Recalling Persky: White Rage and Intimate Publicity After Brock Turner

Abstract

By attending to the successful campaign to recall and unseat Judge Aaron Persky in retaliation for his sentencing decision in the sexual assault trial of Stanford University athlete Brock Turner, we argue that the campaign constituted a White intimate public that directed White rage toward the judge for his perceived betrayals of a White paternal social contract. Because the campaign posited Persky’s willingness to inflict carceral violence upon Turner as the measure of his fidelity to the state’s obligations with regard to sexual violence and equality under the law, it legitimized carceral solutions that disproportionately harm communities of color. Such a centering of carceral solutions betrayed the public’s affective divestment from the needs of marginalized communities.

Keywords

affect affective divestment intimate publics racial contract rape sexual violence social contract Whiteness betrayal

In 2016, a jury convicted White Stanford University student Brock Turner for the sexual assault of Emily Doe, a White woman, while she lay unconscious near a dumpster on the Stanford campus. The maximum sentence for a conviction such as Turner’s was 14 years in prison, and the prosecution sought 6 years imprisonment. Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Turner to 6 months in jail and 3 years’ probation, plus requiring that he register as a sex offender. The state released Turner 3 months early on the basis of good behavior. Critics of the sentence characterized it as unjustifiably light, arguing that the sentence prioritized Turner’s well-being over his victim’s and that a person less privileged than Turner would have likely received a harsher sentence (Stack, 2016). The Stanford Rape Case inspired robust public discourse regarding the prevalence of sexual assault on U.S. college campuses. It mobilized myriad commentaries regarding the ways race and class privilege figure into criminal sentencing, as well as the criminal justice system’s demonstrably poor record in responding to the needs of victims of sexual violence. Eventually, the robust discourses resulted in the successful campaign to recall and unseat Judge Aaron Persky in retaliation for his sentencing decision in the Stanford Rape Case.

In this essay, we argue that the campaign to unseat Persky constituted a White intimate public (Berlant, 1997, 1998) mobilized through White rage in response to the judge’s abdication of a paternal social contract. For Persky’s opponents, the judge’s willingness to inflict carceral violence upon Turner’s White masculine body was the measure of Persky’s fidelity to the state’s paternal obligations to the public. Such obligations included the use of punitive justice as a corrective to sexual violence. White intimate publics coalesce around shared affective investments and divestments (Mack & McCann, 2017), which structure the public’s relationship to Whiteness, to other publics, and to the state. The mobilization of this public in response to Persky’s perceived betrayals expressed White rage through arguments that espoused commitments to the interests of victims of sexual violence, as well as people of color and other marginalized communities who suffer carceral violence in especially intense ways. In spite of these claims of investment in the experiences of oppressed populations, the reliance on carceral solutions to sexual violence and other injustices centered the experiences of privileged White bodies (Bernstein, 2010; Bumiller, 2008; Mack & Na’puti, 2019). In so doing, the campaign is an example of a White intimate public’s mobilization of White rage through an investment in the White paternal contract which simultaneously constitutes an affective divestment from the interests of communities for whom carceral violence is a source of ongoing vulnerability to “premature death” (Gilmore, 2007, p. 28).

As we hope will be clear throughout this essay, we do not write out of sympathy for Turner, nor do we disagree that Turner’s sentence was the result of his privilege. Rather, we proceed out of concern that when White rage toward the actions of men such as Turner manifests in ways that embolden the carceral state, it is racialized Others and victims of gendered violence who are most likely to suffer the consequences. With mutual investments in confronting sexual violence and carceral violence (as well as the myriad ways the two intersect), this essay proceeds in three parts. First, we theorize the mobilization of White rage and the constitution of White intimate publics that invest in a White paternal contract and rely on carceral solutions to protect White feminine victimhood. Next, we attend to the public campaign to unseat Judge Persky, analyzing a variety of texts that coalesced to constitute the successful mobilization of White rage that ended the judge’s career. Lastly, we conclude by meditating on the salience of intimate publicity and White rage as heuristics for critiquing the communicative norms of nonintersectional feminisms that invest trust in a carceral state invested in protecting White cis-heteropatriarchy.

Intimate Publicity and White Rage

It is vitally important, Herman Gray (2013) argued, that critical communication and cultural studies scholars begin “to trace exactly how media organize and circulate powerfully affective means of gathering and assembling sentiment, attachment, and (dis)identification to public policies, bodies, histories, and cultures” (p. 254). One mode for doing such work, we argue, is through the conceptual resources of intimate publicity (Mack & McCann, 2017). Berlant (1998) described intimate publicity as a means of tracing how proprietary publics coalesce around shared affective intensities. Tracing the formation and circulation of intimate publics is useful for examining the cultivation of assemblages of concern, attention, and detachment/attachment. Intimacy describes the powerful affective enthymematic linkages between bodies that coalesce to produce a public. Berlant wrote, “To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity” (p. 281). The production of intimate publicity comes with the expectation that members “share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience” (Berlant, 2008, p. viii).

Many intimate publics are built around shared experiences of injustices and function to make life more livable for marginalized populations (e.g., Berlant, 2008; Khanna, 2015; Nash, 2011). Berlant (2008) explained that intimate publics comprising oppressed and exploited peoples function “as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x” (p. viii). Through intimacy, members of a public develop an intensely felt sense of what it means to belong to a group and, very often, to suffer as a member of a group. Such affectively charged shared histories and experiences mean that even the most egalitarian intimate publics have a boundary of belonging, while also claiming to represent and constitute a large body of individuals who seemingly hold some qualities or experiences in common. Central to the constitution of belonging and felt sense of intimacy is the mobilization of affective investments and divestments. Affective investments are the “inarticulable affective commitments that are mobilized through discourse and social conditions” (Mack & McCann, 2017, p. 337). Practices of affective investment and divestment, or the orientation of affective intensities toward or away from certain bodies and experiences, produce the boundaries of belonging within an intimate public by delineating whose pain and needs matter and by cultivating concern (Gray, 2013). As Garcia-Rojas (2017) explained, the embodied intensities that many critical and cultural studies scholars refer to as affect vary widely on the basis of lived experience. Despite primarily examining White affects, affect scholars—Garcia-Rojas argued—often discuss affect as a universal phenomenon. Such engagement centers White feelings and epistemologies while obscuring the power structures of Whiteness. Naming White affects and their circulation, on the other hand, can answer Gray’s call to examine the cultivation of concern. For example, White intimate publics, which are what we primarily critique in this essay, often speak in universal terms about the interests they serve, and such modernist logics obscure the degree to which such publics are exclusionary and predicated on violence against racialized and gendered subjects (e.g., Wanzer-Serrano, 2015).

In order to better illustrate how White intimate publicity finds expression through discourses of belonging and protection from the neoliberal state, we trace the ways a paternal social contract anchors the affective investments that constitute White intimacy and how White rage functions as an affective response to perceived betrayals of that agreement in the context of sexual violence.

The White Paternal Social Contract

The White intimate public we scrutinize in this essay is constituted through fidelity to the White paternal social contract, which is a founding agreement in the formation of the U.S. nation-state that was designed to secure and protect the interests of White men. Such a public functions to name and protect specific terms of cooperation with the state that center the experiences of White bodies while claiming to represent the interests of all (e.g., Mills, 1997; Pateman, 1988). The capacity of the public and the state to honor their end of the bargain is the condition for continued cooperation between both entities.

In its broadest sense, the social contract, often discussed as a product of enlightenment liberalism, is an agreement that grounds governance in which citizen-subjects sacrifice certain rights in exchange for state protection. Pateman (1988) and Mills (1997) documented how descriptions of the social contract, when not approached with a critical understanding of power dynamics and social hierarchies, fail to account for how White male supremacy structures civil society. As Mills noted, the social contract “is not a contract between everybody (‘we the people’), but between just the people who count, the people who really are people (‘we the white people’)” (p. 3). Questions of who deserves protection and whose actions warrant harsh punishment are tethered to racial, gender, and sexual hierarchies. Reddy (2011) illustrated in his critique of liberal egalitarianism that the expansion of the social contract to include previously excluded bodies and communities inevitably comes at the cost of more violence directed toward other marginalized people. In other words, the realization of justice through the state is predicated on a politics of disposability. Reddy also argued that the state offers protection and freedom only in ways that allow it to continue hiding its own incoherence. He explained that the “contemporary conjoining of state violence and social emancipation” (p. 37) is necessary in order to ensure that progress only emerges in ways that adhere to the normative logics of the neoliberal state.

The ways violence against marginalized communities structures the White paternal social contract become clearer in the context of public and state responses to sexual violence. In U.S. public culture, we symbolically deploy rape as an unusually heinous crime to which the state, acting on behalf of the aggrieved public, should respond with exceptional force (Bernstein, 2010; Bumiller, 2008; Freedman, 2013). But the consequences of this logic do not fall evenly across all bodies. When White women accuse Black or Brown men of rape, the resulting discourses of sexual violence and state protection often reinforce the monstrosity of the men and the innocence and purity of White womanhood. Such are the logics which justified the lynching of Black men and other modalities of White supremacy (e.g., Curry, 2017; Davis, 1978; Jackson, 2006; Ore, 2019). Furthermore, controlling images that figure Black women as hypersexual or parasitic drains on the welfare state make them less legible as victims of sexual violence (Bumiller, 2008; Collins, 2008; Griffin, 2013; Phillips & Griffin, 2015). With few exceptions—such as serial predators or those who are marked as abnormal “monsters”—when White men are accused of raping women, the act is often minimized, dismissed, or normalized (Mack & McCann, 2018).

This apparent contradiction in the ways we circulate different narratives of sexual violence becomes more understandable, and appears less contradictory, when we understand it as an expression of a racial and sexual social contract that establishes which bodies warrant state protection and which ones figure as threats to the social order—when we consider who “belongs” and who does not. The symbolic construction of innocence and victimhood through the White paternal social contract, which is both racial and sexual, is fundamentally based, as Pateman (1988) and Mills (1997) argued, on the establishment of White supremacy (Mills, 1997) and patriarchy (Pateman, 1988). Thus, relying on state violence to protect White women from racialized masculine bodies and often rationalizing sexual violence inflicted by White men presents no contradiction whatsoever. Rather, it is fundamental to a social contract that centers White men as quintessential social subjects who enjoy access to women’s bodies. The punishing power of the state vis-à-vis sexual violence, while nominally deployed in defense of women, ultimately rationalizes a social contract that protects White masculinity.

White Rage and the Politics of Betrayal

When it is perceived that the terms of the White paternal social contract have not been met, White rage gives expression to the feelings of betrayal that emerge in response. Specifically, the White intimate public comes to believe that the state has fallen short of its solemn responsibility to provide protection to the bodies the social contract comprises. Just as the White paternal social contract does, White rage presumes to speak for all. White rage does not express itself as such. Rather, it finds expression through discourses that lament the state’s failure to sufficiently protect individuals regardless of race, gender, or other subjectivities. But because the terms of protection are predicated upon the experiences of White bodies, such grievances are ultimately complaints regarding the state’s perceived betrayals of Whiteness.

Anderson (2016) described White rage as the political expression of White resentments regarding advancements by people of color in the United States. This anger betrays an instinctive understanding among most White people that the social contract is ultimately drafted with their interests at the center. Thus, increases in Black and Brown access to previously forbidden sectors of civil society read as denials of the promises of Whiteness. Those very racialized bodies of color become the targets of White rage. Numerous scholars have documented the ways in which White publics react forcefully to anxieties regarding Black emancipation following the Civil War (Ore, 2019), waged labor at various stages of capitalist development (Roediger, 2007), or changing national demographics at the dawn of the 21st century (Alcoff, 2015). In such instances, White people respond to perceived erosions of White supremacy by directing resentment and violence toward Black and Brown bodies.

However, as we argue here, White rage also emerges and circulates in nominally “progressive” social movements—sometimes even spoken by people of color or through rhetorics that articulate and critique systems of oppression such as White supremacy and patriarchy. To the extent that a White intimate public experiences an injustice as a betrayal of the paternal social contract, it will mobilize the forces of White rage. Thus, tracing and critiquing White rage is not simply a matter of identifying instances in which White people direct violence and vitriol toward communities of color. Rather, White rage becomes identifiable in discourse when members of a public intimate with Whiteness by lamenting an abdication of responsibility or some other act of betrayal vis-a-vis the White paternal social contract.

The mobilization of White rage toward sexual violence and the production of White intimate publics help sustain the violence of the state by naturalizing it and tethering it to an emancipatory feminist project that speaks in universal terms but relies on logics that ultimately serve to protect only certain privileged bodies. Because an assumption of universal experience underlies this public and the social contract to which it adheres, and such universals presuppose privileged White bodies, reliance on carceral violence to ameliorate sexual violence arises with minimal dissonance because the marginalized bodies on the line under such logic do not register as salient. The stakes of such universalizing discourses are deeply consequential for already-Othered bodies. A social contract that relies on the punishing power of an already-racist, patriarchal, and heteronormative state unleashes that state’s various modes of violence on those communities it is designed to control, discipline, and punish.

Because this project explores the contours of activism that posits the carceral state as a corrective to sexual violence, it offers insights into the social patterns that produce the conditions of what Bernstein (2010) called carceral feminism. Engaging in the breadth of research about carceral feminism is beyond the scope of this essay, but certainly that research provides history and context to feminist movements that rely heavily on the carceral state as a corrective to gendered and sexual violence (Bernstein, 2010; Bumiller, 2008). Our analysis of the campaign to recall Persky does arguably provide insight into the social and communicative terms by which carceral logics become deployed in ostensibly “feminist” campaigns and movements. By illuminating how White rage is mobilized to produce intimate publics in the service of punitive solutions to rape, we contribute to understandings of how state violence emerges as a desirable response to social injustice—even in movements that seek structural justice more broadly.

Public discourse regarding the Turner case is salient for studying White intimate publics because it espouses an investment in social justice following an agent of the state’s betrayal of a social contract. However, while the campaign against Persky espoused broad commitments to an egalitarian system of law and order, its centering of the carceral state as a corrective to injustices such as sexual violence and institutional disparities betrayed a narrower set of affective investments in the experiences of privileged White bodies. Here we see a privileged White man accused of raping a White woman whose conviction and sentencing catalyzed a forceful response. By refusing to imagine responses to sexual violence outside of the carceral state or legal system, the campaign affectively divested from the needs of people of color and other oppressed communities for whom the carceral state is a source of persistent violence.

Punishing Persky for Not Punishing Enough

Individuals who were disgusted by Turner’s actions and what they perceived as a light sentence argued that the state failed to draw on its capacity to administer carceral violence in response to sexual violence. In so doing, they also constituted themselves as an intimate public invested in a paternalistic social contract. If Persky was unwilling to orient his own capacity to wield state violence by properly punishing Turner, then activists would mobilize in order to punish the judge himself.

In addition to accepting Turner’s probation officer’s sentencing recommendation (Anderson & Svrluga, 2016), Persky justified Turner’s sentence by claiming “A prison sentence would have a severe impact on him” (Stack, 2016). The sentence also came in the context of a letter Turner’s father submitted to the judge, which posited his son as a victim. The elder Turner claimed that his son had already paid a steep price for “20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years life” and lamented that his son had grown so depressed during legal proceedings that he no longer craved rib eye steaks or his favorite snacks. Turner’s father also blamed alcohol consumption and a culture of campus promiscuity for his son’s actions (Hunt, 2016). The sentence and statements such as Turner’s father’s promptly inspired condemnation from various activists, lawyers, and public figures. In a press release published after the sentencing, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen lamented, “The sentence does not factor in the true seriousness of this sexual assault, or the victim’s ongoing trauma. Campus rape is no different than off-campus rape. Rape is rape. And I will prosecute it as such” (“Former Stanford Student,” 2016). For Rosen and others who desired a longer sentence, a more punitive response from Judge Persky would have communicated the gravity of Turner’s offense and affirmed the social contract around which this intimate public mobilized. However, while Turner remained an object of intense public anger following his sentencing, there were no legal avenues to correct what so many commentators regarded as an injustice. Turner was a convicted sex offender. There would be no new trial unless Turner himself sought one.¹ Public anger turned to Persky and his sentencing decision.

Activists mobilized White rage in the service of an impeachment campaign against Persky, as well as a petition to subject the judge to a recall election. Whereas the impeachment effort failed, the recall petition was successful and, on June 5, 2018, a majority of voters supported removing Persky from the bench (Astor, 2018). Next, we scrutinize the key themes that emerged in the campaign against Persky. We demonstrate that the recall attempt and other public critiques of the judge constituted a mobilization of White rage through a series of argumentative frames and, specifically, constituted an intimate public that relied on a paternalistic and racialized social contract that constitutes the state as the savior of (White) women and privileges carceral punishments as a the primary legitimate corrective to sexual violence and social inequities.

Communicating the Gravity of Rape

Much of the anger following Persky’s sentencing of Turner rested on the belief that Persky, like so many other White men, did not take sexual violence against women seriously. For them, imposing a harsher sentence on Turner would have sufficiently communicated the cruelty and pervasiveness of sexual violence. Absent that, the campaign insisted that Persky himself had to pay. Thus, a significant share of the White rage that emerged in the wake of the Turner sentencing came in response to a White man who simply did not appreciate what Emily Doe and so many other women had experienced. The campaign figured Persky as what Hill (2016) called a custodian of rape culture, or someone whose actions and attitudes “are essential in shoring up and propagating the cultural climate whereby sexual violence can flourish” (p. 35). The campaign’s targeting of custodians such as Persky resulted in the production of an intimate public that equated harsh penal sanction with communicating the gravity of sexual violence and restoring the paternal social contract.

The website for the Recall Judge Aaron Persky (RJAP) campaign featured a black and white photograph of the U.S. Supreme Court building on the top and bottom of its main page.² In this stark image, a partially cloudy sky loomed in the background and darkness draped the upper portion of the iconic federal building. The image constituted an intimate public through affective investments in the majesty of the law—so central to the paternal social contract—expressed through the recognizable building, as well as fear of the looming threat that judges such as Persky pose to it. The image invited site visitors to contemplate and fear the legal consequences of the Turner trial. Superimposed on the image was the text “Today, I am every woman,” which paraphrases a statement made by Emily Doe in an interview following the Turner sentencing (Martin, 2016), as well as an icon encouraging visitors to make donations to the campaign. Above the red donation button was the text “Our legal system must protect every woman from violence.” Immediately, the site’s authors beckoned visitors to invest in a vision of the legal system as the ultimate and necessary arbiter of justice in matters of sexual violence, and to invest in a universal category of woman-as-victim. Removing Persky from the bench figured as an affirmation of the system’s imperative to protect (White) women, as well as the White rage that mobilized the intimate public. Thus, the site characterized Persky as a perversion of an otherwise sound justice system. In the abstract, the site posited the courts and other purveyors of carceral violence as fundamentally sound manifestations of the paternal social contract around which the intimate public mobilized.

The site explained its rationale for seeking to remove Persky from the bench. The authors claimed, “We need judges who understand violence against women and take it seriously.” They also argued,

There’s a reason why this case has sparked national outrage. Women – and men – across the country know this ruling is an injustice and are willing to speak out on a difficult topic. Judge Persky and Brock Turner’s father fail to understand who the real victim is in this case. It’s not the attacker. It’s the innocent woman who was sexually assaulted.

Tethering Persky to Turner’s father, the site’s authors constituted the judge as a custodian of rape culture who was indifferent to the anger of sexual assault victims and their allies. In the site’s telling, Persky simply did not appreciate or respect the seriousness of sexual violence. Rather, he was as out of touch as a White man who would lament his son’s diminishing taste for ribeye following a conviction for sexual assault. If members of the public found Mr. Turner’s letter to Persky outrageous, they should find the judge’s sentence equally worthy of their indignation. The authors also wrote, “Persky is unfit to sit on the bench, and as long as he is a judge, predators in Santa Clara County will know they have an ally on the bench.” Thus, Persky’s failure to grasp the salience of sexual assault on college campuses was more than patently offensive to these authors. It was also a dangerous dereliction of his duties under the paternalistic social contract. In characterizing carceral violence as a modality for sending a “message” about the seriousness of sexual violence, the site’s authors privileged the prison as the measure of the state’s investment in protecting (White) women. These members of the campaign against Persky argued that, in failing to impose prison on men such as Turner, he was an “ally” of sexual predators and a threat to the intimate public the campaign constituted.

Other commentators echoed the recall campaign’s characterizations of the sentence as a crass denial of the seriousness of sexual violence. In a brief editorial following the sentencing, The Mercury News of San Jose wrote, “Brock Turner’s six-month jail term for sexual assault of an intoxicated, unconscious woman on the Stanford campus last year is a setback for the movement to take campus rape seriously” (Mercury News Editorial, 2016). The editorial invoked public anger regarding what Turner did to “an intoxicated, unconscious woman” and reduced it to the administration of punitive justice. Absent a satisfying carceral response, the Turner case figured as a setback for those who wished to eliminate sexual violence. Stanford student Kasey Luo (2018) expressed the same sentiment in an op-ed published in The Stanford Daily, writing,

We cannot change the fact that Turner did not serve even close to what he deserved. But what about the next time this happens? Are we going to let Judge Persky excuse another sex offender? We cannot afford to sit around when there is someone in power who cannot deliver justice, especially when it’s their job to do so. We need judges who will acknowledge that violence against women is a serious issue and take concrete steps to prevent it from happening. The time is up for judges like Persky.

Consistently, critics of Persky lamented his abdication of responsibility to victims of sexual violence. In so doing, they presumed the legitimacy of the judicial system’s prerogative to confine bodies in response to criminal acts—indeed, they claimed it was Persky’s “job to do so.” The measure of Persky’s responsibility to the intimate public and fidelity to the social contract was to “deliver justice” in the form of appropriately harsh sentences. By targeting Persky, activists and commentators invested in a vision of justice for victims of sexual violence that relied on carceral solutions. In figuring Persky as a perversion of the system, the pubic presumed the legitimacy of the social contract itself.

Carceral Correctives to Privilege

Turner’s status as a White male student athlete at a prestigious university, as well as his privileged familial economic background also mobilized the White rage calling for Persky’s ouster. Although the campaign expressed rage toward Persky’s deference to privileged defendants, it did so in ways that relied on a social contract whose carceral logics historically do disproportionate violence to racialized bodies of color—even in the context of reforms designed to make the system more equitable (Murakawa, 2014). In so doing, the intimate public presumed the legitimacy of the criminal justice system by positing harsh sentences as an antidote to an unjust system.

RJAP organizers and other commentators frequently claimed that Turner’s sentence was a function of his privilege, noting that the criminal justice system as a whole typically imposes harsher punishments on people of color, the economically disadvantaged, and other members of marginalized communities. The solution to these disparities, these activists claimed, in addition to ending Persky’s judicial career, was the more even dissemination of harsh punitive measures. The perfection of a system whose genesis is White supremacy emerged as the preferred corrective to a trial that activists claimed reified the inequities of that very system. Thus, the intimate public that coalesced amid RJAP rested on espoused investments in equality under the law just as surely as punitive responses to sexual violence.

In a widely circulated, if ultimately unsuccessful, online petition seeking Persky’s impeachment, author Maria Ruiz (n.d.) argued,

Judge Persky failed to see that the fact that Brock Turner is a white male star athlete at a prestigious university does not entitle him to leniency. He also failed to send the message that sexual assault is against the law regardless of social class, race, gender or other factors.

For Ruiz, leniency or the lack thereof was the measure of Persky’s sensitivity to privilege and its role in the criminal justice system, as well as his fidelity to the paternalistic social contract. The corrective to such structural inequities and a proper response to public outrage would have been a harsher punishment for Turner. In their The Stanford Daily op-ed, Luo (2018) also invoked Turner’s privilege and Persky’s apparent solidarity with privileged defendants. Luo wrote, “We don’t seek to recall Persky for harsher sentences. We seek to recall Persky because of his historically consistent bias in favor of privileged men like Brock Turner.” Luo’s argument took a curious turn, as they explicitly claimed that the goal of the recall campaign is not to ensure harsher sentences. Stanford law professor and founding chair of RJAP Michele Dauber (2018) made a similar claim in an interview with San Francisco Magazine, explaining,

Our campaign isn’t about harsh sentencing. It’s been extremely clear and narrowly focused on addressing the problem of impunity for privileged perpetrators of violence against women, particularly in the case of college athletes, tech workers, and upper-class or white individuals.

Dauber added,

And I reject the idea that’s being advocated by Judge Persky’s supporters that we have to choose between caring about mass incarceration and caring about the fact that victims of sexual and domestic violence do not have adequate access to justice.

Still, commentators who opposed the Persky recall expressed concerns that his removal would set a harmful precedent vis-à-vis mass incarceration. Numerous lawyers, activists, and others argued that the recall would threaten judicial independence by placing greater pressure on elected judges to impose harsh sentences and, therefore, increase incarceration (e.g., Chammah, 2016; Levinson, 2018; Pfaff, 2018). In rejecting such claims, RJAP advanced a mode of argument that accommodated concerns regarding disparate sentences and harsh sentences in their own right, as well as sexual violence. One could long to see Turner spend significantly more time in prison, vote in favor of removing Persky from the bench, and still identify with the burgeoning movement to reduce mass incarceration. Whereas RJAP members and other pro-recall activists expressed affective investments toward the historically over-incarcerated, they argued Persky was a friend of the privileged. Furthermore, both Luo and RJAP plainly claimed that Persky’s leniency reflected a lack of attention to survivors of sexual violence. Thus, a harsher punitive response to Turner’s crimes remains the measure of Perksy’s affective investment toward victims of sexual violence and the underprivileged. The campaign links myriad expressions of injustice, as well as affinity toward numerous marginalized populations, in the service of ending Persky’s career. Anger about mass incarceration, sexual violence, and the role of race and class privilege in the criminal justice system coalesce to produce a message that maintains fidelity to a social contract characterized both by the state’s responsibility to equitably distribute punishment and respond forcefully to sexual violence.

On its website, RJAP attempted to document Persky’s leniency toward privileged men by describing other decisions he made while sitting on the bench. The site authors contended, “Judge Persky’s sentencing of Brock Turner was consistent with other cases in which he appeared to favor athletes and other relatively privileged individuals accused of sex crimes or violence against women.” On the site’s “Frequently Asked Questions” page, the authors responded to the question “Has Judge Persky shown bias before?” by outlining several previous cases in which they claim Persky displayed leniency toward privileged defendants. For example, the site provided several examples in which Persky, himself a former Stanford athlete, appeared to favor fellow athletes in his courtroom. The authors noted that in 2015, Persky allowed college football player Ikaika Gunderson, who was “convicted of felony domestic violence for severely beating and choking his ex-girlfriend and pushing her out of a car” to leave California in order to play football for the University of Hawaii. The site added that, after leaving Hawaii for Washington State, Gunderson was again arrested for domestic violence. Thus, in addition to deferring to Gunderson’s perceived needs as a promising student athlete, the site also faulted Persky for enabling an abusive predator to continue victimizing women.

RJAP described other instances in which Persky favored athlete defendants and other privileged men. For example, the site documented Persky’s decision to sentence Robert Chain, a White man who “was convicted of having dozens of highly disturbing images of very young girls ages 18 months to 4 years being penetrated or in sexual situations,” to 4 days in jail as further evidence of the judge’s investment in the interests of privileged defendants over those of victims. The site added, “Less privileged defendants evidently do not receive the same level of solicitude from him.” The authors cited a case in which Persky sentenced a “low-income Latino defendant charged with similar crimes to Brock Turner” to 3 years in prison. They noted, “Like Turner, he had no serious criminal history. Unlike Turner, the Latino defendant was extremely remorseful, apologized, admitted it was wrong, and pleaded guilty.” Turner’s refusal to concede his guilt was one of the chief focal points of the widely read letter penned by his victim, Emily Doe (Baker, 2016). By invoking anger through disturbing examples of domestic violence and sexual abuse against children, as well as narratives of inequitable treatment of defendants, the site mobilized White rage toward Persky and affinity toward victims by characterizing the judge as apathetic toward the traumas of vulnerable communities. RJAP collapsed outrage toward sexual predators and social inequities, making the administration of carceral violence the measure of Persky’s commitment to social justice. To the extent that he demonstrated leniency toward privileged defendants, he figures as indifferent to the legitimate anger of a broad range of victims. The intimate public calling for his ouster, on the other hand, stands as firmly invested in the fates of all victims.

The RJAP website also addressed privilege and disparity by claiming, “This recall sends a clear message that the people demand equal justice for all, regardless of race and privilege.” Implicit in the message of recalling Persky was the presumption that harsh punishments for men such as Turner would itself express a commitment to “equal justice for all.” The site also engaged critics of the recall measure who “have argued that recalling Judge Persky will cause other judges to impose longer sentences on all criminal defendants, the majority of whom are people of color charged with nonviolent or drug offenses.” In response, the RJAP authors wrote, “We are confident that judges have sufficient judicial integrity to be able to distinguish between high status, white or privileged college athletes like Brock Turner who are convicted of sex crimes and poor minority drug and non-violent offenders.” RJAP expressed faith in the capacity of judges not mired by Persky’s affinity for the privileged to meet the demands for justice that the intimate public constituted by RJAP expressed. The campaign collapsed anger regarding the myriad, well-documented flaws of the U.S. criminal justice system into the person of Persky while affirming the legitimacy of the system in its own right. While drug offenders generated considerable outrage among White intimate publics during the 1980s and 1990s in the United States (e.g., Reeves and Campbell, 1994), contemporary discourse regarding law and order tends to minimize the salience of drug offences and typically centers the drug offender—particularly the underprivileged drug offender—as worthy of sympathy and leniency. The violent offender, on the other hand, does not typically warrant sympathy or mercy (Sered, 2019). Thus, the campaign mobilized affective investments in ways that responded to anger regarding sexual violence as well as mass incarceration.

Conclusion

By articulating real and legitimate anger regarding sexual violence and structural inequalities within the criminal justice system to the carceral state, the campaign against Persky posited punitive solutions to sexual violence as a corrective to social injustice. In so doing, the campaign embraced a paternal social contract under which state recognition through carceral violence is the measure of justice. In mobilizing public outrage against Turner’s brief jail sentence following his sexual assault conviction, advocates for recalling Persky affirmed the carceral state’s legitimacy as the chief arbiter of justice (instead of imagining alternatives), both with regard to sexual violence and its own entrenched inequities with regard to race, class, and other marginalized positionalities. The emergence of such an intimate public was only possible to the extent that its members invested in a paternal social contract that centered White feminine victimhood, and divested from the bodies and experiences of those who stood to suffer considerably from an emboldened carceral state—even as the campaign itself presumed to mobilize and satisfy anger toward the legal system’s violence against marginalized bodies.

Brock Turner is by no means a sympathetic or ideal icon for those of us invested in challenging the carceral state. Furthermore, Persky’s record of leniency toward male athletes and other privileged defendants warrants scrutiny, critique, and rage. How one feels about either of these White men should not be the measure of how we attend to the communicative practices at play in the campaign to unseat Persky. Rather, critical communication scholars interested in the intersections of carceral and sexual violence should be guided by a skepticism regarding the carceral state’s ability to deliver justice to oppressed populations. In this respect, we agree with Murakawa (2014) that the harm of penal justice “varies least by what the partisan values most: the ‘message’ of punishment” (p. 19). Bureaucratic refinements such as the reforms RJAP advocated historically empower the carceral state to expand its reach in ways that ultimately fall the most heavily on marginalized communities. Such empowerment has already occurred in California following Turner’s conviction. In September 2016, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bills 701 and 2888—bills that arose largely in response to public outrage regarding the Turner case. The laws mandate prison time for individuals convicted of rape and broaden the state’s legal definition thereof to include all forms of nonconsensual sex. Brown signed this legislation with some ambivalence, citing California’s overall trend toward ending mandatory minimum sentences. But with his signature, Brown affirmed the State Assembly’s desire to impose such sentences on individuals convicted of rape, affirming the RJAP’s position that sexual offenses warranted special scrutiny and severe carceral solutions. Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen agreed, declaring in a public statement, “While prisons are not appropriate for every person convicted of a crime, rapists belong in prison” (Ullola, 2016).

In seeking harsher punishments for privileged sex offenders through the removal of a judge or passage of punitive legislation in the name of universal victims, those who sought to end the judicial career of Persky and otherwise guarantee that men like Turner will spend considerably more time behind bars invest faith in the state as a neutral arbiter when its history of carceral violence demonstrates that it is anything but. Because the White intimate public that coalesced around public outrage regarding the Stanford rape case was fundamentally rooted in the logics of modernity—and, therefore, colonialism, White supremacy, and cis heteropatriarchy—it could rationalize further entrenching the power of the carceral state by affectively divesting from the lives of racialized and otherwise marginalized Others for whom carceral and sexual violence are deeply entwined. Rather, the campaign predicated its demands on affective investment in the experiences of a universal victim—and universal victims are always already White (Bumiller, 2008). While Persky’s opponents declared solidarity with victims of carceral violence, their activism ultimately rested on affective responses to White victimhood and the presumption that, in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary (Murakawa, 2014), a properly finessed criminal justice system could be self-correcting with regard to social injustice.

In rendering the state and its punishing power as a guarantor of justice for victims of sexual violence or an unjust criminal justice system, Persky’s opponents sustained a number of damaging tropes regarding sexual and carceral violence. For instance, RJAP and their allies constructed a narrative that pits Persky, Turner, and other men who engage in or tolerate sexual violence against the figure of the victimized (White) woman. Bumiller (2008) argues that discourses regarding sexual violence that advance a binary gender relationship between always-already potentially victimized women and always-already potentially violent men represses the significance of race and other positionalities with regard to sexual violence. For instance, while RJAP Chair Dauber noted that men can also be victims of sexual violence during at least one televised interview (Fox News, 2016), the vast majority of discourse from Persky’s opponents posited cisgender White women as the primary victims of sexual violence and, therefore, the most salient members of this intimate public. In addition to erasing the sexual trauma experienced by cisgender men, transgender, and nonbinary individuals, or the distinct ways women of color are vulnerable to sexual violence, the campaign against Persky advanced a normative conceptualization of what sexual violence entails. Indeed, by turning to the carceral state as a corrective to sexual violence, the campaign ignored the ways the prison itself functions as a site of sexual violence. In addition to underdocumented and poorly addressed instances of prison rape (Bruenig, 2015), Curry (2017) argued that incarceration itself functions as a mode of sexual violence for racialized bodies of color. He described the prison as “an institution with a historical libidinal obsession toward Black male flesh” (p. 74). In other words, incarceration as such is an act of sexual violence towards Black men. However, Persky’s critics and others within the White intimate public described in this essay invested in a facile narrative of sexual violence that recognizes it only in instances that are legible within the registers of modernity and, therefore, to the carceral state. They affectively divest from the state sanctioned sexual violence towards racialized bodies of color even as they presume to mobilize their anger in order to make it more difficult for the justice system to advantage privileged White men.

On June 5, 2018, a majority of Santa Clara County voters decided to end Persky’s judicial career (Astor, 2018). Several journalists characterized the campaign’s success as a victory for the #MeToo movement, thus tethering the carceral logics of the campaign against Persky to broader mobilizations against sexual violence that have emerged since Turner’s conviction (e.g., Bach, 2018; Elias, 2018). But as many activists and scholars of color have observed, the #MeToo movement itself too often roots its interventions in the experiences of White women, when women of color experience justice, public opinion, and institutional responsiveness regarding sexual violence in different ways (de la Garza, 2019; Onwuachi-Willig, 2018; Tambe, 2018). Me Too founder Tarana Burke, a Black woman and survivor of sexual violence, has made precisely this point by arguing the movement she initiated, but that found mainstream appeal through the social media activity of celebrity White women, has failed to center the experiences of women of color or attend to the nuances of the ways they experience the cultural politics of sexual violence. In an interview with the New York Times, Burke explained, “We can’t wait for white folks to decide that our trauma is worth centering on when we know that it’s happening.” She has also expressed concern that the movement invests too much energy in the mobilization of justifiable outrage and neglects the salience of healing for victims (Harrison, 2018). While relying on the carceral state as a corrective to sexual violence may seem a perfectly natural response for an intimate public invested in the experiences of privileged White women, voices such as Burke’s illustrate that publics who experience significant measures of both sexual and carceral violence will find recourse to police and prisons less desirable (e.g., Davis, 1978).

The prospect of seeing sexual predators face the full majesty of the law is undoubtedly satisfying in many salient respects. For instance, in the context of a criminal justice system that is woefully inadequate when responding to the needs of victims of sexual violence (e.g., Jordan, 2015), instances in which the offenders we view as especially vile are held to legal account for their actions often constitutes a welcome alternative to the status quo. We deny neither the satisfaction associated with such punitive measures nor the failures of our current legal system to address sexual violence. We readily admit that our disgust at Brock Turner’s offenses lead us to, at times, relish the prospect of him suffering. Our desire is not to mitigate the intensity of public outrage regarding sexual violence, but to suggest that contemporary iterations thereof presuppose the experiences of White women victims at the expense of women of color and other victims of sexual violence. To presume the legitimacy of the carceral state in instances of sexual violence at a time when many of the same activists who called for Persky’s ouster align with efforts to end mass incarceration more broadly invests in an idealized system that simply does not exist. Furthermore, such presumptions portend the expansion of a system, fueled by White rage, that will continue absorbing Black and Brown bodies at disproportionate rates. A robust critique of the carceral state that questions its efficacy even in the face of the most despised culprits enables more nuanced discussions about how we might confront sexual violence without relying on prisons, prosecutors, or police. Such a critique also requires that we center the rage experienced by women of color and other victims of sexual violence who do not align with the normative ideal of the White feminine victim. As Black feminists and other historically marginalized voices have long argued, outrage toward myriad modes of violence is an indispensable resource for constituting publics and mobilizing political action (e.g., Combahee River Collective, 1978). It is not the anger toward men such as Turner and Persky that we have sought to critique in this essay. Rather, we problematize the ends to which such anger finds expression and whose anger takes precedent in public discourse. Whereas those who ended Judge Persky’s career organized White rage and rooted it in the carceral state, those who regard the violence of sexual predators and the state as equally worthy of outrage should theorize ways we might produce new affective investments and critique violence in ways that exceed the felt parameters of modernity and the epistemologies of White victimhood.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Ashley Noel Mack is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University. They are an affiliate faculty member in African and African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. They research feminist social movements, the cultural mobilization of Whiteness, and the framing of sexual violence in public culture. They have published in journals such as Women’s Studies in Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Bryan J. McCann is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Louisiana State University, where he also affiliates with the African and African American Studies Program, as well as the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. He is the author of The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-Crime Era (University of Alabama Press, 2017). His work appears in journals such as Communication, Culture, and Critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

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