Lifting the Veil on Campus Sexual Assault: Morehouse College, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Revealing Racialized Rape Culture through the Du Boisian Lens

Abstract

AbstractAs national rates of sexual assault continue to fall, sexual assault rates for colleges and universities remain stagnant. Researchers ask why rates of sexual assault on college campuses differ from rates across the nation. One approach examines the contexts in which college men “do” rape culture. How men are racialized, however, is a critically missing context in understanding the cultures in which gender violence persists. Although race is one of the most pronounced ways that college men see themselves and their interactions, it is overlooked in extant literature. In failing to apply race theories to college men, researchers have missed an opportunity to unveil how their rape cultures operate as racialized rape cultures. Interviews with 32 graduates of Morehouse College, the nation’s only historically Black college for men, reveal that race is a modality through which men make meanings of masculinity, sex, women, competition, and the repercussions of sexual assault in ways that preserve gender violence on campus. Through a Du Boisian lens of double consciousness, this study finds that rape culture is not only how these men do gender, but is also a formative means by which they do race and are racialized throughout their college experience.