proper investigation will not be done. Remember the good
Father Hesburgh’s words as long as you live: “I didn’t need to
talk to the girl. I talked to the boys. ” Even when a prosecutor is convinced that rape as defined by male law did take place, the rapists will not be prosecuted. Male university officials will protect those sacrosanct male institutions—the football team and the fraternity— no matter what the cost to women.
The reasons for this are terrible and cruel, but you must
know them. Men are a privileged gender class over and
against women. One of their privileges is the right of rape—
that is, the right of carnal access to any woman. Men agree, by
law, custom, and habit, that women are sluts and liars. Men
will form alliances, or bonds, to protect their gender class
interests. Even in a racist society, male bonding takes precedence over racial bonding.
It is very difficult whenever racist and sexist pathologies
coincide to delineate in a political way what has actually happened. In 1838, Angelina Grimke, abolitionist and feminist, described Amerikan institutions as “a system of complicated
crimes, built up upon the broken hearts and prostrate bodies
of my countrymen in chains, and cemented by the blood,
sweat, and tears of my sisters in bonds. ”37 Racism and sexism
are the warp and woof of this Amerikan society, the very
fabric of our institutions, laws, customs, and habits— and we
are the inheritors of that complicated system of crimes. In the
Notre Dame case, for instance, we can postulate that the
prosecutor took the woman’s charges of rape seriously at all
because her accused rapists were black. That is racism and
that is sexism. There is no doubt at all that white male law is
more amenable to the prosecution of blacks for the raping of
white women than the other way around. We can also postulate that, had the Notre Dame case been taken to court, the rape victim’s character would have been impugned irrevocably because her lover was a black. That is racism and that is sexism. We also know that had a black woman been raped,
either by blacks or whites, her rape would go unprosecuted,
unremarked. That is racism and that is sexism.
In general, we can observe that the lives of rapists are worth
more than the lives of women who are raped. Rapists are
protected by male law and rape victims are punished by male
law. An intricate system of male bonding supports the right of
the rapist to rape, while diminishing the worth of the victim’s
life to absolute zero. In the Notre Dame case, the woman’s
lover allowed his fellows to rape her. This was a male bond. In
the course of the rape, at one point when the woman was left
alone— there is no indication that she was even conscious at
this point— a white football player entered the room and
asked her if she wanted to leave. When she did not answer, he
left her there without reporting the incident. This was a male
bond. The cover-up and lack of substantive investigation by
white authorities was male bonding. All women of all races
should recognize that male bonding takes precedence over
racial bonding except in one particular kind of rape: that is,
where the woman is viewed as the property of one race, class,
or nationality, and her rape is viewed as an act of aggression
