Taina Teravainen
TCCS ’19
Content warning: Sexual Assault, rape, racism
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I was nineteen seven autumns ago. I had just moved 15,000 kilometers to Boston from Singapore, my home, for my freshman year of college. In photographs, the most striking thing about me from that year was my purple and black hair, split neatly down the middle. All the other parts of who I am weren’t so obviously portioned out and displayed. I imagined listing all my multitudes during the many upcoming introductions – I am Chinese and white. I’m a Singaporean with a U.S. citizenship. I had chosen Boston partly to be closer to my grandma in the South Shore, a place I visited most Junes, the place I was told harbored the other half of my
identity, as if I would always be divided into two, an entire part of me missing from myself.
As my parents and I drove past the Rainbow Tank toward downtown Boston, I was wedged in the backseat next to my new laundry hamper. Wow, I thought, I’m actually doing it. I feel just like an American teenager. A few days later, still in orientation, I had another experience that turns out to be common among college-aged women in America. I was sexually assaulted. I was raped multiple times that first semester by the same man, another freshman.
According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), a person is sexually assaulted every 98 seconds in America. 9 out of 10 rape victims are female. Women in college between the ages of 18 and 24 are 3 times more likely than women in general to experience sexual assault. Most college sexual assaults happen from August through November. It may be hard to understand these figures. For me, it simply means that rape culture continues to thrive in America, and that when I’m in a room with other people, I am more likely than not there with another person who has been sexually assaulted.
We have endured an exhausting summer, and stumbled into a fall that feels so much like defeat. Brett Kavanaugh is now an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. I’m unsure what this means for the people of America, but I know that a victim of sexual assault was told in front of this country and the world that her pain did not matter. Kavanaugh, her assaulter, would
not be punished nor denied any opportunities.
The man who raped me told me later that he had first come up to speak to me, when I was sitting alone reading in the dining hall, because I was Asian. He showed me a handwritten list of experiences he wanted to pursue in college, one of the top few being having sex with girls of different races. He was white and from a predominantly white Massachusetts town – the type of town the white side of my family lived in, where I was told held the answers to who I really was. To him, women of color were not individuals, just a box to check off on his scrap of paper. Having found out I was only half Asian after he raped me, he was uncertain if I counted.
When I encounter racism, it almost always, always holds the threat of gender-based violence. There is a tenable link between racism and sexism, and I cannot close my eyes to either, because sometimes they feel like one and the same. Racism and sexual violence are not merely American problems, but their presence dates back in the history of the U.S., a double-edged tool of oppression. Our anti-racist work and anti-sexist work should be intertwined, and these connections should be discussed openly and frequently.