Boys & Sex by Peggy Orenstein

Author:Peggy Orenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

At Any Moment Your Life Can Be Taken Away

The first incident happened just before Xavier’s freshman year of high school. I could corroborate some, though not all, of the details, but the specifics are, perhaps, less important than the aftermath, the impact it had on Xavier and his black male classmates. A senior guy, who was also black, got drunk at a party and groped a white girl. The next day, he texted her to apologize, or maybe he wrote her a letter, and somehow that admission of guilt made its way onto social media, incriminating rather than exonerating him. The school administration found out—some say she was reluctant to report him, but her parents insisted—and after an investigation, the boy was expelled. The second case occurred at the end of the following summer, at another party. A white girl had fallen asleep in a bedroom, allegedly waking up to find a boy of color on top of her attempting to remove her clothes. Several months later, she reported the incident to the school’s administration, and, again, after an investigation, that boy, too, was expelled. Later, at a school-wide meeting in which students were invited to speak on any topic, the girl read a prepared statement about the assault, claiming the only reason the perpetrator wasn’t in jail was because he was black. Xavier was stunned by her insensitivity, plus, he said, no adult intervened. Some of the students of color, including him, walked out of the auditorium in tears.

“It was a shit show,” Xavier recalled. “I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard in a public area. I felt attacked—this was supposed to be a place where I feel comfortable and nurtured, and I was just being torn down to my basic identity. After she was done, it was hard for me to look at my peers and teachers and the head of school, who were supposed to be there for me. I was like, ‘In this moment, you all failed me.’”

Xavier didn’t necessarily dispute that the two boys engaged in misconduct. His question is whether they would still be at the school—whether they would have been given lighter punishments and second chances—if they had been white and wealthy with powerful parents who paid full tuition (or if the girls they harmed had not been all of those things). He doesn’t know the answer, nor do I—though, he pointed out, no white boy was expelled for sexual misconduct during his seven years there. On a college level, while no national statistics break down accused perpetrators by race, there’s some evidence that black men at predominantly white institutions—as well as foreign students from Africa and Asia—are disproportionately reported for sexual assault and more likely than others to have those charges referred to formal hearings. (Meanwhile, women of color are both more likely to be assaulted than white women and less likely to report it; they are also less likely to be believed when they do.) It’s hard to know fully

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