In our society we recognize different kinds of violence. We understand, for instance, that lynching enjoys a particular place in American history. We generally grant that Emmett Till was not merely murdered, but that he was murdered in a fashion that places his death in a specifically heinous tradition in our history. And thus we understand that what happened to Till, or what James Byrd, or what happened to Sam Hose is not the same thing as what happened to Tupac Shakur or Sam Cooke. This does not mean that what happened to Shakur or Cooke was good. It means that it wasn't a lynching.

In the history of humanity, spouse-beating is a particularly odious tradition—one often employed by men looking to exert power over women. Just as lynching in America is not a phenomenon wholly confined to black people, spouse-beatings are not wholly confined to women. But in our actual history, women have largely been on the receiving end of spouse-beating. We have generally recognized this in our saner moments. There is a reason why we call it the "Violence Against Women Act" and not the "Brawling With Families Act." That is because we recognize that violence against women is an insidious, and sometimes lethal, tradition that deserves a special place in our customs and laws.

This is the tradition with which Ray Rice will be permanently affiliated. Hope Solo is affiliated with a different tradition—misdemeanor assault. If she is guilty she should be punished. And perhaps we do need to have a conversation about punishing athletes for assaulting people. But we don't need Ray Rice to make that case. And we should not pretend that if Ray Rice were accused of assaulting his younger brother and his 17-year old nephew, we would be having this conversation.

Hope Solo only becomes Ray Rice through the annihilation of inconvenient history—through some forgery that implies that there is no tradition of men controlling women through violence. We are familiar with other such forgeries. It is how a conversation about the racism of Richie Incognito becomes a conversation about banning black people from using the word "nigger." Or how the destruction of Mike Brown's body becomes a debate about "black-on-black crime." Or how Ray Rice knocking his wife unconscious morphs into, "Yes, but women do it too." Indeed they do—but neither with the consistency, nor urgency, nor lethality of men.