The recent rape of an 11-year-old Hispanic girl in Cleveland, Tex., is assumed to be what we can expect from the so-called "'hood." Or it's just what can happen to girls who write about their sex lives on Facebook and dress provocatively - "more appropriate to a woman in her 20s," as The New York Times put it.
And remembering the Tawana Brawley scandal, we could conclude that women of color will use any excuse to save themselves from being caught doing something untoward: running away from home to be sexually free with boyfriends, selling sex and titillation or just being airheads whose fates are determined.
These are obviously sexist and racist ways to read this tragedy, which allow us to avoid the ugly fact of the matter: Our culture does not teach young women to protect themselves. All parents suffer despair when observing how naively female children choose to enlist in the obligatory "rebellion" promoted since the '60s.
Otherwise, one is some kind of a nerd who listens to the advice of parents and other adults. To move up the lurid side of our culture, one should do everything except listen to one's parents - and finish his or her homework.
The extremely strong desire to follow the trends of the moment is helped by an electronic media in which sex is attached to every activity. Girls constantly hear about how to look "hot," which usually means dressing like a prostitute. Even Tucker Carlson, that staid Republican, took to Twitter to brand Sarah Palin a "MILF." That is not scandalous because we are so far gone at this point.
None of this even vaguely excuses women for lying about being raped nor defends male rapists. Neither is innocent.
In today's world, "innocent" is a word rarely applied outside of a narrow legal definition, because most people seem to have accepted the idea that few of us are innocent, given the endless smut supposedly bubbling in our brains.
But it is still painful to hear what preadolescent girls or teenage women say when they open their mouths on the subject of sexuality and responsibility. One can easily hear the heartbreaking confusion of children as it unconsciously wrestles up through their vulgarity, their attempts at being tough, their dismissals of supposed good behavior.
Interestingly, the reactions of men with female children tends to be quite different from those who do not have them. Upon hearing what happened in Cleveland, Tex., men with daughters across the land probably blurted out things like, "They should execute all of those asses. If not, they should stay in prison for the rest of their lives."
Those who only had sons (or who had no children) were uniformly disgusted, but also perhaps sympathetic to the accused young men. But what if they had daughters of their own who had been raped because of how they dressed or with whom they consorted? Would the accused deserve sympathy then?
"Hell, no."
I do not think that rape should be qualified by the dress of the victim, even if she seems to be a "video vixen" in training. Yet irony always walks tall in American life. Those wanting to preserve their crime were caught by the same kind of electronics that may have influenced their behavior: They used their phones to take pictures and to make videos of what happened. That is how the police found out which young men were to be arrested and charged.
There it is.
By, Stanley Crouch- NY Daily
crouch.stanley@gmail.com
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