Cross-Posted at Roll to Disbelieve

Thank you, women.

I’m not kissing ass here.  This has been on my mind for awhile.

What’s been the single most decisive issue in this campaign?  It’s the one that often gets sidetracked as “off topic” or “not essential” or a “distraction.”

It’s rape culture, and its high time we paid attention to it as a species.

It’s been with us from the very founding of the nation.  My people were taken as property.  But only black women were considered (and often still are considered) “designed” for sexual assault.  Even certain founding fathers’ flowery rhetoric about freedom masked ugly racial and gender transgressions that they most likely committed themselves or knew about and did nothing to correct.

When I look at my light brown skin that gives me color privilege, I always wonder: “product of loving unions” or “product of generations of institutionalized rape?”  But I can’t get too comfortable there.  Even if I had dark skin, there’s a not insignificant chance I could still be here because some of my foremothers had no choice in the matter.

Right up until the present, this very moment, rape culture has been the elephant in the room.  The right callously used it in the shadows to stoke racial and political animus, but unintentionally brought it into the light with their standard bearer’s own words and deeds.

I’m still an optimist, though.  I think we’re going to get a better world after this election, slowly but surely.  Human dignity will finally be acknowledged, in every situation and in every circumstance, and it will be because women insist on it.

I am proud and humbled to stand with you.