Never again for anyone

Never again is now

[Image description: Four exhausted middle-aged radical professors gather to protest genocide and scholasticide and illegal deportation and kidnapping students and who can even count, anymore, all the things we’re protesting, really?]

Today, my students organized an intersectional feminist march as part of a coordinated day of action against the fascist takeover of American higher education. These are the remarks I delivered.

Hi everybody. Thank you for coming out today. I’m Emily Van Duyne, and for the last eleven years, my classes have helped to put on marches like this as part of their activism projects for Women, Gender, and Sexuality, every spring. When I started teaching this course, I was 34-years old, and barely two years out of a violent marriage in which I survived domestic violence and sexual assault. I never intended for my own survival to become part of how I taught about sexual assault, but it did. My students granted me credibility because I was a survivor; they listened to me, and then, they talked back. They told me their rape stories, their survival stories, which we used as a way to collectively resist a culture that increasingly celebrated sexual violence against women, a culture that elected president–twice, now– a man credibly accused of rape by multiple women, including his ex-wife.

It was empowering to do that work with my students, during the first Trump presidency. But it was also negligent, on my part. I took for granted that my whiteness allowed me to speak publicly as a rape survivor, a role this country has only ever granted to white women, especially middle-class, highly educated white women. In my classrooms, and at marches like this, I emphasized the importance of reclaiming the story of your rape and sexual assault in writing and public speech. But I neglected the reality that I could do this, if not with impunity, then at least with the protection of my race and class. This is borne out of the American history of rape, one in which, to quote the great anti-lynching activist and reporter Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “for certain crimes and alleged crimes, no negro shall be allowed a trial; that no white woman shall be compelled to charge an assault under oath or to submit any such charge to the investigation of a court of law.” In other words, if a white woman accused a Black man of rape in the United States, he could be lynched without a trial. This was the “unwritten law,” that was, said Wells-Barnett, “considered necessary to prevent crimes against [white] women.”

This is the legacy of rape in the United States. To shield ourselves from the horror and shame of centuries of the systemic rape of enslaved women by the white men who claimed to own them, we invented a bogeyman, Black men who threatened the precious chastity of white women. The most famous example of this is the 1955 lynching of 14-year old Emmett Till, after a white woman named Caroline Bryant claimed he whistled at her in a grocery store; Bryant’s husband and his half-brother kidnapped and murdered Till that same night, and were acquitted of the crime in a jury trial, during which the all-white jurors were allowed to drink beer on duty and white spectators openly carried handguns.

This is the same racist, shallow playbook which is now being used to justify and excuse and perpetuate a genocide against the Palestinian people, for nineteen months, with no end in sight. All of you have surely heard the allegations of sexual violence against Israelis that occurred during the October 7 Hamas attack. And many of you surely saw the widespread clip of Pramila Patten, the United Nations’ Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, reporting to the Security Counsel after visiting the October 7 attack sites that, indeed, “What I witnessed in Israel were scenes of unspeakable violence perpetrated with shocking brutality,” including sexual violence.

Of course you saw it. The clip was on every major news media outlet, playing on repeat. Case closed, the western media seemed to say. Members of Hamas raped Israeli womem, and so, all of Palestine must suffer endlessly to protect the chastity of Israeli women from even the specter of rape.

No matter, I guess, that Pramila Patten went on to say, “I am horrified by the… injustice in Gaza,” that she was there to call not for a “war without rape,” but a “world without war,” an immediate ceasefire. No matter that, in the ensuing discussion by the Security Council, the representative from Algeria noted that, since 2001, Palestinians and other members of the Security Council have lodged 1400 complaints of torture, including sexual violence, against Israel, which have led to– count them!-- a total of three investigations. No matter that Pramila Patten, when she turned her discussion From October 7 to Gaza, spoke definitively of “Israeli forces’ sexual violence in the context of detention, such as invasive body searches; beatings, including in the genital areas; and threats of rape against women and female family members. Sexual harassment and threats of rape during house raids and at checkpoints were also reported. Patten expressed disappointment that the immediate reaction to her report by some Israeli political actors was not to open inquiries into those alleged incidents but, rather, to reject them outright via social media.”

And no matter that the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which is presently in its 78th and deadliest year, yet, resembles nothing so much as American terrorism against Blacks, by lynching, in the Jim Crow south, of which Ida B. Barnett-Wells said, “The sentiment of [America] has been appealed to, in describing the isolated conditions of white families, in thickly populated negro districts; and the charge is made that these homes are in as great danger as if they are surrounded by wild beasts. And the world has accepted this theory without let or hindrance. In many cases there has been open expression that the fate meted out to the victim was only what he deserved. In many other instances there has been a silence that says more forcibly than words can proclaim,” that the lynching and burning alive of innocent human beings in the name of white women’s chastity is more than acceptable, it is just. This is the same argument, a century later, that Israel, and America, make about Palestinians, daily. What else is this genocide, in the end, but a mass and endless lynching?

So I stand here today as a survivor of sexual violence to say, no. We refuse the wholesale exploitation of sexual trauma in the name of an Israeli genocide paid for with US dollars, with our tax dollars. You cannot have the money I make by teaching about rape to use rape as an excuse to burn Palestinians alive with US bombs. We call out the systemic use of sexual harassment and rape by the Israeli occupation against all Palestinians as an ongoing tool of colonial occupation and apartheid, one America quite literally wrote the book on. We say– say it with me– never again to anyone. Never again is now. Thank you.