the feminist librarian reads

What’s more, America’s terrible history of discrediting black men via charges of sexual misconduct was precisely the kind of thing that might lead white liberals to not want to engage such loaded allegations about a black man who had assuaged their guilt over precisely this kind of history. To wrestle with the merits of those charges—the kinds that have too often been deployed falsely to justify everything from lynching to stand your ground laws—would force America to acknowledge that deeply set, incredibly complicated patterns of injustice around race and sex and power are far from erased. It would also force us to concede that, in this case, they might not be false.