Speaking Partial Truths and Preserving Power: Deconstructing White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and the Rape Corroboration Rule in the Interest of Black Liberation
![handle is hein.journals/howlj40 and id is 467 raw text is: Speaking Partial Truths and Preserving
Power: Deconstructing White
Supremacy, Patriarchy, and the
Rape Corroboration Rule in the
Interest of Black Liberation
LISA A. CRooMs*
I cannot write contrary to what life reveals to me. I wish to
malign no one.1
Men are not born rapists; we are taught very subtly, often in
unspoken ways, that women are ours for the taking.2
I want to scream it out that we should know better, those of us
who have endured diaspora and genocide. I want to make us look
into the mirror to see how many of us have apparently accepted
the terrorism of ourselves and each other as a fact of life.3
I. INTRODUCTION
In the mid-17th century, Lord Chief Justice Matthew Hale called
rape an accusation eas[y] to [] ma[k]e, and hard [] to [be] proved,
and harder to be defended by the party accused th[ough] ever so inno-
* Associate Professor, Howard University School of Law. B.A. 1984, Howard University;
J.D. 1991, University of Michigan Law School. I would like to thank Tanya Brown, Natasha
Delinois, and Eric Grannon for their research assistance. I would also like to thank Fatina Pur-
die and the members of the Howard Law Journal for their editorial work. As always, the views
expressed in this article as well as any errors remain my own. Excerpts of this article were
presented as part of the Critical Race Feminism panel at the Second Annual Northeast People of
Color Legal Scholarship Conference (New England School of Law, Boston, MA, March 21,
1997).
1. ALICE WALKER, Advancing Luna - and Ida B. Wells, in You CAN'T KEEP A GOOD
WoMAN DowN 85-104 (1981).
2. Haki R. Madhubuti, On Becoming Anti-Rapist, in TRANsFORMING A RAPE CULTURE
165, 176 (Emelie Buchwald et al. eds. 1993) [hereinafter TRANsFom.io].
3. In6s Hernandez-Avila, In Praise of Insubordination, or, What Makes a Good Woman
Go Bad?, in TRANsFoRMING, supra note 2, at 375, 378.
1997 Vol. 40 No. 2](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/howlj40&div=19&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
What Is HeinOnline?
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most