America has had centuries to practice making violence respectable.

It has called theft discovery, conquest civilization, slavery an economic necessity, and humiliation a rite of passage. It knows how to put respectable language around something rotten, protect the institutions that allow it to continue, and ask the people harmed to lower their voices so everyone else can remain comfortable.

Living in this country has taught me to recognize the pipeline.

Humiliation becomes tradition. Tradition becomes culture. Culture teaches people what they are allowed to do to someone with less power, while silence becomes loyalty and protecting the institution becomes more important than protecting the people inside it.

Eventually, we stop asking whether something is wrong because we have learned to call it normal.

That is what I keep thinking about when I look at the allegations at Cornell, the fraternity basement at the University of Iowa, the questions Nolan Wells’s family is still asking, and the workplaces where I have watched powerful men protected while women were expected to manage the consequences.

At Cornell, a former student alleges that seven fraternity members drugged and raped her. Her lawsuit describes a fraternity group chat used to invite others into the room. The chapter reportedly had 57 active members, although it remains unclear how many belonged to the chat.

The questions extend beyond the seven men named in the lawsuit because a group chat is a social space where people learn what their peers will applaud, tolerate, challenge, or conceal. Who received those messages? Who understood that a woman might be in danger? Who challenged what was happening, and who decided it was easier to say nothing?

Brotherhood has obligations, and I want to know what those obligations are worth when someone is being harmed.

At the University of Iowa, first responders found dozens of blindfolded fraternity pledges in a basement, and the university subsequently investigated and suspended the chapter.

Think about what rituals built around humiliation can teach people about power. Your dignity can be taken as the price of admission, the people above you establish the rules, and you demonstrate loyalty by enduring whatever they decide belonging requires. Eventually, you may acquire enough status to impose those same expectations on someone else.

A culture that teaches people to accept humiliation and abuse can also teach them how to administer it.

Then they graduate and enter corporations, hospitals, universities, courtrooms, government and every other institution where people exercise authority over others. They become managers, executives, doctors, lawyers, professors and public officials, carrying with them whatever they have learned about obedience, loyalty, silence and protecting the group.

This is the American pipeline for many white men in power and for those clamoring for proximity to that power.

Nolan Wells was 18 when he went on a trip and never came home. His family is still fighting for answers. A grand jury declined to bring charges; his cause and manner of death remain undetermined; and his family disputes the adequacy of the investigation. Black Americans know this pattern: our experience teaches us which questions to ask and when official explanations do not add up. In Mississippi, the state with the nation’s highest share of Black residents, yet where no Black candidate has won statewide office since 1890. So why would we ever trust these institutions with the glaring gap in representation. It stinks of obvious collusion. Then Nolan’s mother, Christine Wells Wonsley, suffered public harm to her livelihood for demanding answers.

There is a long history in this country of Black families having to demand that institutions take their questions, their pain, and their dead seriously. That history teaches us to pay attention to whose questions receive urgency, whose pain requires additional proof, whose reputation receives protection, and whose family has to make enough noise before someone decides they deserve an answer.

The same scrutiny is necessary when we talk about victims of white men, particularly white men with power. And this is where I need white women to understand something: when you refuse to fight for Black people, you are weakening the very fight you may one day need for yourself.

History has shown us that the ideologies, institutions, and value systems that normalize the theft of Black freedom, the violation of Black bodies, and violence against Black communities do not remain neatly contained. A system that teaches people that power grants them the right to dominate, exploit, silence, and violate others will eventually turn that logic on anyone with less power.

You cannot preserve the hierarchy and expect it to protect you simply because you stand closer to the people at the top.

This is why accountability for the Epstein class has been so limited. Wealth, status, and connections created the power to buy access, exert pressure, and benefit from institutions that repeatedly placed reputations and relationships above vulnerable girls and young women. Across years of abuse and institutional failure, the burden remained on the victims to force their experiences into public view and make people with power treat their abuse as something that mattered.

That is what power can purchase: not necessarily innocence, but protection from consequences. It’s the American way.

Slavery, colonialism, sexual violence, racial terror, and imperialism did not survive through individual cruelty alone. They required institutions to legitimize exploitation, people willing to benefit from it, and communities willing to rationalize it or look away. It also required working-class participation, sustained by the promise that if you worked hard enough and moved close enough to power, you too could one day wield it against someone beneath you.

Black history did not begin with that exploitation. African people had histories, governments, economies, scholarship, spiritual traditions, art, and complex societies long before enslavement. Domination required stripping people not only of their freedom, but of their history, identity, dignity, and humanity until their exploitation could be treated as ordinary.

That stripping is not incidental to systems of domination. It is how they work.

Eventually, domination becomes tradition, procedure, company culture, brotherhood, protecting the institution, or concern for someone's promising future. Everyone gets to believe their individual participation is small while the person being harmed is forced to live with the cumulative result.

I am tired of hearing about “promising” mediocre white men while women, children and families absorb the damage. I am tired of institutions protecting reputations instead of people demanding accountability. Why defend those who would never defend you? Look around.

We must examine what we reward, whose silence we buy, whose reputations we protect and whose suffering we tolerate.

Whether in a fraternity house, workplace, wealthy circle or public institution, the question is the same:

When someone with less power is harmed, what will those with power do and what will everyone else allow them to call normal?

So stop asking how we got here as a country and look in the mirror. Ask how you have shown up, what you have tolerated, what you have excused, and what your silence has allowed to continue. I can look at myself in the mirror, can you?

Depravity · a total lack of morals, wicked behavior, or an instance of moral corruption.