I write this as someone who considers himself a liberal in the American political sense. As I see it, there is a serious tension in the way we think about sexual assault. We assert two things: 1. women very rarely make false claims of sexual assault, so we should believe their claims, and 2. higher rates of criminal convictions and incarceration among black people are largely explained by institutional racism, rather than truly higher criminality among black people. These things conflict in the apparent over-representation of black (and minority in general) students in campus sexual assault accusations [1].

Hard numbers don't seem very common here, but that article contains qualitative testimony: "In 2015, in The New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a Harvard Law School professor, wrote that in general, the administrators and faculty members she’d spoken with who 'routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases' said that 'most of the complaints they see are against minorities.'"

That article offers also one pretty shocking statistic: "In the 2013–14 academic year, 4.2 percent of Colgate’s students were black. According to the university’s records, in that year black male students were accused of 50 percent of the sexual violations reported to the university, and they made up 40 percent of the students formally adjudicated. During the three academic years from 2012–13 to 2014–15, black students were accused of 25 percent of the sexual misconduct reported to the university, and made up 21 percent of the students referred for formal hearings."

As a result, I struggle to reconcile points 1 and 2 above. My best guess -- and it's similar to what that article hypothesizes -- is that encounters that already exist in some grey area of drunkenness and consent are more likely to be viewed as assault when the man is "other", i.e. black or minority. But this seems awful.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-qu...