You don’t prove your feminist credentials with racism

You may know Sugar Ray Leonard as a seventies boxer. He recently released an autobiography in which he admitted he had been sexually assaulted by an unnamed boxing coach, just before the 1976 Olympic Games. Not an easy admission to make, especially not for somebody coming from the macho world of boxing. You therefore expect a leftwing, feminist blog to both take his confession seriously and treat it sensitively. Anthony McCarthy at Echidne of the Snakes is here to prove you wrong:

I have a hard time imagining that a very middle aged gay man would have chosen Sugar Ray Leonard to make a sudden, un-negotiated, physical sexual assault against just as he was about to win a gold medal in BOXING. Boxing, repeatedly and skillfully and forcefully hitting an evenly matched opponent in the face and head in order to inflict damage up to and including knocking him unconscious. Boxing is not track and field, it’s not gymnastics, it’s the training and practice of how to do physical damage to someone. No matter how physically attractive Leonard was, the possibility that he might beat you to a bloody pulp if he didn’t welcome your entirely unannounced, unapproved physical advance would have made him an unlikely man to choose to make one on.

Though he never quite comes out and says it, everything McCarthy says is based on the assumption that Black man = violent thug and especially that a Black boxer is a violent thug. Obviously it’s absurd to assume that just because Sugar Ray Leonard was a career boxer, he would beat up people outside the ring as well, as if boxing and criminal assault are the same thing. To make his case McCarthy has to ignore all other power considerations that could exist between a young, Black boxing hopeful and a well established, white boxing coach, has to ignore what the likely consequences for Sugar Ray had been had he indeed physically attacking this coach, had to ignore the very fact that awareness of sexual assault, especially sexual assault aimed at men, was pretty low in 1976. Instead he has to rely on unspoken but understood stereotypes of young Black men, dogwhistled through emphasising Sugar Ray Leonard’s boxing career.

Without this racism he only has own incredulity as an argument, but just because Anthony McCarthy finds something hard to believe doesn’t mean it didn’t happen — I found it hard to believe any self declared feminist could engage in victim blaming this blatant, yet Anthony made it happen anyway.