Does Amy Cooper, the Central Park racist, teach us anything about responding to sexual misconduct as a student under Title IX?
YES! She teaches us that it is war out there.
Yesterday, Memorial Day 2020, amidst the national solidarity over the COVID-19 pandemic, a young white woman, Amy Cooper, maliciously and later unapologetically discriminated against a black man Christian Cooper who happened to be bird watching in New York City’s Central Park. (1). The crisis exploded because Mr. Cooper had the temerity to ask Amy Cooper to leash her dog, and later to take video of her call to the New York Police, complaining about him as about to assault her. Amy Cooper’s performance on that video is a priceless fractal of what happens when some women complain of sexual misconduct on campus. Just as Mr. Cooper the birdwatcher did not expect a racist histrionic tirade to explode in front of him, from his request to leash a dog, most men responding to sexual misconduct in school did not expect any Title IX complaint to issue from a spectrum that goes from infatuation to sex.
Amy Cooper speaks the words that constitute her racism (and misandry) in the video. (2). These are inescapable facts usually not available to the man defending a Title IX complaint. But, still, it is worthwhile to listen to Amy Cooper’s voice to capture the pathological way in which she repeats and enhances her tale. This helps to understand the inescapably banal, immature, hatred that sadly fuels so many of these complaints. Amy Cooper’s basic sentence to the New York Police, whom she calls on her cell phone, is: “I’m going to call them and tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life“. Through that sentence, in seconds, she reverses the roles and becomes the victim because she fits the trope of the white woman, about to be raped in Central Park, frantically seeking help from an aloof authority. When she repeats it, she’s hysterical. (3)
Women in college, for painful and true reasons, easily fit the trope of the white woman about to be raped—the “one in five”. (4). When they repeat it, they easily become hysterical. That trope presents male students with danger because the campus culture actually catalyzes and allows for transmogrification of sexual experiences—particularly the tenuous ones from white women—into full blown sexual misconduct where the man is immediately assumed to be at fault. Stated otherwise, we only know that Mr. Cooper did not assault Amy Cooper, and expect that Amy Cooper should be punished for dehumanizing him, slandering him, and filing a false police report against him, because she speaks all her vile on video. Most male respondents to a Title IX complaint in school have some confirmation that the complainant liked them, but not a full blown video with her threatening him with a lie. Thus, most male respondents easily get cast into the corresponding trope: the US male student who rapes, predates, or grooms one out of five.
These are sordid tales of community break-down. Much like men responding to sexual misconduct on campus experience conflict, the Amy Cooper story actually pitted two modern, elite Americans against each other, and the outcome was only fair because one had proof that he was the victim. Amy Cooper stated a fiction as complaint because Mr. Cooper is black and male. A female complainant will speak things against a man that he did not expect, because he is a man, much more so if he is a man of color, (5) suffers from ADHD (6), or works as an NCAA athlete (7). Community ties disappear in the College’s Title IX office setting, just as they did for Amy and Mr. Cooper, who, ironically, are professionally similar and may be neighbors. She went to Chicago. He went to Harvard. And I have run through the Ramble enough to know that if you walk a dog there, or if you bird watch there, you expect to meet your elite neighbor there. This is the Ramble, not some tourist place like Times Square. So keep in mind, if you are of color in the world, or a man in college, you will easily be cast as a trespasser or as a predator. Schools are not going to do the hard work of sorting fact from fiction for the respondent. (8). The denouement of that tension may lead to the re-segregation of college life in the United States, this time based on gender; which is not that far from what it was like the first time around.
But either way, the Amy Cooper story has a clear lesson for Title IX respondents and the families who love and support them: This is war, and you need technology (and a legal team) to win it. To put it as theory, the story of Title IX has robed men of their voice. For some women, however, that theft is generally regarded as unremarkable, or as normal, a taken-for-granted reflection of the civil society they crave; as white privilege. Oh, and a final thought. The man who provided a perfect statement guiding us on how to approach this war, is the (we hope) next president of the United States. Vice-President Joe Biden in responding to the outrageous and clearly false allegations from Tara Reade has clearly said “Women have a right to be heard, and the press should rigorously investigate claims they make. I’ll always uphold that principle. But in the end, in every case, the truth is what matters. And in this case, the truth is the claims are false.” (9).
Raul Jauregui
Jauregui Law Firm
I am an attorney and I defend mostly respondents of sexual misconduct in colleges or universities. This is absolutely not my legal opinion or my legal advice, but rather survey of the Title IX topic. If you’re in this situation, in any way, consult a lawyer now.
As posted in Quora:
ENDNOTES:
3. Possibly some object to the use of the term “hysteria” to describe the behavior of women. Freud studied “hysteria” as an illness of woman as if men didn’t get like that. We do. But here the term hysteria comes from the female journalist at the New York Times who labeled Amy Cooper’s pathology as such: “Then the encounter, which was recorded on video, took an ugly turn. As the man, Christian Cooper, filmed on his phone, the woman, clutching her thrashing dog, calls the police, her voice rising in hysteria. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life,” she says to him while dialing, and then repeats to the operator, “He’s African-American.” The video, posted to Twitter on Memorial Day, has been viewed nearly 30 million times, touching off intense discussions about the history of the police being falsely called on black people, sometimes putting their lives in danger.” [Emphasis added]. Sarah Maslin Nir, Woman Is Fired After Calling Police on Black Man in Central Park, The New York Times, May 26, 2020, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/nyregion/amy-cooper-dog-central-park.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
4. We have bloged, from the start, on the dangerous and inflammatory use of that statistic because it feeds the corresponding trope: If one in five women in college in the United States is sexually assaulted, does that not mean that one in five men in college in the United States are sexual predators? See, e.g,. https://www.studentmisconduct.com/news/2016/6/27/blog-post-05-harrisfootnote 4. Every decent person shares the concern that many women have been subjected to unwelcome conduct or pressure while studying in the United States. However, the claim that one in five women is sexually assaulted in college, a claim that has long been the basis for advocacy efforts, school disciplinary procedures, and government policy decisions, is based on anonymous surveys, not scientific studies, and has been seriously challenged. See,e.g., https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/factchecker/wp/2014/12/17/one-in-five-women-in-college-sexually-assaulted-anupdate/?utm_term=.7f211e30541e; http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/09/aau_campus_sexual_assault_survey_w hy_such_surveys_don_t_paint_an_accurate.html. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey reports a much lower rate of sexual assault: 6.1 per 1000 female students from 1995 to 2013, with the rate trending downwards. That study is available at: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rsavcaf9513.pdf.
5. Men of color sue under Title VI and under Title IX.
9. Maggie Astor and Isabella Grullón Paz, Full Transcript: Joe Biden Addresses Tara Reade Allegations on ‘Morning Joe’, The New York Times, May 1, 2020, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/us/politics/joe-biden-tara-reade-msnbc.html