“Our Hands Are Tied Because Of This Damn Brother-Sisterhood Thing”
For decades, students at Spelman — the elite historically black women’s college — have spoken out about instances of sexual assault committed by students from Morehouse College, their unofficial brother school. Now, in the wake of a petition, protests, and a federal investigation, their messages are ringing louder than ever. Why haven’t we heard them?
At Spelman and Morehouse, two private single-sex schools so connected that they’re often referred to as one — “SpelHouse” — some Spelman survivors who have reported their assaults have been left to wrestle not only with a campus adjudication process that they feel didn’t serve them justice, but also with deep guilt for having turned in one of their Morehouse “brothers.” Spelman and Morehouse are, respectively, the first- and fourth-ranked HBCUs in the country — and thus incubators for the next generation of black elites. But in many ways, they still represent a microcosm of the black community at large, within which respectability politics and expectations that black women stand in solidarity with black men in the quest for racial justice make the conversations surrounding gender and sexual violence particularly fraught. In the days BuzzFeed News spent in Atlanta, members of both communities expressed concern that this combination — of ineffective institutional processes and black cultural dynamics — has created a climate in which silence has become not only standard, but expected.FULL ARTICLE HERE
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