Professor Sameena Mulla: ‘Moynihan Redux: How Courts Theorize Black Families in the Prosecution of Sexual Assault
Professor Sameena Mulla is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Emory University (U.S.). She uses anthropological methods to study the intersections of law, medicine and policing. she is the author of The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention (NYU 2014), and the co-author of Bodies in Evidence: Race, Gender and Science in Sexual Assault Adjudication (NYU 2021).
Sameena Mulla’s talk explores racial disparities in sentencing practices in the US criminal justice system. Drawing on observations of 687 court appearances, including 34 full jury trials and 139 sentencing hearings in the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, sexual assault sentencing is analysed as a site for the production of racist narratives about black communities, cultivated by the court’s mistrust of black kinship, sexuality, and modes of care. Mulla examines the legacy of the theories of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Moynihan, a key figure in Democratic politics, echoes judges’s position in Milwaukee County, most of whom were either openly or tacitly aligned with the Democratic Party. The report exemplifies the racist rhetoric of liberals. As Mulla argues, the report, whose sociological analysis has been debunked and challenged for decades, persists as a guiding lens within legal frameworks, and court sentences in the United States continue to frame Black families as pathological. The report remains a key rhetorical framework used in court, where judges present punishment in the form of incarceration as the inevitable consequence of the failures of Black family life. For instance, maternal and paternal deficits are a recurring theme of sentencing hearings. These racist narratives shape how courts assess ‘pro social assets’, often declaring that Black community ties fall short, and custody within a prison is the only rehabilitation possible. Her talk illustrates how racism and anti-blackness in the US are not simply a conservative project, but also a liberal one.
