Lincoln University president expresses great concern for the futures of accused rapists

Because of the work by activists such as our very own Alexandra and Dana, the issue of sexual assault on college campuses is now one of national priority. With the increased scrutiny, colleges and universities should now be taking extra care to address sexual assault and work toward implementing more effective preventive measures and protections for those who are assaulted. Enter Robert R. Jennings. 

Jennings is the president of Lincoln University, the 160-year-old HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) located in Chester County, Pennsylvania. Lincoln University boasts some legendary alumni, including Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Cab Calloway, Kwame Nkrumah, and Gil Scott-Heron. Now, it’s home of a victim-blaming president.

During his speech at the university’s All Women’s Convocation hosted in September of this year, Jennings took on the issue of sexual assault and rape. Did he provide empathy for those who had been assaulted? Did he say that rape and sexual assault would not be tolerated on campus? Did he sure the crowd of black women who chose to attend this university that he, as president, would do everything in his power to ensure that they graduated unmolested? Not exactly.

…we have had on this campus, three cases of young women, who after having done whatever they did with the young men, and then it didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to turn out, guess what they did? They then went to Public Safety and said, ‘He raped me.’ So then we have to do an investigation. We have to start pulling back all the layers and asking all kinds of questions.

And when we start trying to collect the data and ask the questions…and why do we do that?  Because we know that possibly somebody’s life is getting ready to change for the rest of their life. Because there’s no more serious accusation. And within the last 30 days, the United States federal government has now issued a new set of regulations that deal with sexual misconduct on colleges and university campuses. And the penalty is jail time.

What happens when you allege that somebody did something of that nature to you? You go to jail. I don’t care how close they are to finishing their degree. Their whole life changes over night. Because they’re gonna get a record and that record is then gonna follow them for the rest of their life. They’re going to be expelled from the university. It’s gonna be very difficult for them to get into anyone else’s university because they have to explain at the receiving institution why they were expelled from the institution that they were expelled from.

And we have to send the transcript, we have to note on there the reason for him being expelled. And so when they see that, then they don’t want to take a chance on letting them into their university because they don’t know what they are getting ready to get themselves in for.

President Jennings cares so much… about the futures of accused rapists.

This speech was given in September, but is only now receiving the deserved backlash because video the offending parts made it to YouTube on November 1. Since then, Jennings has issued an apology for his “choice of words,” saying he “intended to emphasize personal responsibility and mutual respect.” 

There isn’t any video of his speech made to the All Men’s Convocation, so who knows what type of “mutual respect” he advocated there, but his statements are troubling enough on their own. Jennings, like most people who get criticized for things they’ve said, claims his words were taken out of context. And I agree. His words were taken out of the context of an entire history of black men telling black women to keep quiet.

Kirsten West Savali addresses this over at Dame Magazine:

Jennings’s toxic logic is dangerous on many levels. Too many of us have been taught that our bodies are collateral damage in America’s war on Black people. That our bloodied and bruised bodies, violated again and again by men who are supposed to love us are secondary to both revolution and the elevation of Black communities around the nation. We are often manipulated by a religion that has a stranglehold on the African-American collective subconscious to see ourselves as Eve (tainted and untrustworthy) or Lilith (aggressive and rebellious). We are trained to believe that our rapes are but a symptom of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome and if we could just take the pain a little while longer, once we get this White supremacy thing all worked out, we can focus on demanding that we be allowed to walk streets and campuses in peace.

We’ve been presented with a false choice: protect black men from state violence or respect black women’s bodily autonomy. Any movement toward liberation that would pit those two issues against each other is not one worth respecting.

And when you make people choose, black women lose every time. This, despite the fact that black women continue to show up and fight against the repressive forces that assault black men’s bodies and minds. If they stopped doing so today, it would be completely rational. Why continue showing up for people who have shown they don’t give a shit about you?

That’s what’s most disheartening about Jennings’s comments, which are not uncommon. They reveal a hierarchy of concern, where the lives of young men are placed on pedestal that is unreachable and unknowable for the women who fight for them. For black women, the most concern they can expect from black men is when they’re being told they aren’t being good “ladies.” They’re told they deserve the disrespect doled out to them because of the way they dress or speak. And not a one of these black men sees a bit of irony.

But Jennings apologized. He apologized in that non-apology kind of way that is meaningless, but it’s more than most can say. That’s how low the bar is set right now. We’ll see if Lincoln University takes sexual assault seriously under Jennings’s leadership, but speeches like this one only reveal one thing: we still don’t give a shit about black women.