Chapter 12: Rape on a Subway Train: Reflections on the Politics of Sexual Misconduct, Race, and Erasure

The objective of this discussion is to present an intersectional framework to better inform our reading and understanding of contemporary reports of sexual assault and sexual harassment. I posit that contemporary incidents of sexual violence must be read within the historical framework of slavery, where plantations served as the first site of sexual exploitation that has provided the ideological and practical scaffold for the continued erasure of the abuses of Black women and men in the workplace and under the law. This legacy, nonetheless, has yielded a coded language for according visibility to the “deep story” of rape and race in the United States.