Justice in America: The Importance Of Brock Turner’s Whiteness // Four videos that answer some of the questions about the Stanford rape case
The narrative
surrounding Brock Turner, from day one of his arrest, has been all about his
“potential.” A Stanford student, a champion swimmer with Olympic aspirations,
only 20 years old with no prior convictions — the concept of Turner’s potential
has been at the center of his defense. It’s Turner’s
potential that kept the police and most media outlets from sharing his true
mugshot from the night of his arrest in 2015, a mugshot quite different than
the clean-cut, wide-eyed, innocent photo from his sentencing that has been so
widely circulated in the last several days.
His potential is what
inspired his father, Dan Turner, to send a letter to the judge asking for
leniency in his son’s sentencing, writing: “His
life will never be the one he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That
is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20
plus years of life.”
And his potential is
what ultimately moved Judge Aaron Perksy to sentence him to just six months in
a California prison instead of the six year-sentence prosecutors originally
asked for, because a long prison sentence “would have a severe impact on him.”
Six months for a young man guilty of three counts of sexual assault. Six months
for someone who assaulted an unconscious young women behind a
dumpster. But potential really has nothing to do with how easily he got
off.
“Potential,” in this
case, is just another word for whiteness. It has been pointed
out throughout this case that the framing of Turner as a star athlete with
everything to lose, a young misguided man who simply needs another chance, epitomizes
the way rape culture operates. We’re socialized to question the victim, use
the fact that she was intoxicated to poke holes in her accusations, while
bending over backwards to highlight all the “good qualities” in her attacker.
Here, rape culture and
“race” culture intersect in a disturbing, but unsurprising way. Let’s just
state the obvious: if Brock Turner were black or Latino, the likelihood of him
getting a measly 6-month sentence for a brutal sexual assault would be very
slim. His wealth, his gender and his whiteness have played a huge role in his
protection, and we must acknowledge that. It’s already a known
fact that incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of color, and that black
convicts are more likely to receive long sentences than their white
counterparts. And no, this isn’t because people of color are just more prone to
crime. It’s because our highly flawed criminal justice system is steeped in racial bias.
There is a long
history in this country of black men being unfairly accused of rape. From Jesse Washington to Emmett Till, young black men have
historically been branded as naturally predatory and sex-crazed, they’ve been
found guilty by all white juries (if they even got a trial) on trumped up
charges and false evidence. They’ve been lynched, executed, sentenced to
lifetimes in prison. Why? Because there is no “potential” in blackness.
When five young black
and Latino boys ranging in ages from 14 to 16 at the time of their arrests were
handed decades-long sentences for the rape of a Central Park jogger in 1989, no
one thought of their potential. No one was concerned with how long prison terms
might affect them at such young ages. No one pondered how their punishment
might impact the lives they dreamed of having. They were black, and they were
poor, and that was enough.
But in the case of
young white men like Turner or Owen
Labrie of St. Paul’s Prep School, it’s somehow easier to humanize
them, to look at their transgressions as youthful mistakes. This has always
been at the center of the disconnect in how we view black and white youth. A
young white man sexually assaults a girl and it’s a terrible but
once-in-a-lifetime mistake. A young black boy like 17-year-old Trayvon Martin
is shot and killed for absolutely no reason at all, but a few photos of him
flashing gold teeth or playfully throwing up the “West-Side” sign are
used as a means for justifying his death. ... read more:
At Turner's sentencing
the 23-year-old woman who has not been identified read out a letter describing the turmoil and effect the assault
had had on her, "Your Honour, if it is all right, for the majority of this
statement I would like to address the defendant directly. You don’t know me,
but you’ve been inside me, and that’s why we’re here today." Below is a
video of a reporter reading out the letter."
"I thought
there’s no way this is going to trial; there were witnesses, there was dirt in
my body, he ran but was caught. Instead, I was told he hired a powerful
attorney, expert witnesses, private investigators. That he was going to go to
any length to convince the world he had simply been confused." "I was pummelled
with narrowed, pointed questions that dissected my personal life, love life,
past life, family life, inane questions, accumulating trivial details to try
and find an excuse for this guy who had me half naked before even bothering to
ask for my name."
At the hearing, Brock's father Dan Turner
also read out a letter where he denies that his son did anything
wrong. He wrote that it would be "a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of
action out of his 20 years of life". Turner felt that even the six-month
sentence was too long and his son shouldn't have been sentenced in the first
place.
The sentencing and the
letters have fostered a national conversation both about rape culture and the
kind of response it has in the media and online. One line of criticism is that
from the beginning, Brock Turner was called a "swimmer with Olympic
dreams" as if that somehow diminished the intensity of his crime. And as
is pointed out in the women's letter, she was called an "unconscious
intoxicated woman, ten syllables, and nothing more than that".
Another angle is the
racial aspect. While people of colour are often convicted for longer terms for
similar crimes, Turner was let off with relative ease… read more:
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