Quickies
Quickies: Limping Ladies, UConn Settles Sexual Assault Suit, and the Use of Turbans During the Jim Crow Era
- Victorian Strangeness: The bizarre tale of the ladies who limped – If you laugh at this story about a strange fad, just remember that the whole “one glove” trend inspired by Michael Jackson wasn’t too long ago.
- Gangs draw up lists of girls to rape as proxy attacks on rivals – “Gangs assault rivals’ sisters and girlfriends as a ‘low risk’ method of asserting dominance.” From Radium.
- “Tomlinson Hill”: A white man from Texas unearths his family’s shockingly racist past – ” ‘I felt proud of my family’s slaveholding and Confederate past,’ Tomlinson writes of his youthful self, ‘not because I believed in slavery or racism, but because white Texans honored and celebrated that heritage.’ In school, he was taught that ‘slavery was wrong,’ but somehow his teachers found a way to walk ‘a careful line in teaching about race, holding no one responsible for the sins of the past.’ “
- Saturday Stat: Wait, WHO Dislikes Atheists? – “We just don’t like atheists. But who is ‘we’?” SocImages breaks it down for you.
- UConn Settles Sexual Assault Suit For $1.3M – “The financial settlement includes stipulations that UConn establish better procedures for handling instances of sexual assault among students.” Progress! From Amy.
- How Turbans Helped Some Blacks Go Incognito In The Jim Crow Era – “In mid-20th century America, the turban was a tool that people of color used for ‘confounding the color lines.’ ” I love reading these tidbits from NPR’s Code Switch blog.
- America’s Long History of Immigrant Scaremongering – “Conservatives claim that the young immigrants crossing the border are diseased and pose a dangerous public health risk. It’s a sad American tradition.”
“Gangs draw up lists of girls to rape as proxy attacks on rivals – “Gangs assault rivals’ sisters and girlfriends as a ‘low risk’ method of asserting dominance.” From Radium.”
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Raping a rival’s sister is considered low risk, really?
That might be a low risk provocation from a legal point of view compared to carrying a knife or a gun. But its a 5 year base sentence rather than 10-20. Thats not exactly trivial.
It would seem to be pretty much certain to result in retaliation by the other gang though. And quite likely to get into a ‘vengeance’ mode where the responder ignores the risk of a long or possible life sentence.
Seems to me that part of the messaging here is to discourage girls from joining gangs by suggesting that they are ineffective in defending their honor. Its also an injunction to the officers on the beat to make sure that they bear in mind the possibility of a revenge rape.
As to the first, only about 3% of rapists ever see time (you can find the stat at http://www.rainn.org).
In the cases where she didn’t report, it’s also because law enforcement considers rape cases hard to prosecute. Oh, and she might not report in this case because, remember, members of her family are involved in illegal activity.
Related to the articles about racism and scare-mongering: I’m reading Bruce Catton’s ‘Never Call Retreat’ ( http://bookdir.info/?p=731520 ) and some things just don’t change. One argument that northern pro-slavery people made was ‘The Negros will take your jobs’. It’s an effective argument, sadly, since it’s still used today against immigrants.