Lifting the veil on campus sexual assault: Morehouse college, hegemonic masculinity, and revealing racialized rape culture through the Du Boisian lens
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2021-01-31
Authors
Grundy, Saida
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
Saida Grundy. 2021. "Lifting the Veil on Campus Sexual Assault: Morehouse College, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Revealing Racialized Rape Culture Through the Du Boisian Lens." Social Problems, pp. 1 - 24 (24). https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spab001
Abstract
As national rates of sexual assault continue to fall, sexual assault rates for colleges and universities have remained stagnate. Subsequent focusses on campus sexual assault have continued to press a simple question: what about sexual assault on college campuses is so different that rates are not declining with the nation? A longstanding approach in the literature has turned to the contexts in which college men “do” rape culture. How men are racialized is a critically missing context in our understandings of campus gender violence. Race is one of the most pronounced ways that college men see themselves and their interactions, and yet it is grossly overlooked in extant literature. Researchers have missed an opportunity to apply race theories to college men, and thus unveil how college men’s rape cultures operate as racialized rape cultures. By interviewing 32 graduates of Morehouse College, the nation’s only historically Black college for men and a campus rife with high-profile sexual misconduct, this study finds that race is a modality through which men make meanings of masculinity, sex, women competition, and the repercussions of sexual assault in ways that perpetuate assaults on their campus. Through a Du Boisian lens of double consciousness, (in which racialized men think about themselves through the lens of the White gaze) this paper finds that rape culture is not only how these men do gender, but it is a formative means by which they do race and are racialized throughout their college experience.