Bring it on -- the brilliant smile of a Stanford swimmer with Olympic dreams, the happy privileged face of a white college kid named Brock Turner. Another picture of him smiling, please.
Because this is what a campus sexual predator looks like. And that's the truth too many people refuse to acknowledge. It's the most difficult part of the campus rape culture destroying the lives of so many young women: acknowledging who their rapists are.
Because virtually all rapists are men, and because the great majority of Americans (and thus American college students) are white, it's doubtless true that, purely as a statistical matter, a "campus sexual predator" is a white man. But this "news story" is not about truth, statistical or otherwise. Its about collective guilt. And it's racist.
If a newspaper were to print a photograph of a black man with the caption, "Bring it on -- the snickering smile of a ghetto dweller selling crack cocaine, destroying the lives of so many young women," it would be out of business the next day. The racist smear behind the statistical truth is too obvious for words.
It is no less obvious here, and no less appalling. The problem with rape is not whiteness, any more than the problem with crack is blackness. The problem is with parenting that fails to instill respect for other people's lives, property and humanity.
When we fix that problem, the prison population will wither to nothing. Until we do, prisons will help keep us safe. It has zip to do with race. It has everything to do with taking responsibility for your actions and requiring your kids to do the same.
This, incidentally, is Brock Turner. It's a tragedy that someone with this much going for him chose to treat a woman as chattel. His wretched parenting bears a share of the blame. But he's an adult, and chose to ignore the most basic rules of civilized life. Now, with all respect to his anything-goes lawyer and his "20 minutes of action" father, it's on him.
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