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By Root 914 0

the Indiana district attorney prosecuted him for rape because of his achievements and popularity combined with his race. To believe this, Ms. Washington must be cast as a liar or a pawn in the scheme to bring down Mike Tyson. Thus, the community declared that the potential for racial bias in the prosecution was more important than the possibility of sexual assault. More important, it played into the hands of the stereotypical portrait of African American women as untrustworthy attestants to sexual misconduct no matter who is the accused. Unfortunately, the support Ms. Washington received from feminists hurt her in the eyes of the community, fueling the community distrust of her claim. She was seen as a pawn of the criminal justice system as well as the tool of white women. Since white women are the very individuals whose claims of rape, though often manipulated, lead to the lynching of black men, Ms. Washington by proxy became a party to Tyson’s “lynching.”

The picture of a lynching is as repugnant to the black community as any, and false rape charges have too often been the tool for advocating lynchings. Through rape some members of the white community manipulated racist fears of black sexuality. George Bush himself selected convicted rapist Willie Horton as a symbol of his tough stance on crime. And certainly, Mr. Tyson deserved the benefit of the doubt of his innocence, as does anyone accused of a criminal offense. Nevertheless, in denouncing Ms. Washington’s claim as part of a conspiracy, the community played on another set of racist notions—those about the sexuality of African American women.

Race has been a determinant in the conviction rates for all crimes. Part of the present and the history against which the African American community reacts is that blacks are more likely to be convicted of rape than are whites and that for years in the South the rape of a white woman by a black man carried with it the death penalty. What the community does not react to is the fact that historically there was no criminal penalty in the South for the rape of a black woman by any man, black or white. Moreover, studies of rape today show that the likelihood of conviction in a rape trial depends more on the race of the alleged victim of the rape than on the race of the accused. The conviction is less likely to occur if the accuser is black regardless of whether the accused is black or white. Thus, there is evidence that society has bought into the stereotype of the dishonest and untrustworthy black woman more readily than it has the stereotype of the oversexed black man.

I accept that both may have been at work in Mike Tyson’s conviction. The Tyson defense team played a dangerous card portraying him as a sexual aggressor whose behavior, no matter how bad, was part of a common knowledge Ms. Washington shared. Notwithstanding this obnoxious and offensive portrayal of Mike Tyson, many among the community leadership chose his perspective over hers. It was a predictable choice given the racial reality as they saw it—the reality of blackness as male and moreover as the successful male athlete role model, no matter how he treats African American women.

The same approach would be echoed by Ben Chavis in his reaction to his dismissal by the board of the NAACP. Chavis was accused of settling a sex discrimination suit that had shades of harassment with $300,000 of badly needed NAACP funds. In response, many said a woman caused his demise, and shamed the African American community for political reasons. Nevertheless, whether or not Chavis ever harassed his accuser, it was Chavis who used the money of the nation’s leading civil rights organization to settle his personal claim, and ultimately it was Chavis whose behavior brought him down. In the same way it was Clarence Thomas’ own behavior which led to his public scrutiny and embarrassment.

Thomas and Chavis as a pair of black men publicly accused of sex harassment certainly represent two sides of the political coin. Chavis, whose career had been in civil rights from the 1960s era of the movement,