I remember being a young woman reading about “wilding” in New York City and being terrified of the Central Park Five (five teenagers of color who were convicted in the 1989 rape and beating of a jogger but later exonerated). It was especially terrifying to me because the previous year, I had been raped.

And yet, it was a “kind” older white man who picked me up when I was hitchhiking one night in 1988 and who raped me at knifepoint, not half a mile from my parents’ house in the Oxford Hills.

Had the person who offered me a ride that night been a black man, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into his car, but I had not been conditioned by racism to be afraid of the man who ended up raping me.

And I was chided for years about giving in to my “irrational fear and hatred” of older white men. “Not all men are rapists,” I was constantly told, and “It’s not fair for you to think of all men that way.”

I get it. They meant that it wasn’t fair for me to think of older white men that way.

Last week I listened to the audio of Donald Trump bragging about grabbing a woman “by the (genitals).” And now, when I drive through the Oxford Hills to visit my family, every time I see a Trump/Pence sign in front of a house – and there are so many! – I wonder, “Does the older white man who raped me at knifepoint 28 years ago live there?”

And I wonder if he brags to his friends about the 19-year-old whose genitals he grabbed, and I wonder if they laugh.

Kelley McDaniel

Portland

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