“Our Hands Are Tied Because Of This Damn Brother-Sisterhood Thing”
For decades, students at Spelman — the elite historically black women’s college — have spoken out about instances of sexual assault committed by students from Morehouse College, their unofficial brother school. Now, in the wake of a petition, protests, and a federal investigation, their messages are ringing louder than ever. Why haven’t we heard them?
Anita Badejo
BuzzFeed News Associate Features Editor
posted on Jan. 21, 2016, at 10:53 p.m.
The afternoon of Nov. 11, 2015, in the Atlanta University Center (AUC) was meant to be a quiet one. The day before, students and faculty at the consortium of historically black colleges — which includes the all-women’s Spelman College, all-men’s Morehouse College, and co-ed Clark Atlanta University — had flooded Morehouse’s recreation center to hear Vice President Joe Biden speak as part of the “It’s On Us” campaign, the White House initiative to prevent sexual assault on college campuses. They had listened as he implored college men to play a more vocal role in addressing issues of sexual violence — victims of which are still predominantly women and members of the transgender, genderqueer, questioning, and not listed communities — and had dutifully snapped photos and posted them to social media along the way. But now, the vice president was gone, and campus life had resumed its steady rhythm.
Melanie, a Spelman junior, was thankful. Having spent much of the previous day waiting for Biden’s speech, on top of October’s frenzy of midterms and homecoming preparations, the international studies major was drained. A sexual assault survivor who reported being raped by someone she considered a friend at Morehouse her freshman year, she was at once frustrated that she’d had to leave the Biden event early to go to class, and already wary of what she had heard — Morehouse President John Silvanus Wilson Jr. describing the college’s “zero tolerance” policy for sexual violence in his remarks and Biden’s booming declaration that “no means no.”
After all, Morehouse had handed off Melanie’s case to an independent investigator based in Massachusetts who, without ever meeting her in person, concluded she hadn’t been raped, despite the fact that both parties agreed Melanie had said “no” repeatedly. Later, she’d learn that the college also classified her reported rape as a case of “simple battery.” Like most Spelman students who are assaulted by a peer from Morehouse, Melanie was raped on the latter’s campus, so her own college had no jurisdiction over her case. She’d been struggling to make sense of it all ever since. Sure, it was nice that the vice president had visited. He and people like Wilson talked a great talk. But she knew the AUC had a long way to go before they could properly handle cases of sexual assault, an issue students — particularly at Spelman and Morehouse — had been discussing for decades.
So, Melanie (who requested BuzzFeed News use her first name only) was jarred, but not entirely surprised, by what had begun to circulate within the AUC that Wednesday afternoon: a photo of a “sexual consent form,” scrawled on notebook paper by a Morehouse student for potential female visitors, complete with space for a “hoe signature” and a date. “By signing this I (hoe signature) will not spread misleading truths and/or ignomious [sic] lies. If found in violation of this consent form I (hoe signature) will be indicted and prosecuted accordingly as well as be exposed campus wide as a lying bitch.”
Administrators sent emails denouncing the contract, student activists in the AUC drafted a list of demands from the colleges, and other students like Melanie who’d been assaulted during their time on campus spoke out — some through social media, others through active protest — pleading for their peers and administrators to finally acknowledge problems that they knew had long existed.
At Spelman and Morehouse, two private single-sex schools so connected that they’re often referred to as one — “SpelHouse” — some Spelman survivors who have reported their assaults have been left to wrestle not only with a campus adjudication process that they feel didn’t serve them justice, but also with deep guilt for having turned in one of their Morehouse “brothers.” Spelman and Morehouse are, respectively, the first- and fourth-ranked HBCUs in the country — and thus incubators for the next generation of black elites. But in many ways, they still represent a microcosm of the black community at large, within which respectability politics and expectations that black women stand in solidarity with black men in the quest for racial justice make the conversations surrounding gender and sexual violence particularly fraught. In the days BuzzFeed News spent in Atlanta, members of both communities expressed concern that this combination — of ineffective institutional processes and black cultural dynamics — has created a climate in which silence has become not only standard, but expected.
On Nov. 17, Morehouse and Spelman convened a forum to address the issue of “gender based violence” on their campuses, a rare joint event. The pews of Spelman’s Sisters Chapel were packed. “Ideally, Spelman, Morehouse, and Clark Atlanta should be models of mutual respect between black men and black women,” Spelman President Mary Schmidt Campbell said in her opening remarks. “We know that is not the case.”
A “no means no” sign outside of the campus center at Morehouse. Anita Badejo / BuzzFeed News
Two days after the forum, on Nov. 19, Morehouse and Spelman were added to the Department of Education’s list of colleges that are under federal investigation for allegedly violating Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. They joined over 150 institutions across the nation that are under similar investigations, thanks in large part to campus activists who have shared their own experiences of sexual violence. Many of their stories, like Melanie’s, share a common element: administrations that were inadequately prepared or unwilling to properly investigate and judge their claims.
“One thing about Spelman that has to be made clear is it is a women’s college, but it’s not a feminist college.”
Yet despite the increased public scrutiny, there is still disproportionately little attention paid to how these issues play out on the campuses of America’s 107 historically black colleges and universities. HBCUs have a lower rate of sexual assault than predominantly white institutions, or PWIs, according to a 2010 federal study — the only major study specifically focused on sexual assault at black colleges. The difference is commonly attributed to the fact that black students at both HBCUs and PWIs alike generally drink far less than their white counterparts.
Yet buried in the same study is the statistic that, overall, only around 17% of black women report instances of sexual assault to the police, as opposed to 44% of white women. While it acknowledges that a previous study found that black women were more likely to report sexual assaults that occurred on college campuses, the incidents most likely to be reported were those in which the perpetrator was a stranger or in which the victim and perpetrator did not share the same race. “The extent to which these patterns can be generalized to HBCU students is unclear,” it states. “More research into barriers to reporting and the outcomes of reporting is greatly needed.”
Step onto the campuses of Spelman and Morehouse, and it doesn’t take long before some of those barriers come to light. Both founded in the late 1800s at a time when black Americans were barred from enrolling at traditionally white institutions of higher education, they sit side by side at the bottom of the Atlanta University Center and are each home to around 2,100 students. The roots between the two still run incredibly deep: Along with other elite HBCUs such as Howard and Hampton, they’ve long been where many black Americans aspire to send their sons and daughters. During orientation, each Spelman sister is paired with a Morehouse brother, a partnership that is meant to last throughout the students’ time on campus.
Spelman provided much of the inspiration — and background shots — for the idyllic, fictional Hillman College in the Cosby Show spin-off A Different World. Spelmanites live on a gated campus from which male visitors must leave by 11:45 p.m. They wear white dresses or skirt suits to formal college ceremonies, though students today say that pants are also allowed, but generally discouraged. Pearls are optional. “She’s middle class, she’s Southern, she has good manners, she’s heterosexual, she’s not deviant in any way,” Banah Ghadbian, Spelman’s 2015 valedictorian, said, describing the archetypical Spelman Woman to BuzzFeed News.
Anita Badejo / BuzzFeed News
From the time they enroll, Morehouse students are immersed in what is known as the “Morehouse Mystique,” a loosely defined term that refers, in part, to the school’s sense of brotherhood. The Morehouse Man is described as one who “embodies all that is good, noble, and strong in the African American Educated male.” The college’s controversial “Appropriate Attire Policy” — now irregularly enforced but nevertheless still easily found in its handbook and on its website — forbids sagging pants, grillz, du-rags, hoods, and “clothing associated with women’s garments.”
Students at both colleges have questioned these traditions, arguing that they force young black men and women into complacency with a society that already oppresses them. “Throughout our history you have the sense that there’s been two Morehouses,” said Casey Jones, a Morehouse senior. “You have people like [civil rights activist] Julian Bond, god bless his soul and may he rest in peace, and at the same time you have these more ‘respectable’ people.” Ghadbian, who was a leading student activist during her time at Spelman, found it difficult to reconcile the marginalization she and others felt by some of the college’s policies with the inspiring images of radicals like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde that hung on the walls of her dorm. “They’re encouraging all of these things, but then once it gets too disruptive, the larger institution intervenes in some very serious ways.”
Indeed, for much of the colleges’ histories, there have been two parallel narratives. In one, the SpelHouse community is a place that upholds the politics of respectability in order to propel students into positions of power normally reserved for white people. In the other, the community is meant to cultivate and unify the next generation of black social activists. And few issues are as emblematic of the conflicts at the two institutions over the politics of respectability versus those of resistance as the issue of sexual violence.
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