ve read of the Broadwater exoneration, including Bray’s piece, my feeling toward Sebold was initially rather jaundiced – that she had the wherewithal in later years, as a successful author who was able and willing to reflect on her traumatic experience, to realize that her accusation against Broadwater might be a mistake, and to do something about it. I admit I’ve reserved judgment a bit more since reading Laura Miller’s piece in Slate – it’s one thing to read and acknowledge in the abstract that Sebold’s rape was “brutal,” quite another to read the cruel details and see the depth of her trauma. But I still think Bray is closer to the truth than Miller.

Bray’s discussion of how internalized racism affected Sebold’s judgment also made me think about the question of racial disparities in campus sexual assault accusations and adjudications. This question arises against a backdrop where universities have ignored or bungled complaints for even the most egregious assaults – not just nebulous “he said, she said” scenarios. And it’s used by the Right as a cudgel to claim that the real campus epidemic is in false accusations, not sexual assaults.

Specifically, I remembered an Atlantic article from 2017 by Emily Yoffe. I have some reservations about her – for instance, I don’t share her hand-wringing about cancel culture or Al Franken’s ouster, and I’m not as worried about #MeToo beyond specific racial dynamics. While her 2013 Slate piece, “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk” was more nuanced and informative than the clickbait title suggests, I thought there was a subtle but powerful blind spot in its framing. (If you can contemplate changing binge drinking culture on campus, you could simultaneously contemplate how to instill more respect for women in male college students, while changing the culture of negligence in university administrations.)  So I don’t know for sure when she’s being intellectually honest, or when she’s leaving some key details or context outside her frame of analysis. Still, she presents enough compelling information in the Atlantic piece for me to take the issue seriously as one that needs further study:

“Since there are no national statistics on how many young men of any given race are the subject of campus-sexual-assault complaints, we are left with anecdotes about men of color being accused and punished. There are many such anecdotes. In 2015, in The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote that in general, the administrators and faculty members she’d spoken with who ‘routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases’ said that ‘most of the complaints they see are against minorities.’”

“Colgate University was recently investigated by the Office for Civil Rights for potential race discrimination, a Title VI violation, in its sexual-assault adjudication process. The university was cleared in April, on the grounds that the numbers did not allow OCR to conclude that race was a statistically significant factor in Colgate’s adjudications—in any given year the number of men of any race referred for formal hearings was in the single digits. … But the report did bring those statistics to light, a rarity. In the 2013–14 academic year, 4.2 percent of Colgate’s students were black. According to the university’s records, in that year black male students were accused of 50 percent of the sexual violations reported to the university, and they made up 40 percent of the students formally adjudicated.”

 

Yoffe emphasizes the difficulty of drawing conclusions without systematic data, but highlights possible causes suggested by university faculty and staff she interviewed:

“Janet Halley, a professor at Harvard Law School and a self-described feminist … writes that ‘morning-after remorse can make sex that seemed like a good idea at the time look really alarming in retrospect; and the general social disadvantage that black men continue to carry in our culture can make it easier for everyone in the adjudicative process to put the blame on them. … Case after Harvard case that has come to my attention, including several in which I have played some advocacy or adjudication role, has involved black male respondents.’”

“Students are pushing their boundaries and that many hook up with a partner of a different ethnicity for the first time. But then, ‘if there is any kind of perceived injury—emotional or physical—when you cross racial lines, there’s likely to be more animus.’”

“As the definition of sexual assault used by colleges has become broader and blurrier, it certainly seems possible that unconscious biases might tip some women toward viewing a regretted encounter with a man of a different race as an assault. And as the standards for proving assault have been lowered, it seems likely that those same biases, coupled with the lack of resources common among minority students on campus, might systematically disadvantage men of color in adjudication, whether or not the encounter was interracial.”

“[Melissa Kagle, former Colgate professor] told me that university administrators, in their zeal to address an issue that was a top priority of federal regulators, had gone after rumors and third-party reports of assaults, pressuring some female students to pursue complaints. I spoke with two women who made harassment complaints against a Rwandan student who was later expelled. One said she hadn’t wanted to make a complaint, but was told that it would help another woman feel safer; neither believed expulsion was the right outcome.”

 

Another possibility, of course, is that sexual assault victims on campus are more likely to report men of color as opposed to white men. It would also take more data to understand what percentage of campus sexual assault complaints are ambiguous “he said, she said” cases – the kind the public imagination fixates on disproportionately – rather than obvious assaults. Another variable is how well the complainant knew the accused in various cases (the better she knew him, presumably the less likely she would be to misidentify him). Still, Melissa Kagle’s perspective, at least as reported by Yoffe, is thought-provoking:

“Kagle viscerally understands the horror of rape because as a young woman she experienced it herself. But she told me that over the past several years, she’d become deeply concerned that in some cases fear of assault on campus was clouding people’s judgment and creating a reflex to presume guilt. In several cases that she’d come to know closely, at first by happenstance and then because minority men began to seek her out for assistance, ‘people believed something terrible happened when it hadn’t.’

Kagle believes that men of color—and especially foreign men of color, students from Africa and Asia—were uniquely defenseless when charged with sexual assault, typically lacking financial resources, a network of support, and an understanding of their rights.”

 

Yoffe and the university personnel are suggesting that a non-trivial share of accusations against male students of color might be, if not willfully false, then based on a racialized misinterpretation of the encounter. Of course, extensive research has shown that false rape accusations are rare. But, as Blay explains, “False rape accusations are rare, yes, but one must reconcile that with the fact that 52 percent of people falsely accused of rape are Black men, and Black men convicted of sexual assault are 3.5 times more likely to be innocent than white men.”

Maybe the racial disparities alleged by Yoffe and like-minded faculty are really a nothing-burger based on a few scattered anecdotes. For one thing, most assaults are unreported, and those that are often don’t make it to formal adjudication. (Also side note – Halley has similar allegiances to Yoffe.) But the sordid history of rape allegations against Black men in the US suggests it’s a legitimate concern on college campuses, and a major objective of campus reforms is to make assaults easier to report and adjudicate.

And yet, in a system where young women are already doubted, shamed, and too often subjected to the trope of “morning-after regret,” what would it mean if college campuses became more circumspect in handling cases with a Black or other racialized defendant, especially if the complainant was white*? The prospect of examining complaints against racialized male students for bias is a minefield, since it could involve cross-examining the complainant and picking apart her story – precisely the type of practice that is under scrutiny for disparaging and re-traumatizing victims.

Moreover, many of these defendants may in fact be guilty, and would assault other women if the university cleared them of wrongdoing using a higher bar for evidence. These victims continue to see their perpetrators on campus or even share classes with them, while universities too often do nothing. As a result, many victims drop out of school, losing scholarships, tuition dollars, and years of fulfillment and good income that could come from earning a degree and pursuing a career in their field. Instead, they spend years coping with their trauma, while also struggling to make a living and grappling with trust issues in future relationships.

So while wrongful expulsion from college isn’t a trivial outcome, it must be balanced against the widespread incidence of young women wrongfully being driven from college themselves by trauma and negligence. And while young women, especially white women, would ideally be aware of their own biases in reflecting on sexual encounters with Black men, it shouldn’t come at the cost of them self-gaslighting and hesitating to report assault. Also, importantly, racial bias toward Black male sexual assault defendants isn’t the only dynamic at play. Black women who report being raped by Black men are sometimes attacked by fellow community members, not least among them other Black women.

If it’s not apparent by now, I’ve never been raped, assaulted, stalked, or subjected to intimate partner violence. No doubt this impacts my reaction to the Sebold case and the question of race in campus sexual assault cases. I’m sure trauma narrows or overrides a victim’s intellect in ways that I can’t understand, even decades after the event. But I’d say my opinion is still relevant because my own experiences give me an appreciation of what’s at stake. I know what it feels like to fear for my safety.

Also, perhaps it’s relevant not in spite of the fact that I’ve never been sexually assaulted, but because of it, specifically with Black men in sexually charged situations. My experiences are among the many mundane reminders of what should be obvious – that most Black men aren’t rapists. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), based on self-reporting by victims, 8 out of 10 rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. Over half of rapes and sexual assaults are intraracial while fewer than 40% are interracial. (I haven’t figured out how to use the raw data to disaggregate victim and perpetrator data by race, so I don’t know what victim/perpetrator race combinations are most paramount among interracial rapes.) Black perpetrators are overrepresented in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics for nonfatal violent crime overall, but the disproportionality is lower for rape than for other nonfatal violent crimes (22% of rape offenders compared to 13% of the U.S. population). The white share of rapists is statistically comparable to the white share of the population.

 

In short, I think Bray’s implicit (yet gentle) attempt to examine how Sebold’s racial biases drove her inaction as a successful author, and even her actions as a traumatized teenager, is reasonable. I clashed with several Facebook commenters on the Jezebel article about whether Sebold should be subject to any questioning or accountability for how she handled Broadwater’s conviction over the past 4 decades. (This isn’t a scientific assessment, but the women who bristled at these questions seemed predominantly white, while those receptive to the questions included many Black women.) To those who opposed scrutinizing Sebold’s (in)actions and insisted we shouldn’t let the law enforcement personnel who handled her case off the hook, I wanted to say, “No shit, Sherlock.” No reasonable person is denying law enforcement’s culpability in this case, and accountability for them and Sebold isn’t all or nothing. But these commenters do bring up an important point. As Miller says in the Slate piece:

“It’s not the responsibility of a traumatized rape victim to fairly investigate and prosecute the person who assaulted her. That is the duty of the police and prosecutors, who failed both Sebold and Broadwater at every stage, from the moment she first reported the crime to the moment he was convicted.”

 

Similarly, in an article for The Cut cited by Bray, Amia Srinivasan explains:

“Very often, it is men who falsely accuse other men of rape. This is a thing almost universally misunderstood about false rape accusations. When we think of a false rape accusation we picture a scorned or greedy woman, lying to the authorities. But many, perhaps most, wrongful convictions of rape result from false accusations levied against men by other men: by cops and prosecutors intent on pinning an actual rape on the wrong suspect. … Fewer than half of these [exonerated] men were deliberately framed by their alleged victims. Meanwhile, over half of their cases involved ‘official misconduct’: a category that applies when the police coach false victim or witness identifications, charge a suspect despite the victim’s failure to identify him as her attacker, suppress evidence or induce false confessions.”

 

This echoes the point in Yoffe’s article, quoted above, that university administrators sometimes pressure women into filing sexual assault complaints.

 

Notably, though, even Miller 1) doesn’t say it’s off-limits to question whether Sebold should have realized her mistake years later, and 2) doesn’t answer “no”:

“Should Sebold, at some later point, have had second thoughts about Broadwater’s conviction? Possibly. I don’t know. … That [“Lucky” movie] producer’s inquiry ultimately led to the overturning of the conviction. But Sebold herself researched the case while writing Lucky. Did she, too, notice the smaller lies that [Assistant DA] Uebelhoer told her and wonder if the big one, about how Broadwater had gamed the lineup with a friend, was also untrue? In an afterword added to the book in 2017, Sebold describes Broadwater as coming from ‘a family with an entrenched criminal record,’ which suggests she’d looked into the facts and realized that the prosecutor’s stories about his own past offenses weren’t true. To my mind, that’s the most incriminating line in the book, but it still doesn’t prove that Sebold knew or even sensed that the wrong man had been convicted of raping her.”

 

In a way, the question of sexual assault and harassment on college campuses – or workplaces, or any other institution with an internal, non-criminal discipline process – is even more vexing. The stakes are lower, but so is the burden of proof. Again, it’s hard to say without better data how often wrongful accusations (sincere or otherwise) happen, let alone lead to expulsion or termination. California's Yes Means Yes law, which I support overall, has been in place for a few years and might provide some data soon. 

Wrongful college expulsions are clearly an exaggerated strawman for the Right, and likely for Yoffe and Halley as well. But even if rare among Black and other racialized defendants, I still think they’re relevant. For one thing, part of what might make these cases rare is the fact that Black men are underrepresented among postsecondary students to begin with, and Black American men probably more so. If that were to change, maybe racial disparities in sexual assault accusations would become more apparent. EDIT: It could simultaneously be true that a large majority of Black and other racialized defendants are in fact guilty, and that men in these demographic groups experience disproportionate and intolerably high rates of wrongful accusations.

I have no clue how to balance these conflicting goals, and I wonder if they’re really as conflicting as Yoffe suggests. Hopefully writers like Yoffe are merely making a strawman of the Left’s supposed indifference to questions of fairness and racial disparities, just as Ijeoma Oluo was asked to do for USA Today. And yet, I’ll say outright the impression that I suppressed when I first read Oluo’s article – that her coup de grace,

“I was asked to write that if a few men are harmed to protect women, it’s worth it. As if that’s a real threat. As if that’s a valid fear. As if, in this world, a power shift of that magnitude is even within the realm of possibility …”

is a bit glib, since there are other power dynamics at play. (I know anecdotally of at least one case where a kind, capable young Black man was fired from a social service agency because he was accused, not that credibly, of sexual impropriety by an intellectually disabled client.) As a Black woman, Oluo is in more of a position to know than I am. But there are other thinkers and writers of color who’d disagree with her, and I’m trying to make sense of all reasonable perspectives and all that’s at stake.

Jeannie Suk Gersen, who strikes me as more honest than Yoffe or Halley, opposed Harvard’s adoption of “a lowered standard of proof [of guilt for sexual misconduct cases]: from ‘reasonable belief’ to a ‘preponderance of the evidence.’” I’m not a legal scholar, and I don’t know that I’d agree with her on the specifics even if I understood them better. But I agree the questions are worth asking. Maybe it’s quixotic, but I wonder if a sensitive and trauma-informed questioning style would make at least as much impact as the evidentiary standard in assuring justice for both accusers and defendants?

 

The ultimate prize, of course, isn’t a fairer and more effective system for adjudicating rape cases – it’s a world where white supremacy, misogyny, and violence are simultaneously dismantled, and rape is rare to begin with. But for white women, we can’t just say that it’s the job of these institutions to figure it out, or it’s the job of men to get their act together (though they really should). As voters and members of civil society, we’re part of these institutions, we have clout with them, and we can use them in positive or harmful ways. I don’t think we should be afraid of the conversations that Broadwater’s exoneration and Sebold’s wrongful accusation have raised. It’s not like these discussions (and others on race and gender that I haven’t even touched on) are verboten in mainstream discourse – clearly many journalists, scholars, and activists are tackling them. But they’re not as widely discussed among white liberals, women or men, as they should be.

Bray had a bleak assessment of the current situation:

“What is justice, after all, in an inherently unjust, deeply racist and sexist society? Who gets justice, and what does justice look like for people who experience harm at the hands of others and particularly at the hands of the state? In America, justice is constantly shapeshifting, and one person’s idea of what is just can just as easily be another person’s idea of gross inequality and corruption. It’s the nebulous nature of the concept that makes it so easy to corrupt.”

 

If, God forbid, a daughter of mine were raped, I’m sure I’d advise her to report it to police or other authorities regardless of the perpetrator’s race – unless there was something specific about the case or her wishes that swayed me otherwise. After all, she’d not only have a right to justice, but also an obligation to prevent more women from being victimized if at all possible. But, hopefully, we’d be cognizant of our own biases and try to prevent someone she couldn't confidently ID from being punished. Overall, the purpose of these questions isn’t to set rigid, ideological standards for how to react in specific circumstances. It is, at least, to try to imagine what justice does look like, and to remember how multifaceted the fight for it is.

*I'm not envisioning a scenario where colleges and universities use different evidentiary standards for perpetrators of different races. Rather, investigators would keep racial dynamics and the possibility of implicit bias in mind in evaluating accusations.

Thoughts on Sebold, Part 1

 

Photo Credit: Leonardo Cendamo for Getty / L: NBC News, as featured in Jezebel

Since Anthony Broadwater (age 61) was exonerated for the brutal rape of Alice Sebold, then 18, in 1981, I’ve been thinking about a few unsettling experiences in my life. I’m wondering how well my moral compass would’ve held up if they went differently. (Full disclosure, I haven’t read “Lucky.”) This post is geared mainly toward other white people, especially other white women. I describe these experiences in detail for family and friends whom I’ve never told before, and they touch a number of sensitive race, gender, and class nerves. For that reason, when I shared the link to this post on Facebook, I adjusted the privacy settings to hide them from friends who might be needlessly triggered. I’m airing these stories out, in part, because our prejudices lurk and build in the things we don’t say. I’m publishing this post in two parts, with my personal anecdote in the first part. For those who want to skip past the anecdotes, my take-home message is in the second part.

 

Part 1

It’s hard for me to say enough good about Zeba Blay’s sensitive and insightful piece for Jezebel, “What Does Alice Sebold Owe Anthony Broadwater?” In light of my own experiences, this passage strikes me in particular:

“We forget that there is a subtlety and banality to racism that allows it to endure. It is too easy to cast the then 18-year-old traumatized rape victim as some kind of mustache-twirling villain. … This isn’t to say, of course, that Sebold’s actions were not egregiously anti-Black, and that as a young white woman in a racist society, she colluded with a criminal justice system that is more concerned with punishing Black men — any Black man — than it is with due dilligence and intentionality in handling such a delicate and complex crime. In her memoir, Lucky, it’s clear that Sebold’s own biases and prejudices collided with the reality of her assault: She writes about being afraid of ‘certain’ Black men after her rape.”

 

Blay seems to believe, and I’m inclined to believe, that Sebold sincerely thought Broadwater was the perpetrator when she accused him. But Blay is still opening up a conversation about how Sebold’s internalized racism preprogrammed her response to the trauma.

 

Also, after much digging, I rediscovered a passage I’d found in a past Google binge, by Susan Brownmiller (yes, that Susan Brownmiller) from “Against Our Will”:

“The Till case became a lesson of instruction to an entire generation of appalled Americans. I know how I reacted. At age twenty and for a period of fifteen years after the murder of Emmett Till whenever a black teen-ager whistled at me on a New York City street or uttered in passing one of several variations on an invitation to congress, I smiled my nicest smile of comradely equality – no supersensitive flower of white womanhood, I – a largess I extended with equal sincerity to white construction workers, truck drivers, street-corner cowboys … Did not white women in particular have to bear the white man’s burden of making amends for Southern racism? It took fifteen years for me to resolve these questions in my own mind, and to understand the insult implicit in Emmett Till’s whistle, the depersonalized challenge of ‘I can have you’ with or without the racial aspect. Today a sexual remark on the street causes within me a fleeting but murderous rage.”

 

Go figure, this passage comes right after the one that Angela Davis excoriated for portraying Till “as a guilty sexist, almost as guilty as his white racist murderers.”

 

Two of my bizarre and unsettling experiences were situations I got myself into. I’ve told so few people about them because I’m mortified by my recklessness. 

The first experience was in Manhattan, KS in 2005, when I was 21. I was out of college, working my first full-time professional job, and living in a tiny apartment, almost a studio, in a converted old house that I’d been too naïve to realize was something of a slum when I rented it. (The landlord treated me, a young professional woman, fairly well, but the other tenants not so much.) On Halloween night, a Black neighbor down the hall – I’ll call him Carl – was having a party, and later that evening approached me to borrow some money. I’d had one or two brief, friendly conversations with him since I lived there. He said he had an outstanding warrant in a neighboring county, and he needed to pay the court about $90 or he’d be in some violation and lose visitation rights with his son. He said something to the effect that he’d made mistakes but didn’t want to lose touch with his son. I had no idea, then or now, if he was telling the truth, and the way he told the story seemed a bit theatrical. But I sympathized in the chance that it was true, and I figured I wouldn’t starve on account of $90 even if he was lying, so I went to an ATM and got it for him. As collateral, he and a friend brought a giant TV into my living room (this was before flat-screens were widespread).

Later, a friend of Carl’s – I believe the same one who’d helped him carry in the TV – knocked on my door and asked if he could hang out for a while. I haven’t chosen a pseudonym for him because I don’t remember his actual name. He said he was trying to get away from an annoying and persistent woman at Carl’s party. Wanting to be polite and not wanting to be racist – wondering if I’d have the same hesitancy if he were white – I let him come in. We sat on the couch and chatted for awhile, and it was a charming and interesting conversation. He said at one point he was pro-union and a Democrat. Afterward I wondered if he said it because he knew it would strike a chord with me. Maybe both are true.

It was getting late, but he asked if he could spend the night on the couch, to stay away from the unpleasant woman at the party. Again, interrogating my own reaction for racism and classism, I said yes. But I also knew it was a stupid and reckless thing to do. So as I got ready for bed, I quietly pulled a couple of my cheap steak knives from the kitchen and placed them on the windowsills by my bed. A little while later, he came to the bed, crouched down, and asked if he could sleep in the bed with me. I can’t even remember now what I was about to say – I think I was finally going to say no – when he reached over and cut his hand on one of the knives. I can’t even remember why he was reaching – maybe for better balance – and I don’t remember if I felt threatened by the reach. He pulled back in surprise and said “What the – you have a knife?! You’re scared of me?! I’m scared of you!” And he hastened to get out of the apartment with the crazy knife girl.

The next day after work, I came home to a torn envelope halfway under my door. There was a note from Carl, saying he’d repaid the $90 in full and wanted the TV back. But ostensibly someone had ripped the envelope and stolen the money. I went in and started preparing dinner, and after a few minutes I noticed that my laptop and all but one CD were missing. The door didn’t have a deadbolt, only a knob lock, and the jamb was scratched as if it had been jimmied. I called the police and filed a report for the stolen items, and I told them about the previous night. I didn’t tell them I suspected anyone in particular, because I didn’t – though I suspected that Carl or his friend had scoped out the place for valuables for someone’s benefit when they brought in the TV. The conversation I remember was unremarkable, but one officer said I shouldn’t worry that excluding someone would be racist – “this is your castle, and you’re the queen here.”

I don’t know if anything happened to Carl or his friend as a direct result of my police call – I just wanted my stuff back. And I was relieved when Carl retrieved the TV shortly afterward – it took up a ton of space and I’d had no interest in selling it anyway. Months later, another tenant told me that Carl was nervous about an impending landlord visit because had had some stuff that was “hot” or “not legit.”

Carl’s friend stopped by several times after that. Once he stood on the fire escape and called several times for me to come to the window. Once he came to the door, and I had the handy excuse that I was cleaning for my aunt’s visit the next day. The final time he came to the door, I was fed up and didn’t have any excuse handy, so I just shut the door.

Obviously I thank my lucky stars that something much worse didn’t happen in the situation I opened up with Carl’s friend. I don’t think he planned to rape me, considering how taken aback he was by the knives. But for all I knew at the time, he could’ve been a rapist. I do wonder how he treats lower-income Black women, who can be mistreated with fewer social repercussions than there would be for middle-class white women. I’ll impress upon a daughter that she should always deny a strange man an entry to her space, or a date if she’s not interested. Politely if she wants, but still – set boundaries. If he happens to be Black and he thinks she’s being racist, it’s his problem if he doesn’t understand why a woman by herself would take precautions with any man she doesn’t know.

 

You’d think I would’ve learned from this experience, but I had another experience with some similarities in late 2011 or early 2012 in Iowa City, when I was in grad school. The young man in question was a Ghanaian ex-pharmacy student; I’ll call him Abeiku. I can’t remember where or how I met him, maybe at a café, but likely he struck up an interesting conversation, we exchanged numbers, and maybe he called to meet up sometime later. He’d studied at Howard University but I believe he’d dropped out. As I recall, his father was a pharmacist and was somewhat frustrated that he’d fallen off track. Once I gave Abeiku a ride home, but he was vague about where “home” was and said “Just let me off here.” It was near the homeless shelter. My relationship with another man at the time wasn’t exclusive, but I wasn’t interested in Abeiku that way.

One evening he called, or maybe we ran into each other at a café. He asked if I wanted to watch TV with him and I said sure. But he didn’t want to watch it with his roommates around, so he suggested we go to a hotel. Seemed weird, but I decided to take him at his word – I could understand wanting to get away from his roommates. And, again, I asked myself if I’d be as hesitant if he was white. In my memory, we took a cab there for some reason – maybe we’d met downtown and my car was back at the house. We might’ve started watching TV, but at some point he made sexual overtures. Maybe he tried to kiss, and maybe I kissed back to be a good sport – I honestly can’t remember. Somewhere in there he exposed himself, and he asked “Have you ever been with a Black boy before?” (His words – it’s possible he asked this at a previous time we’d met, rather than at the hotel.) I recall being put off but not exceptionally offended or threatened by the exposure – it seemed to make sense in context. But nothing happened beyond that and he dozed off. I tiptoed around the hotel room, gathering up my things so I could sneak out, but I dropped some coins and woke him up. I can’t remember the exchange then – I think the gist was that he realized now that I wasn’t interested but was dismayed that I was conveying it by sneaking out.

Some months later, I got a call from Abeiku in jail. He’d been picked up for fighting in the library and now he was being held on an immigration charge. Maybe I was the only person he knew whom he thought would have that kind of money. But I sure as hell didn’t have $6,000 for bail. Sometime later he’d been transferred to another facility, and he sent me a pen he’d made with a fabric cover and my name stitched on it. He may have included a note that said that he was going to be deported to Ghana, or he may have called or texted once he was back in Ghana.

I honestly don’t know why my memory of the evening in the hotel is so spotty, since really nothing happened. It’s only now that I have an inkling of why this experience was less unsettling than the one in Manhattan. It’s not just classism and the buffering influence that educated immigrant status has on anti-Black racism in America – Abeiku was respectful overall, not intrusive. He wasn’t a stranger asking to enter an apartment where I was alone. Even if my memory is wrong and we left from my house, I had roommates. And maybe he honestly thought that a hotel self-evidently implied sex. Still, though, I didn’t know him that well, and I couldn’t have known what his intentions were. That’s why I still find it unsettling – because of what *I* did despite my own discomfort.

 

The third incident that sticks in my mind was in Tampa, probably in 2013. On the bus home from work, I happened to make eye contact with a Black man who may have been in his 40s and I smiled. I noticed him looking at me and smiling a couple more times after that. I got off at my stop and was heading toward the intersection when I saw him step off the bus rather abruptly. It seemed like he’d decided at the last minute to get off at that stop. It was late afternoon and the area immediately around us was deserted. I think we were in front of a motel. He hit on me in a deliberately charming, velvety way. If I recall correctly, I told him I had a boyfriend – “Where is he?” – I told the truth that he was in Iowa City finishing his bachelor’s, since I’m not good at lying. He wasn’t deterred, but eventually I deflected his advances and politely made my departure.

Most of the time, when I’ve blown a guy off who was hitting on me, I haven’t feared for my physical safety, at least not consciously. But, due partly to my own nature and partly to how women are socialized, I don’t like to break guy’s hearts or be the unreasonable person who won’t even give him a chance. Asking myself afterward why I was so unnerved in this encounter, I certainly can’t rule out racism, but our isolation and the fact that he seemed to choose that stop specifically to follow me were also factors.

 

My main interest with this two-part post is sexual assault, not come-ons or catcalls, so I won’t spend too much time on the latter. As it happens, I’ve personally experienced them mainly from Black and Latino men. Maybe similar advances from white men haven’t stuck in my memory or I didn’t pick up on them as readily, which probably reflects my internalized racism. I know I’ve had advances from white men that were more subtle but in some cases unsettling. Probably the biggest factor, as Roxane Gay has pointed out, is simply that one person’s experience is highly variable and can’t represent the whole.

But … Meh, I’m not that interested in intellectualizing it anymore. Such exercises are often a well-intentioned, convoluted, desperate effort to prevent one’s experiences from reinforcing one’s prejudices. The fact that there are cultural differences between men of different races isn’t that complicated. Whether or not it’s objectively true that white men catcall less, that kracken of a trope just isn’t so strong in my head anymore, that street harassment and come-ons say anything deep or insidious about the character of masculinity in any one demographic group. Likewise, I could be wrong, but I don’t believe I saw Carl’s friend in every poor or working-class Black man I encountered in later years.

But the way white women experience and make sense of these street encounters, influences how we react to cases like Sebold’s. Sebold herself first became convinced that Broadwater was her rapist when he greeted her on the street with a casual flirtation.

 

Finally, a PSA to dudes everywhere – if you want sex, just come out and say so. Don’t play these mind games with coded terms and cajolement. Don’t try to trick us into having sex. Or, if you don’t want to ask and be rejected outright, resign yourself to an evening that’s just Netflix and no chill, since she probably won’t change her mind. Ask the waitress to split the check if you prefer, but sex isn’t an unspoken quid pro quo for dinner and drinks. If that’s what you want, find an independent sex worker who’ll tell you up front what services she offers at what price. Truth in advertising.