Know My Name

Twenty feet away from my current residence is the site where Chanel Miller was assaulted by Brock Turner four years ago. In her memoir, she delves into the event, her family, her background, her inner struggles, her experiences at the trial; she presents the vignette of a real, relatable person behind the Emily Doe persona that many might be familiar with. I had known she was a phenomenal storyteller and writer from reading the victim impact statement in 2016, and the full memoir gives a much deeper and more exhaustive look at her past and provides so much more context to the victim impact statement. Sexual assault is a topic so distant from my personal life, that I cannot pretend to understand, and thus I cannot say I empathize since I cannot possibly, though I can act as a keen observer of history. I imagine living through this time is living through history, just as people in the 50s and 60s might have felt when they witnessed the Civil Rights Movement firsthand, and as such I’m sure the book will have a place as a modern classic.

Taking a broader perspective, the idea of power has profoundly shifted since this case. Law usually dictates the result, so called “justice”, when conflict arises. The same law is a conservative force which often preserves the powerful, but in this case the grassroots outcry of the people upended the force of law, made possible by a farcical sentencing. Liberals will say that this is progress in the making, since the law needs to be regularly renewed to reflect new social attitudes while fixing old and outdated beliefs, and conservatives will argue that some functional, good parts of law can lose their legitimacy and gravity when legal outcomes are subject to overrule from the whims and emotions of vocal masses. The Hegelian pendulum of history swings toward liberalism with a momentum stronger than ever before, as more power is in the hands of select individuals instead of institutions. The Internet in this case lived up to its ideal of democratization: had it not been for Buzzfeed publishing Chanel’s victim impact statement which went viral, this book would probably not have been written. This book is both a testament to the swinging of the pendulum and fuel for its momentum.