I would like to raise some issues specifically about coming to this story as white folks, myself as a white person. Coming from a position of whiteness and racial privilege, I’m thinking about the tendency we have as white folks to want people like Recy to be like us, to assume that her story and experience will be what we expect it to be, and to understand her experiences and truths in terms of our own experiences of and truths about violence and sexual violence.
It’s important I think to try to hold the integrity of her story as, among other things, a black woman. To recognize that violence and sexual violence is a tool of white supremacy as well as a tool of male supremacy and that all of that is in play for her in a way that white folks can’t assume is the same for us. To hold the integrity of her story as both patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity and also racism and this country’s history of slavery and Jim Crow (and now mass incarceration) intersect on her body — not abstractly or in an academic way, the way some folks talk about intersectionality — but how Kimberle Crenshaw meant it in terms of how these assorted, multiple systems of power and systems of violence actually, bodily and physically and viscerally, cut into and land on and crush Recy Taylor. [Added: The way black women have higher mortality rates for breast and cervical cancer. The way disproportionate numbers of black women are dying while giving birth.]
Similarly, or along that same trajectory, I want to encourage white folks who watch this story to think about active and meaningful engagement with it and with creating change specifically around the rape of black women. Whiteness and those of us who (even passively, even accidentally, even unknowingly or unintentionally) benefit from white supremacy sometimes think that our absence of overt racial harm or our attempts to be non-racist or to claim an ally identity for ourselves is sufficient. I want to encourage white folks to, first, recognize and name the privileges of whiteness that we are ashamed of and want to disavow, and also I want to encourage white people to think in much more active ways about racial justice. We need to think in anti-racist terms that interrupt racism and white supremacy. It’s not enough to watch a documentary about the rape of Recy Taylor and attend a panel discussion, it’s not enough to wear a safety pin, it’s not enough to march in a knitted hat (regardless of the color yarn, but maybe especially pink), it’s not enough to not be overtly racist. These things are fine, and they are not enough. We, white folks, need to be willing to lose stuff we are accustomed to having — to lose cache and lose friends and lose jobs sometimes and lose football maybe, if we think of that as a loss, and lose comfort.
We need to realize that the rape of Recy Taylor was a historical moment but that The Rape of Recy Taylor is ongoing. For example to recognize the ways that she was assumed to be and called a prostitute (as though sex workers are somehow not entitled to give or withhold consent, or entitled to physical safety and bodily integrity), that she was called a prostitute and assaulted because she existed in public space. That she was deprived of her humanity and ownership of her body in ways that we can find happening in similar ways today to transgender women of color [Added: Janell Crosby and Tyra Woods] who are assaulted and stripped on the Atlanta transit, with people videotaping the assault and laughing, nobody helping, trans women of color who are assaulted and arrested and assumed to be and called prostitutes, who are deprived of their humanity and bodily integrity, like Recy Taylor, because they are existing in and occupying public space.
I hope we will take that to the next level of connection and the next, to Jacqueline Dixon and Marissa Alexander in Florida and Alabama, both of which are Stand Your Ground states, black women who used force to protect themselves from abusive partners, black women who are not being protected under that law when that law has been used repeatedly to protect non-black men who are shooting and killing black men. And at the next level to connect all of these black women and black men and black children who are being stopped daily and surveilled and interrogated by white neighbors and white dorm mates and the police simply for existing in and occupying public space, and sometimes private space, and sometimes their own private property. I hope we connect the rape of Recy Taylor to our own assumptions and our sense of entitlement about owning and controlling public space.
This is not only a story about rape, it is importantly a story about rape against a black woman. I realize that I’m speaking primarily to white folks, and I want to be clear that this is not in order to center whiteness but hopefully quite the contrary, to call on us to de-center whiteness and the assumption that white experience is a better framework or the only framework from which to understand violence and sexual violence. Again, I urge anti-racist-minded and well-intentioned white folks in the room to actively and meaningfully engage in dismantling and de-centering whiteness and create change specifically for black survivors of assault and sexual assault in our country.
Rev. Miller Hoffman 