Home is an Island
Narcissists in high places have fully gone mask-off. There is an ease with which powerful men move through the world as if consequence is a myth, by the endless revelations that the wealthiest rooms in society are often built like theaters—bright chandeliers above, children in shadows below. Everyone is asking the same trembling question, as though disbelief itself is a kind of moral stance: how could this happen? How could such depravity exist at the highest levels? How could anyone do such things and sleep at night? Perhaps the most chilling part of the question is not its horror, but its amnesia. Embedded inside the question is the assumption that this violence is new, that it is an eruption rather than a foundation, that it represents a collapse of values rather than the values themselves finally speaking aloud.
The question I keep turning: what do you mean, how could this happen? This country was founded on the sexual trafficking of enslaved Africans and the violence and displacement of Indigenous people. Not as a metaphorical, unfortunate detour from an otherwise noble experiment, not as a stain that can be scrubbed away with enough patriotic ceremony. Literally. Structurally. Intimately. The United States was built on the violation of Black women, men, and children as an economic system; on the forced reproduction of human beings into property; on the premise that some bodies were not sacred but harvestable. It was built on Indigenous girls stolen into conquest, on women treated as spoils of expansion, on the idea that domination was not permissible but actualized as holy. This is not an aberration. This is the genesis.
What Americans refuse to sit with is the ordinary acceptance of the atrocity. Violence that was not hidden behind euphemism or scandal, not whispered about as an exception. It was law, it was custom, it was neighborly. The average person accepted it as reality, the way one accepts drought or hunger or death. Your neighbor did not recoil in horror at the idea of human beings being bought, sold, raped, bred, and beaten. Your neighbor participated, adjusting their morality until it fit the architecture. It is easy, now, to point to the plantation owner, to the politician, to the founding father with his enslaved children. But the terror was communal and social. The United States agreed to normalize and embed this culture to survive itself.
Lynchings were a family event. Children were dressed for spectacle, and people brought food. Violence was recreation and bonding. Brutality was a public ritual, a reminder that the social order was maintained not by justice but by Black death. If you can understand that—if you can comprehend that entire communities once gathered beneath swinging Black bodies and called it tradition—then the present moment should not feel like a shocking departure. It should feel like continuity.
Now, centuries later, America wants to experience outrage as virtue. It wants personal devastation as evidence of distance. It wants to believe that shock proves innocence, that horror proves progress, that the recognition of evil is somehow the same as the dismantling of it. But outrage is easy when it costs nothing. Outrage is often the most convenient emotion a society can produce, because it allows the performance of morality without the labor of reckoning. We are told to be appalled, but not to remember. We are encouraged to condemn individual monsters, but not to interrogate the culture that manufactures and protects them.
Black people and Indigenous people have been sounding the alarm since this country’s inception. We have been naming the violence, tracing its lineage, refusing its normalization. We have been screaming from inside the architecture while the nation insisted it could not hear. America has not changed as much as it has simply become more skilled at gaslighting itself into believing the original wound has healed. It has learned to narrate slavery as distant, lynching as isolated, and assault as scandal, as though these were interruptions in the story rather than the plot itself.
Perhaps the most dangerous American talent is this ability to forget what it was built upon, and then call itself shocked when the foundation begins to speak. Because when the mask comes off, what is revealed is not a new face, but rather the old one this country has always worn. The one it simply learned, for a time, to hide behind PR.
The Comfort of Looking Upward
There is a particular comfort Americans find in directing their disgust toward the distant. The predator becomes more comprehensible when he is famous, when he is sealed behind gates, when his depravity can be treated as an exotic corruption of wealth rather than an ordinary practice of power. People want the villain to be exceptional because exception preserves the fantasy of the normal. If evil lives only on private islands and in penthouse suites, then the rest of the world can remain unexamined. The outrage becomes a kind of entertainment, a spectacle of condemnation that reassures the viewer: I am not like that. My life is not touched by that. My community is not built to sustain that. And yet this is precisely how the violence survives—not through secrecy alone, but through the insistence that it belongs somewhere else.
We are not dealing with a problem of a few monsters at the top. We are dealing with a culture of protection that stretches outward, horizontally, through ordinary life. Predation does not require celebrity. It requires cover, familiarity, and a community willing to say, even quietly, even with discomfort, that it would rather preserve the illusion of peace than confront the truth of harm. The American imagination loves a spectacular villain because spectacular villains allow everyone else to remain unindicted. The real horror is that the machinery of violation is often assembled in plain rooms: family living rooms, church basements, college dorms, school hallways, group chats, board meetings where everyone knows and no one acknowledges.
How many men are shielded not by wealth, but by closeness? By the instinctive loyalty of other men who understand, even without language, that accountability is contagious. By brothers who joke it away, fathers who refuse to ask, friends who say he’s a good guy, he just drinks too much, he didn’t mean it, she’s exaggerating. By mothers who become defenders not because they do not know, but because knowing would crack something too sacred to lose: the story they have told themselves about their sons. There is a particular violence in the way communities will contort themselves to make the harmed person into the disruption, the accuser into the problem, the truth into the threat. The predator is often less terrifying than the chorus around him that insists that what happened is not what happened.
Nowhere is this more grotesque than in the spaces that claim moral authority. How many religious leaders have participated in the very brutality the nation now pretends to discover with fresh horror? How many pulpits have been constructed atop the bodies of girls? How many congregations have rehearsed forgiveness as an instrument of coercion, demanding grace from the violated while offering endless patience to the violator? Do not ruin his life, they say. Do not cause division, they warn, as though division were not already introduced the moment violence occurred. As though a girl’s life were not already altered beyond recognition. As though the unity of the church were more precious than the safety of the child. Hypocrisy is not an unfortunate side effect of power; it is one of its most reliable tools.
Consider the campus, that modern temple of American possibility, where assault is treated as an unfortunate hazard of youth rather than a predictable outcome of entitlement. How many college-aged men rape women and are protected by administrations, fraternities, judges, and families, because it wouldn’t be fair to “ruin his future”? The question is asked with such tender concern for the perpetrator’s trajectory, as though violence is merely a detour on his road to greatness. His scholarship, his career, his promise—all invoked like sacred offerings that must not be disturbed. Meanwhile, the girl’s future becomes a silent casualty. Her education now contains the shape of what happened. Her body becomes a site of memory. Her life splits into before and after. The culture mourns the possibility of his consequences more than it mourns the permanence of her harm.
This is what rape culture is: not simply the act, but the network of excuses that makes the act survivable for the one who commits it. It is the endless translation of violence into misunderstanding. It is the collective labor of minimizing, doubting, protecting, and reframing. Predators do not thrive because no one knows. They thrive because too many people know and decide that knowing is not enough to act. They thrive because the world has been trained to treat violation as regrettable but inevitable, and accountability as the true disruption.
The outrage of the present moment will remain shallow if it continues to point only upward, toward distant villains. The reckoning begins closer; in the familiar rooms, among the respected men, inside the institutions that call themselves safe. It begins when we stop outsourcing evil to the elite and admit how many ordinary communities have been quietly laundering the same violence for generations.
The State’s Indifference and the Discipline of Girlhood
The American reflex when violence is named is to turn toward the State as if it were a parent. People speak of justice as though the courtroom is a sanctuary, as though the police are custodians of innocence, as though punishment is the natural endpoint of harm. They want to believe there is an institution sturdy enough to absorb the horror and return the world, intact, back to them. But the State has never been the protector it pretends to be. It has never been neutral. It has never been devoted to the safety of women, and it has certainly never been devoted to the safety of Black and Indigenous women, whose violation has so often been treated as inevitable.
The evidence of this indifference is not hidden. It sits in boxes, on shelves, in police stations across the country like abandoned testimony. Rape kits—physical proof, the most intimate kind of evidence, the recorded aftermath of someone’s body being turned into a crime scene—gather dust as though they are inconveniences rather than emergencies. Thousands upon thousands go untested, untouched, uninvestigated. People speak of backlog as though it is a bureaucratic accident, as though it is merely a matter of resources. But what is a backlog if not a confession? What is it if not the State admitting, quietly, that it does not intend to care? That the violated will wait indefinitely for recognition. That justice is not delayed accidentally but withheld intentionally, parceled out according to whose suffering is deemed worthy of labor.
Even when the kit is tested, and the evidence is clear, the machinery of disbelief remains. Women are interrogated not for what was done to them, but for how they behaved around it. What were you wearing? Why were you there? Had you been drinking? Did you say “no” loudly enough? Did you fight hard enough? The violated must prove their violation and perform their pain to be believed, must demonstrate that they did not somehow invite the violence that arrived. The perpetrator is granted complexity and doubt; the victim is granted suspicion. This is not a flaw in the system, but the system doing what it was designed to do: preserve the comfort of those who benefit from the presumption that women are always partly to blame.
It begins before anyone has language for assault. It begins in girlhood, in the first lessons of containment. Rape culture is not introduced only through brutality; it is introduced through training. A girl learns early that her body is a problem to be managed. She learns that her presence is disruptive. She learns that she is responsible, somehow, for what men might do with their desire. The world tells her, before she has grown into herself, that she must anticipate male hunger and build her life around avoiding it.
This is why school dress codes are never just about clothes. They are sermons and discipline disguised as decorum. A child is told her shoulders are distracting, that her skirt is inappropriate. A child is told that the education of the boys around her depends on her ability to shrink. The stated justification is always boys: they cannot focus, they cannot help themselves, they are wired this way. What the girl is actually being taught is far more damning: that male attention is her responsibility, their misconduct is her burden to prevent, that the problem is not the gaze but the body being gazed upon.
There is an obsceneness about the adultness of this demand. We pretend it is about adolescent boys, but the enforcement so often comes from adults—faculty, administrators, authority figures whose concern is steeped in projection. The girl is made into a temptation. The institution is made into the moral guardian. The adult men remain unexamined, untrained, untouched by the expectation of self-control. The girl learns that safety is not something she is owed. It is something she must earn through compliance.
This is how the culture prepares itself. Before the assault, or the courtroom, or the untested kit on the shelf, there is the steady grooming of acceptance. Girls are taught to take up less space. Women are taught to doubt their own instincts. Communities are taught to soften the language of harm until it becomes survivable for everyone except the harmed. And the State, ever consistent, stands not as savior but as witness—present enough to police bodies, absent when those bodies are violated.
In this way, the violence does not arrive as a surprise. It arrives as a fulfillment. A country that disciplines girls into managing men’s appetites cannot then pretend to be shocked when men behave as though appetite is something they are entitled to. A society that treats evidence of rape as administrative clutter cannot then pretend that its outrage is righteousness. The neglect is not incidental. It is cultural, foundational. It is the continuation of an old permission: that some bodies will simply have to endure.
What is required, then, is not simply outrage, or exposure, or the endless naming of harm. What is required is a refusal to inherit the world as it is. The solution cannot be found solely in headlines or reckonings that flare bright and then fade. It must be cultural, spiritual, it must be structural. It must be a remaking so profound that the old permissions no longer make sense.
This is where rematriation enters—not as a slogan, but as an orientation toward life. A tipping of the scales away from domination and toward care. Away from excusal and toward responsibility. Away from the ancient story that men’s violence is natural and women’s endurance is the price of living. Rematriation is the return of the world to the values it has been taught to despise: tenderness as power, community as protection, safety as a shared obligation rather than an individual burden.
Rape culture is not simply about sex; it is about hierarchy and entitlement, and whose bodies are considered public terrain. To end it requires more than consequences; it requires the dismantling of the social imagination that sustains it. It requires raising boys who are not owed disbelief. It requires communities that do not confuse silence with peace. It requires a world in which care is not feminine weakness but the organizing principle.
To arrive there, we will need what can only be described as a science fiction of the mind. We must imagine a society that has never existed here. A society beyond the one we have inherited, beyond the old bargains, beyond the brutal normalization of women’s pain. The future will not be an extension of the present unless we insist upon rupture. We must become capable of dreaming past the architecture of violation, of inventing forms of community that do not rely on women’s silence and girls’ compliance.
America wants to be outraged without being transformed. It wants to believe the violence is shocking rather than foundational. But transformation begins when we stop treating the world we have as inexorable. We are being asked, in this moment, not only to condemn what is revealed, but to build what has never been given: a culture that does not excuse, a society that does not look away, a rematriated world where the vulnerable are not made into sacrifices for the comfort of the powerful. We must insist, with the full weight of our memory and our moral imagination, that another world is possible—and then labor, fiercely, to make it real.
