ABSTRACT
Feminists in the United States often claim that men’s abuse and battering of women in intimate relationships knows no race, class, ethnic, religious, or national boundaries. The essence of battering is said to be men’s use of violence to maintain power and control over women. While this claim of “equality” and “sameness” continues to be reproduced in much public discourse, it is often undercut by racial and often class profiling that underlie differential responses to men’s interpersonal violence against women. As Aishah Shahidah Simmons asks, why is it that Black men are often the “household names when discussions about sexual harassment, sexual abuse, sexual assault, rape, and femicide occur” in the white feminist community?1 In the United States, just as Clarence Thomas is often the symbol of sexual harassers, just as Mike Tyson is often the symbol of acquaintance rape, O.J. Simpson has become the signature of domestic violence. It is no accident that all three men are African American and it is no accident that their cases became key sites in the United States for racial and gender politics to become polarized.
