The Atlantic, October 12, 2018: What the black men who identify with Brett Kavanaugh are missing
On Tuesday night, I was in an auditorium with 100 black men in the city of Baltimore, when the subject pivoted to Brett Kavanaugh. I expected to hear frustration that the sexual-assault allegations against him had failed to derail his Supreme Court appointment. Instead, I encountered sympathy. One man stood up and asked, passionately, “What happened to due process?” He was met with a smattering of applause, and an array of head nods.
The caping for Kavanaugh does make a twisted kind of sense. Countless times, black men have had to witness the careers and reputations of other black men ruthlessly destroyed because of unproved rape and sexual-assault accusations.
If anyone has the right to complain about unproved allegations or cry #HimToo, it’s black men. A report released last year, examining 1,900 exonerations over the past three decades, found that 47 percent of the people exonerated were black, despite the fact that blacks make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population. In sexual-assault cases, blacks accounted for 22 percent of convictions, but 59 percent of exonerations.
Those disparities also underline an equally important point that seems to be getting lost in the conversation. White men don’t ordinarily face the kind of suspicion and presumptions of guilt to which men of color are routinely subjected. If Kavanaugh were black, how many people would empathize and relate to his circumstances?
One name continually surfaced from these defenders of Kavanaugh: Brian Banks. Banks was a senior at Long Beach Poly High School and a promising linebacker who had already committed to the University of Southern California when his playing career was torpedoed by a false rape accusation. Banks served five years in prison. Banks would never have been exonerated had his accuser, Wanetta Gibson, not sent Banks a friend request on Facebook once he was out of prison. Gibson, a high-school sophomore when she accused Banks of rape, agreed to meet with Banks and a private investigator because, she said, she felt guilty and had “a desire to make amends.”
Banks faced spending the bulk of his life in jail; Kavanaugh risked losing a promotion. The reason black men are three and a half times as likely as whites to be exonerated after being convicted of sexual assault is that there’s generally been one standard for suburban prep-school athletes, and another for the Brian Bankses of this country.
Black men have every right to be frustrated by the lack of due process and the inevitable rush to judgment they often face in sexual-assault cases. But that’s not because they’ve so often been treated like Kavanaugh—it’s because they so rarely have.
