Representing Prison Rape: Race, Masculinity, and Incarceration in Donald Goines’s <i>White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief</i>

Abstract

In April 1981, in early years of what Randall Kennedy terms racial darkening (134) of America's jail populations, New York Times reported that New York Criminal Court judge refused to send young, middle-class white male to city's Rikers Island jail on grounds that defendant almost certainly be sexually assaulted by jail's predominantly African American Latino inmate popula tion. We take judicial notice of defendant's slight build, his manner isms, dress, color, ethnic background, judge wrote in his opinion, and are cognizant of unfortunate realities that he not last for ten minutes at Rikers Island. Arguing that the State of New York could not guarantee [the man's] safety in surroundings, judge predicted that defendant, if sent to jail, would be immediately subject to homo sexual rape sodomy to brutalities from prisoners such as make imagination recoil in horror (Shipp B3).1 As somewhat baroque language of that final sentence attests, possibility that white man could be raped in jail by African American or Latino inmates exerts powerful hold over American racial imaginary. As Ted Conover puts it, rape-of-the-white-guy is a fixture of how middle-class America thinks about prison (262). At same time, this trope is at least partially rooted in statistical reality: as Patricia Hill