Rape was a ritual of racial terror wielded against the spirits of Black women. Accusations of rape were a tool of racial terror threatening Black men. What remains harder to address is the way sexual violence exists inside Black communities in the United States, although it does in every community in the United States. The challenge is that we are still afraid. False accusations of rape directed at Black men were a commonplace of the lynching era. We want to heal communities without falling into the old patterns of demonizing Black men that destroyed communities. This is what makes an internal
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