Anything but a Hypocrite: Interactional Musings on Race, Colorblindness, and the Redemption of Strom Thurmond

In December 2003, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a bi-racial retired schoolteacher living in Southern California, revealed that she is the illegitimate daughter of the late Strom Thurmond. Thurmond served as South Carolina’s United States Senator for nearly fifty years and was a passionate segregationist during the Civil Rights Era. Washington-Williams’s revelation shocked many because few people outside South Carolina had expected Thurmond to have a “Black daughter.” But this story is not simply about race. Carrie Butler, Washington-Williams’s mother, was a teenage maid in Thurmond’s parents’ home when the then-twenty-two-year-old Thurmond had sex with her. Both the law of South Carolina and the power dynamic between Black women and White men during the Jim Crow era suggests that Thurmond statutorily raped and/or sexually assaulted Butler. Yet, this aspect of the story has been largely ignored; journalists reporting on Thurmond’s “Black child” focused on Thurmond’s hypocrisy—that is, his readiness to preach segregation while practicing integration of the most intimate kind. This Article begins with a content analysis of news articles following this story’s break, which shows that journalists largely reported WashingtonWilliams’s revelation as a story of racial hypocrisy without fully discussing the issues of rape or sexual assault. After legally and historically situating the Thurmond-Butler relationship, this Article then develops a theory of interactionality, grounded upon Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectionality analysis, to explore how and why journalists “missed” this story. This Article argues that a “colorblind” race ideology can at least partially explain this omission. By focusing on race aesthetics without a deeper conversation about racism, and by taking the potential rape and sexual assault out of their narrative, journalists † B.A., Yale University; J.D., Columbia Law School; Ph.D. candidate, University of California, Berkeley. I am deeply indebted to Kathryn Abrams, Lauren Edelman, Ian Haney Lopez, Angela Harris, Samuel Lucas, Camille Nelson, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig for their thoughts and support throughout this project. A special thanks also to Jordan Elias, D’Lonra Ellis, Andrew Rosen, Aliya Saperstein, Gabrielle Williams, and Peter Younkin. OBASOGIE FINAL.DOC 12/15/06 6:11 PM 452 Yale Journal of Law and Feminism [Vol. 18:2 were able to partially absolve America of any lingering racial guilt or unease, ultimately impeding any path towards genuine racial redemption. I.INTRODUCTION 453 II.CONTENT ANALYSIS OF MEDIA COVERAGE 458 A. Methodology 458 B. Results 459 III.RACE, RAPE, AND THE LAW 463 A. A Socio-Historical Approach 463 B. Statutory Rape in Early Twentieth-Century South Carolina........ 471 IV.TOWARD INTERSECTIONALITY 476 A. Feminism and Anti-Essentialism 476 B. Intersectional Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Rape 479 C. Intersectionality’s Limits 482 V.TOWARD INTERACTIONALITY 485 A. Interactionality’s Conceptual Foundations 485 1. Qualitative Methods: Symbolic Interactionism 485 2. Quantitative Methods: Statistical Models 487 B. Interactionality and Colorblindness: Re-Reading History 490 VI. CONCLUSION 494 OBASOGIE FINAL.DOC 12/15/06 6:11 PM 2006] Anything but a Hypocrite 453