Nicole Bedera

Emmett Till's lynching is an important part of the history of sexual violence allegations in the US. Most sexual violence scholars do not contest that. In fact, I actively educate my students about the tensions between white feminism and anti-racist movements.

There is room for complexity here. It's why intersectionality is so vital in the study of sexual violence. It's why you don't see essentially any of us advocating for the complete abolition of investigations into claims of sexual violence.

The thing I find so strange about how Till's name has been invoked in this particular thread is that when I poked around the accounts for the critics, they were largely white supremacists.

That means that they aren't invoking Till's name to fight for racial equality or to insist on the creation of an anti-racist society. They don't believe in that. They invoke Till's name exclusively as a way to undermine the feminist movement.

And perhaps exonerate themselves should they ever be accused of sexual violence.

The really scary thing about this is that it was white supremacists who lynched Till. They created the problem that they are now using to discredit survivors. It's a very insidious way of undermining two movements at once.

To prove false allegations are a legitimate problem with serious consequences, all white supremacists need to do is lynch another black man. It also serves the dual purpose of reinforcing racist discourses through myths about hyper-sexual and criminal black men.

For me, the takeaway is that it matters who makes a comment and for what ends. This is also yet another reason that anti-sexual violence work also needs to be explicitly intersectional and anti-racist. We need to make it harder for white supremacists to get away with this.

(Whether those white supremacists are women or men.)