Content warning for sexual assault.

Morgan is a senior here at UMBC pursuing a BA in Media and Communications major with minors in English and Cinematic Arts. If she’s not working at the Women’s Center you can find her watching Ghost Shark (2013) with her friends. 

You know who Brock Turner is. 

In January 2015, Turner sexually assaulted “Emily Doe.”. His face was splattered everywhere in the media. Sometimes it was his mugshot and other times it was the shining photo of him competing on Stanford’s swimming team. He’s a rapist but look, he’s an athlete! One year later, in 2016, you knew his face and you knew his name. Prosecutors recommended six years. He was sentenced to six months. He served ninety days. In a letter to the judge, his father stated that legal repercussions were a “steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.” 

We were all forced to reckon with the reality that for many victims of sexual assault they get no real sense of justice, in court or otherwise. Emily Doe was a blank space and Brock Turner’s narrative was the one that filled it.

That was until Chanel Miller revealed herself to be the “Emily Doe” in the case of Turner vs. the People. Now, the case takes on a different face. Not only is Chanel Miller a survivor of sexual assault, but she is a woman of color, white and Chinese-American. I, along with countless others, had assumed she was white. It immediately became clear why there had only been a six-month sentence, why the judge was so quick to discredit her, and why her facelessness resonated so deeply. Chanel Miller, like many before her, was another woman of color who knew all too well the intersections of white supremacy, rape culture, and violence against women of color.

Her pain feels familiar in too many ways. Miller was violated in the same way that white men historically and continually perpetuate violence (especially sexual violence) against women of color over and over again. Take for instance, the expected sexual violence against black women by their white slave owners. This was normalized so much so that raping a black woman was not a crime for much of history. How can you violate your own property? Or the comfort women of Eastern Asia–women and girls forced into sex slavery by the Japanese Army around World War II. Women from China, Korea, the Philippines, and many other areas were objectified by the Japanese who believed themselves to be a superior people. For the Imperial Japanese Army, it was not just about sex; rather, it was about power and domination.

Rape is never about pleasure. It’s about power. Chanel Miller was incapacitated beyond the point of consent and Brock Turner knew that — despite what his testimony might tell you. He saw an opportunity to exercise his power as a white man and he took it, leaving lasting harm on a woman of color he doesn’t know. 

In the aftermath of rape and sexual assault, his mugshot was in every headline and on every news report. Chanel Miller, in identity and aftermath, remanded faceless left with her perpetrator serving three months in jail with a six-month sentence from a judge who was later was recalled partly due to the public’s accusations of the negligence in the People v. Turner case.

In court, Chanel read a particularly powerful impact statement that went viral. I read the whole thing in one breathless sitting when it was first published. I remember my heart beating out of the chest as I read and read through Chanel’s (then “Emily Doe’s”) words to Brock Turner. “I am no stranger to suffering.”

She continues, “[Turner] made me a victim. In newspapers, my name was ‘unconscious intoxicated woman’, ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity. To relearn that this is not all that I am.”

Her words rang in my head and resonated with me. In leading Take Back the Night the past two years, sharing my own survivorship, and hearing the stories  of other women of color that sense of erasure feels reclaimed in a way.

It’s not about the Brock Turners anymore and their faces and all their harm. 

This is a list of questions Miller was asked at Turner’s trial. Read through them. Every single one. 

How old are you? How much do you weigh? What did you eat that day? Well what did you have for dinner? Who made dinner? Did you drink with dinner? No, not even water? When did you drink? How much did you drink? What container did you drink out of? Who gave you the drink? How much do you usually drink? Who dropped you off at this party? At what time? But where exactly? What were you wearing? Why were you going to this party? What’ d you do when you got there? Are you sure you did that? But what time did you do that? What does this text mean? Who were you texting? When did you urinate? Where did you urinate? With whom did you urinate outside? Was your phone on silent when your sister called? Do you remember silencing it? Really because on page 53 I’d like to point out that you said it was set to ring. Did you drink in college? You said you were a party animal? How many times did you black out? Did you party at frats? Are you serious with your boyfriend? Are you sexually active with him? When did you start dating? Would you ever cheat? Do you have a history of cheating? What do you mean when you said you wanted to reward him? Do you remember what time you woke up? Were you wearing your cardigan? What color was your cardigan? Do you remember any more from that night? No? 

Okay, well, we’ll let Brock fill it in.

Sources:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katiejmbaker/heres-the-powerful-letter-the-stanford-victim-read-to-her-ra

https://eji.org/history-racial-injustice-sexual-exploitation-black-women

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dear-christine-blasey-ford-i-too-was-sexually-assaulted–and-its-seared-into-my-memory-forever/2018/10/03/2449ed3c-c68a-11e8-9b1c-a90f1daae309_story.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2019/09/24/chanel-miller-brock-turner-rape-emily-doe-book-review/2073117001/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/24/opinion/chanel-miller-know-my-name.html

https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1324&context=rrgc

Voices for Economic Opportunity Grant 
Grand Global Challenges, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Deadline: November 13, 2019 
The goal of this challenge is to elevate diverse voices that can help broaden the conversation about the issues inhibiting economic mobility and generate deeper awareness and actionable understanding. Most Americans believe it is right to help others, so that they may have the opportunity to live healthy and productive lives. Yet skepticism exists about the efficacy of anti-poverty programs in the U.S. and deep-seated stereotypes remain about people experiencing poverty and who deserves to rise out of it. Many community practitioners and social movement leaders in the U.S. are already working to address this challenge. Still, there is a need for new ways of bringing personal stories to life to help others better understand why people fall into or remain hindered by barriers that impede their ability to advance and what the obstacles to building and maintaining economic security are. We seek proposals for creative, scalable, strategic new ways to generate awareness of the structural and historic barriers to economic mobility; to communicate that poverty is not just something that happens to other people and everyone is deserving of the chance to move out of it; and to change the predominant misconceptions about poverty in a way that creates the conditions for effective programs and policies to be adopted by the public and private sectors.
For more information. 

Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (NSF)
Deadline: November 15, 2019 
With an emphasis on two-year Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs), the Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program focuses on the education of technicians for the high-technology fields that drive our nation's economy.
For more information. 

Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science Phase II Grant (NSF)
Deadline: November 20, 2019 
Transdisciplinary Research In Principles Of Data Science (TRIPODS) aims to bring together the statistics, mathematics, and theoretical computer science communities to develop the theoretical foundations of data science through integrated research and training activities.  Phase I, described in solicitation NSF 16-615, supported the development of small collaborative Institutes.  Phase II will support a smaller number of larger Institutes, selected from the Phase I Institutes via a second competitive proposal process.  All TRIPODS Institutes must involve significant and integral participation by all three of the aforementioned communities.
For more information.

Environmental Health Disparities Research (NIH)
Deadline: November 22, 2019 
Social determinants of health--the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age--shape individual and population health and wellbeing across the life course, and include a broad range of factors such as access to safe housing, affordable healthy food, potable water, green space, clean air, and supportive social networks. These health determinants are in turn shaped by wider forces including economics, social policies, politics and personal and community beliefs and value systems. Unequal distribution of health-promoting social determinants across various populations is increasingly understood as a significant contributor to persistent and pervasive health disparities. A focus on health equity calls for addressing determinants of health that put health disparity populations and vulnerable communities at a disadvantage for achieving positive health outcomes. This initiative will support multidisciplinary research to generate innovative approaches to mitigate environmental health disparities and improve access to healthy and sustainable environments for health disparity populations and vulnerable communities. Each center is expected to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, synergistic research projects (see descriptions of required components below for examples of synergy), and core support that enhances the ability to achieve goals and objectives.
For more information.

Oceanographic Facilities and Equipment Support (NSF)
Deadline: December 16, 2019 
Oceanographic facilities and equipment are supported by the Integrative Programs Section (IPS) of the Division of Ocean Sciences (OCE), Directorate for Geosciences (GEO). These awards are made for the procurement, conversion and/or up-grade, enhancement or annual operation of platforms in the ocean, coastal, near-shore and Great Lakes. Awards are generally directed specifically to support facilities that lend themselves to shared use within the broad range of federally-supported research and education programs. Most of these platforms and facilities also receive partial support from federal agencies other than NSF. This includes state and local governments and private sources on a proportional basis usually through a daily rate mechanism. The primary objective of these awards is to ensure the availability of appropriate facilities for federally-funded investigators and educators. Individual project-based facilities and instrumentation, limited to one, or a small group of investigators, should be supported through appropriate research programs as opposed to the IPS programs listed herein.
For more information.

Formal Methods in the Field Grant (NSF)
Deadline: January 22, 2020
The Formal Methods in the Field (FMitF) program aims to bring together researchers in formal methods with researchers in other areas of computer and information science and engineering to jointly develop rigorous and reproducible methodologies for designing and implementing correct-by-construction systems and applications with provable guarantees. FMitF encourages close collaboration between two groups of researchers. The first group consists of researchers in the area of formal methods, which, for the purposes of this solicitation, is broadly defined as principled approaches based on mathematics and logic, including modeling, specification, design, program analysis, verification, synthesis, and programming language-based approaches. The second group consists of researchers in the “field,” which, for the purposes of this solicitation, is defined as a subset of areas within computer and information science and engineering that currently do not benefit from having established communities already developing and applying formal methods in their research. This solicitation limits the field to the following areas that stand to directly benefit from a grounding in formal methods: computer networks, cyber-human systems, distributed /operating systems, embedded systems, and machine learning. Other field(s) may emerge as priority areas for the program in future years, subject to the availability of funds.
For more information.

And please don't miss out on these Internal Opportunities:   
 

• October 15, 2019 CAHSS Dean's Research Fund(CDRF) https://cahss.umbc.edu/cahss-deans-research-fund/

• October 15, 2019 Pedagogy and Teaching Award (PAT) & the John Jeffries Curriculum Internationalization Fellowship https://cahss.umbc.edu/cahss-grants-for-pedagogy-and-teaching-pat-awards/

• November 4, 2019 CAHSS Research Fellowship https://cahss.umbc.edu/cahss-research-fellows-program/

UMBC Immigrant Recognition Day

Students, Staff, Faculty, Service Workers, Administrators: Join us on Monday, October 7 for a day-long celebration on the Commons Quad**

Come one, come all. Wear red!