Close observers of the long struggle against white supremacy will find Griffin’s formulation familiar. There is, off the top, a ruthless unacquaintance with the facts. Cosby has been accused of assaulting women, not merely in hotel rooms, but at his home, at a celebrity tennis tournament, backstage at show in Las Vegas, backstage at The Tonight Show, and on the set of the Cosby Show. It is not very hard to know this—two minutes of Googling will suffice.

But the narrative of cunning “bitches” arriving at the hotel room of a married man has a kind of resonance that drugging women on the set of a family-friendly television show does not. Similarly, the narrative of thuggish black boys in hoodies has a kind of resonance that child-murder does not. In fact, there is no real difference in claiming that a woman in a married man’s hotel room forgoes the right to her body, and asserting that a black boy wearing a hoodie forgoes the right to his. Brutality is brutality, and it always rests on a bed of lies.

Too, it rests on animus. One official of the pirate government of Ferguson joked that dogs might qualify for welfare because they are “mixed in color, unemployed, lazy, can’t speak English and have no frigging clue who their Daddies are.” Cosby’s accusers are “bitches.” Last year an incredulous Damon Wayans tried to understand the behavior of some of Cosby’s victims. “Bitch, how many times did it happen?” asked Wayans. “Just listen to what they're saying and some of them really [are] un-rape-able. I just look at them and go, 'You don't want that. Get out of here.’”

Whether for the thrill of domination or the balancing of a municipal budget, animus justifies plunder. The scorned enjoy no rights that the powerful must respect. And like all powerful elements seeking to sanctify their use of violence, these apologists employ history selectively.“How big is his penis that it gives you amnesia for 40 years?” continued Wayans. Of course Cosby has faced many more recent claims—including the 2004 incident for which he was recently arrested, in which civil claims were first filed in 2005.

No matter. The unspoken logic here holds that there has always been some sort of legitimate system for hearing and adjudicating plunder. In the case of rape, no such system existed 40 years ago, 30 years ago or 20 years ago. It’s arguable that it still does not exist today. In much the same way, no such system existed to bring to the victims of the Chicago police officer John Burge until decades after his campaign of torture began. Burge began torturing black Chicagoans in 1972, and was never convicted by the local courts. Reparations were not granted until last year.

Criminals flourish when no credible system exists to adjudicate the claims of their victims. When asked why they did not report the crimes of Daniel Holtzclaw, a police officer charged with targeting and raping poor black women, many of his victims said the same thing: Who would have believed them? Effectively Holtzclaw had found a hole in the law, and he was only convicted after he deviated from his pattern.