THE COURAGE of Black Stanford Freshman Ebbie Banks. White Girl Consents to Sex, But Then…
At Stanford University during a Spring event, black student Ebbie Banks stood up and spoke about the most traumatic experience so far in his young life. Growing up, he said he was pretty liberal. Then he was falsely accused of sexual assault, and the “white liberals” who were supposed to support him and hear his side of the story instead turned their backs on him. “The white liberals were very eager to demonize me and see me as a monster before they had all the facts,” Banks said. “The left only acknowledges certain kinds of victimhood … but then my trauma doesn’t get acknowledged and validated.” He said the incident took place in the summer after his junior year in high school. He attended a theater camp that enrolled predominantly white students, and he was among a handful of black students there. He engaged in a consensual sexual act with a white female student, but soon after rumors spread that he assaulted her. He was never contacted by police or administrators, the entire affair was rumor-driven, he said. “People were looking at me like I was a fucking monster, like I wasn’t human. I cried every day for a month. I was depressed out of my mind. It just felt so unfair.” “So for the longest time I wanted people to acknowledge what I had gone through, sympathize with my pain, but I realized no one on the left was going to validate my victimhood… If I got stopped by the police I could talk about that with white liberals, but once you talk about being falsely accused, it’s a taboo subject. I felt that burden of suffering in silence… you just feel isolated.” Eventually, Banks said he decided to let go of his anger over the incident. “It wasn’t productive for me to always be stuck in my victimhood,” he said. “I can either stay in it and feel sorry for myself or empower myself and try to get my shit together.”
thecollegefix.com Jennifer Kabbany
