by Jackson Katz
CHAPTER EIGHT
Race and Culture
“…Racism turns our attention away from real exploitation and danger…by creating myths about family violence and sexual assault. We are taught that men of color and men from other cultures are dangerous. We have stereotypes about rapists being dark (i.e., black) strangers in alleys, about Asian men being devious and dishonest, about Latinos being physically and sexually dangerous. Racism has produced myths about every group of non-white, non-mainstream men being dangerous to white women and children.”
—Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism
“The sexist, misogynist, patriarchal ways of thinking and behaving that are glorified in gangsta rap are a reflection of the prevailing values in our society.”
—bell hooks
On October 3, 1995, I boarded a plane at the St. Louis airport just a few minutes before the jury was set to deliver its verdict in the O. J. Simpson double murder trial. Like millions of Americans, in their homes, workplaces, and in public spaces, I had been glued to CNN waiting to hear how the latest “trial of the century” would end. A few minutes after takeoff, the pilot came on the PA system. “I bet you’re curious about the verdict in the O. J. Simpson trial,” he said with a hint of a smirk. “Let me do this. If the verdict is guilty, I’ll bank the plane to the left. If he was acquitted, I’ll bank it to the right.” Intrigued by this creative gesture, we waited for a few tense moments or until all doubt was removed as the TWA jet leaned gently to the right. As the plane tipped, the passengers let out a collective gasp, which quickly turned into expressions of disbelief and anger. Needless to say, most people on board were white.
From the first moments of the infamous white Bronco chase more than a year before, the O. J. Simpson case forced questions of race to the forefront of our national dialogue about gender violence. It was not the first criminal case to do this, but because the alleged murderer was an African American man who had already achieved the status of a cultural icon, and because it took place on the cusp of a dramatic proliferation of 24/7 cable television coverage, it was by far the most culturally consequential.
I have no desire to revisit the specific questions raised by the case about racism within the LAPD, whether Simpson’s “dream team” of lawyers simply overpowered the prosecutors, or whether a predominantly black jury chose to deliver a not-guilty verdict to send a statement above and beyond Simpson’s guilt or innocence. But I do want to discuss what I learned from the case about the volatile intersection between race and gender, and the manner in which that relationship shapes the national conversation about gender violence.
When I first started giving public lectures about men’s violence against women in the late 1980s, I rarely said anything about race beyond the obligatory statement that crimes like rape and domestic violence cut across all the social categories of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. I paid close attention to ongoing intellectual debates about race and gender, and I was certainly familiar with the work of black feminists like Alice Walker, Michelle Wallace, Audre Lord, and bell hooks. I knew the subject was crucially important, but also complex and potentially incendiary, and at the time I doubted my ability to say anything particularly insightful about it. Moreover, because I had already taken on the delicate task of challenging my own and other men’s sexism, I worried that in trying to navigate the subjects of sexism and racism simultaneously, I might stumble and inadvertently make an offensive statement. Why take the chance of mishandling a sensitive subject like race and risk diverting my focus away from gender violence? Occasionally this presented a problem, such as when a man—usually but not always African American—forced the issue by yelling out, “Tyson was railroaded!” when I dared broach the subject of male athletes who assault women. Still, I maintained this cautious approach for a few years, until one day, after one of my talks at a large East Coast university, a black female professor approached me and took me aside.
“I noticed that you didn’t talk about racial matters in your presentation,” she said. “What you are doing is very important, but I think it would be more effective if you said something about race and racial difference so at the very least, people of color—and white people—could trust that you know there are important racialized dimensions to this issue, even if you are not going to focus on them.”
She was right, of course. I immediately began to question my cautious strategy. How could I presume to do justice to the huge and multifaceted problem of men’s violence against women without acknowledging—at a minimum—some of the ways that race, ethnicity, and culture are involved? I knew, for example, that many African American women in abusive relationships are reluctant to call 911 because they know that black men—especially poor black men—are more likely than whites to receive harsh and often unfair treatment from police and the courts, not to mention the fact that a criminal record would further endanger their already bleak chances for gainful employment. I knew that in certain immigrant communities there is still intense pressure on women to stay in abusive marriages and work things out. Thus how could I talk about efforts to hold batterers criminally accountable for their behavior and not talk about the dramatic difference in perspective between people in a typical white middle-class suburb, who generally trust the criminal justice system, and people in ethnically diverse, poor, and working-class city neighborhoods, who generally do not? It was clear that as a white man I had to address more thoughtfully the unique racial and cultural experiences of women and men of color.
It took me longer to realize that in other ways I had been talking about race and culture all along. Every time I said “our culture” teaches boys that being a man means being in control—both of ourselves and others, including women—I was talking about the dominant white culture. Because whiteness is the “norm” against which other races/ethnicities are measured, many white people do not even see themselves as having a racial identity, or belonging to a racial/ethnic group with its own set of characteristics. That is one of the most subtle ways that social privilege functions: by remaining invisible. Whenever there is a well-publicized domestic violence incident involving a man of color, it is fair to predict that many whites will casually observe that it is “something about their culture” that causes men of color to abuse “their” women. Fernando Mederos, a leader in the batterer intervention movement who has long advocated for culturally competent services and approaches to men who batter, says there is a universal tendency to think that “Our batterers are deviant, theirs are in their cultural mainstream.” For example, when was the last time you heard someone say, “It’s a white thing” about a white man who was arrested for beating his wife?
During the thousands of hours of TV commentary and debate about Scott Peterson’s murder of his pregnant wife, Laci, in 2004, did anyone ever suggest that one of the root causes of the crime might be racial, because white men in our society are socialized to view women as disposable objects? On the endless cable news shows and talk radio programs that made fat profits off the case, was there any discussion about the pervasive misogyny of a culture—our culture—that produces the likes of Scott Peterson? I must have heard Peterson referred to dozens of times as a cad and a pathological liar. But you would have been hard-pressed to hear Peterson described as a product of a deeply sexist white culture in mainstream media. When white men assault women, it is far less threatening to attribute their behavior to moral failings, or individual demons like bad childhood experiences or alcoholism. As a result, white men’s violence tends to be examined on a case-by-case basis. Or as the anti-racist educator Tim Wise writes, “When Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer go out and do their thing, no one thinks to ask what it is about white folks that makes them cut babies out of their mothers’ wombs, torture young men and bury them under the house, kill two dozen or more women for the hell of it, or consume human flesh…You say 90 percent of modern serial killers have been white? Well, isn’t that puzzling. Next question.” By contra
st, when African American or Latino men assault women, many white people feel free to make sweeping judgments about their entire racial or ethnic group. The sinister influences of “race” and “culture” are only invoked when the perps are men of color.
The long-standing racist stereotype of black and Latino men as thuggish brutes and sexual predators does incalculable damage to people of color. The image of the dark-skinned man as a threat to white women—and a threat to social order more generally—has been used for centuries by whites to justify all manner of racist social controls. One of the fundamental beliefs underpinning white European colonialism since the fifteenth century was the racist idea that indigenous peoples throughout Africa, Asia, and North, Central, and South America were “savages” whose violent impulses had to be contained and controlled. Two relatively recent manifestations of those beliefs were the white vigilante practice of lynching African American men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the dramatic overrepresentation of black and Latino men in prison today. Since the 1960s, conservative white politicians have exploited white fears—of black men especially—with “tough on crime” rhetoric and mandatory sentencing laws, resulting in the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of African American men (most of whom are convicted of non-violent drug offenses).
But the caricature of men of color as violent beasts does more than simply justify racist social or economic policies. Shifting responsibility for violence against women onto the racialized other also keeps the critical spotlight off of white men. Even though FBI statistics clearly indicate that most men who assault women attack those within their own racial or ethnic group, a culturally prevalent message to white women says otherwise. White girls learn from an early age that it is not their own white boyfriends and husbands who present the greatest risk to their safety. The real danger lurks with dark-skinned predators. In spite of decades of multicultural education and consciousnessraising, many white women continue to take this message to heart. Whenever I ask a roomful of (mostly white) college-age women what steps they routinely take to protect themselves against sexual assault, one of their first answers is always “stay away from ‘certain’ neighborhoods.” In his book Uprooting Racism, Paul Kivel calls this the “geography of fear,” where whites are taught to dread the “inner city,” a code word for where African Americans and/or Latinos live. In the hundreds of times I have done this exercise, relatively few women have said they are careful around the white men they hang around with or date—even though statistically those men are much more likely to physically or sexually abuse them. Thus racism plays another of its many functions in our society. When white women focus their self-defense strategies against “external enemies,” they are less likely to see—much less do something about—threats from white men that are much closer to home.
The racist but enduring image of black males as violent animals also provides the promise of a built-in alibi for white criminals. A recurring script line on HBO’s The Sopranos plays on this theme, as white Italian gangsters regularly break the law or double-cross each other, secure in the knowledge that if they are caught, they can always “blame it on the black guy.” In one memorable scene, the show’s central character, Tony Soprano, the patriarch of a New Jersey mafia family, tearily confesses to his female therapist that he failed to show up and assist his cousin during a planned robbery many years before because he had suffered a panic attack after an argument with his mother. The robbery was botched and the cousin was sentenced to a long prison term. Until that session with his therapist, the violent alpha male, Tony, had never shared the truth with anyone, instead maintaining the socially acceptable cover story that he had been jumped by “a couple of [blacks].”
In 2004, tens of millions of Americans followed the Scott Peterson case, which audiences soaked up as a true crime reality show—replete with betrayed mistresses, clandestinely taped conversations, and tearful courtroom testimonies. The narrative heart of the story was that a white man murdered his pregnant wife and then for weeks successfully deceived his family and friends about what happened. But fifteen years before anyone had heard of Laci and Scott Peterson, another high-profile white domestic homicide riveted the nation. The 1989 murder in Boston of Carol DiMaiti Stuart by her husband Charles Stuart sent shock waves through white middle-class America. Like the Peterson case, the Stuart case featured a seemingly upstanding white man who had murdered his popular, attractive, pregnant white wife, exposing the hypocrisy of the white middle-class conceit that this kind of thing couldn’t happen to “people like us.” The two infamous cases had many characteristics in common, but as cultural spectacles there was one big difference. In the Peterson case, both the victim and defendant were white, hence there was no overt or hushed discussion of “race” as a contributing factor. But in the Charles Stuart murder race played a major role. In fact, the alibi that Charles Stuart offered for the murder of his wife provides a textbook illustration of how the demonization of black men can divert attention away from white men’s responsibility for violence against women.
The basic facts of the Stuart murder are as follows: On October 23, 1989, Charles Stuart, a thirty-year-old white fur-store manager, fatally shot his pregnant thirty-year-old wife Carol DiMaiti Stuart, a lawyer, in the head as they sat in his car near the Boston hospital where they had just attended a childbirthing class. He then turned the gun on himself, causing a serious wound to his stomach. What came next set the stage for a full-blown racial upheaval. With his car phone Stuart called 911 to report that a black man in a sweat suit had shot him and his wife in a robbery attempt. He was in excruciating pain and his wife was dying next to him in the front seat. By coincidence, the national TV show 911 had a crew in town, and they were able to rush to the scene and provide rare footage of the wounded, bleeding man being loaded into an ambulance. Stuart’s chilling call to the dispatcher was also played endlessly on national TV and radio, generating enormous sympathy for him, along with outrage at this brutal and senseless tragedy that had befallen the “perfect couple.” Their tragic mistake, it appeared, was venturing into a largely black section of the Mission Hill neighborhood.
While Charles Stuart lay recovering in his hospital bed and expressions of sympathy for the supposedly grieving husband/father poured in, local and national media coverage emphasized the “racially motivated” slaying. Meanwhile, in response to Stuart’s description of the black suspect, and under the pressure of national media attention, Boston police began to aggressively stop and search black men on the streets and in housing projects, with little or no probable cause. In a city with an ugly history of white racism and often tense relations between the police and communities of color, the police tactics sparked widespread anger and outrage, and resulted in a series of emotionally charged public meetings and high-profile and angry press conferences by black leaders. A couple of weeks after the shooting, Boston police arrested a black man from Mission Hill with a long criminal record on an unrelated charge. But word spread quickly that he would soon be charged with the murder of Carol DiMaiti Stuart. On January 4, the next bombshell dropped. Charles Stuart jumped off the Tobin Bridge to his death in the Mystic River, an apparent suicide. It was widely believed that he killed himself after learning that his younger brother planned to go to the authorities and confess that he had been an unwitting accessory to the murder of his brother’s pregnant wife. The city and much of New England was in shock at the brazenness of Charles Stuart’s betrayal—both of his wife and of the many people in the region (not all of them white) who had grieved with him and offered their support and prayers in neighborly solidarity.
Almost immediately there ensued a long round of recriminations and introspection, as white-dominated institutions from law enforcement to city government to the media were accused—and defended themselves against—charges of institutional bias and racism. The questions lingered: why were so many people so quick to believe Charles Stuart’s story of a black murderer? No doubt his (presumably
) self-inflicted wound enhanced his credibility. Still, when a woman is murdered, her husband is usually the first person to come under suspicion. That assumption seems to have been suspended in this case. If Charles Stuart had killed his wife and concocted a different alibi, would he have been so readily embraced by the white community?
Carol DiMaiti Stuart was probably the most prominent domestic violence murder victim in the U.S. in 1989. But in part as a result of the skill displayed by Charles Stuart in staging an alibi for himself that capitalized on the dominant white culture’s willingness to believe the worst about black men, very little commentary in the case related to domestic violence or its causes. In fact, the cover story in Time magazine that ran on January 22, 1990, with a picture of Charles Stuart at the crime scene, was titled “A Murder in Boston: How a bizarre case inflamed racial tensions and raised troubling questions about politicians, the police, and the press.” The headline writers did not even bother to mention domestic violence. The troubling questions the case raised about (white) men’s violence against women were relegated to the status of an afterthought.
As we will see, the racial subtext—however important in and of itself—often serves this diversionary function.
ATHLETES, RACE, AND GENDER VIOLENCE
When people talk about the bad behavior of male athletes—including their mistreatment of women—they might actually be talking in a coded way about the bad behavior of black men. There is certainly a lot of evidence for this. The list of names that typically rolls off white people’s tongues is revealing: O. J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Kobe Bryant. I suspect that most whites would not consciously want to single out black male athletes as violent misogynists. But running down a list of perps that consists exclusively of black male athletes does reinforce the racist idea that the problem is less about the privileged position of men in a sexist athletic world and more about the racial identity of those men.