Representative for California’s 43rd district has been a role model, a crusader for justice, a game-changer, a trailblazer, and an advocate for the marginalized who has long defied her critics, including her most vocal detractor, Donald J. Throughout her forty years in public service and eighty years on earth, U.S. But behind the Auntie Maxine meme is a seasoned public servant and she’s not here to play. To millions nationwide, Congresswoman Maxine Waters is a hero of the resistance and an icon, serving eye rolls, withering looks, and sharp retorts to any who dare waste her time on nonsense. Twenty years later, after a career of working with victims like herself, Michelle decides to find out what happened to her case and why she never heard from the police again after one brief interview.
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In 1984, the Boston Sexual Assault Unit was formed as a result of a series of break-ins and rapes that terrorized the city, of which Michelle's own horrific rape was the last. Given all this, it seems fair to ask whether rape is actually a crime. It might be laughable if it didn't work so much of the time. Rape in this country is not treated as a crime of brutal violence but as a parlor game of he said / she said.
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Cases are closed before they are investigated and DNA evidence sits for years untested and disregarded. A person stands whole, and in a moment of unexpected violence, that life, that body is gone.Īward-winning writer and public health executive Michelle Bowdler's memoir indicts how sexual violence has been addressed for decades in our society, asking whether rape is a crime given that it is the least reported major felony, least successfully prosecuted, and fewer than 3% of reported rapes result in conviction. The crime of rape sizzles like a lightning strike. She shows how the division between innocent white women and racialized, sexualized women of color was created, and why this division is crucial to confront.Īlong the way are revelatory responses to questions such as: Why are white men not troubled by sexual assault of women? With rigor and precision, Hamad builds a powerful argument about the legacy of white superiority we are socialized in, a reality we must apprehend in order to fight. It offers a long overdue validation of the experiences of women of color.ĭiscussing subjects as varied as The Hunger Games, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the viral "BBQ Becky" video, and 19th century lynchings of Mexicans in the American Southwest, Ruby Hamad undertakes a new investigation of gender and race. Taking us from the slave era, when white women fought in court to keep their slaves, through the centuries of colonialism, when they offered a soft face for brutal tactics, to the modern workplace, White Tears/Brown Scars tells a charged story of white women’s active participation in campaigns of oppression.