The Keepers, Netflix's latest true-crime documentary about the murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik in Baltimore in 1969, is a riveting series about white people who segregate themselves into an all-white world full of guns, mass rape, and murder. Though it's seven hours long, you will only see non-white people in about five minutes of the film. This is a world full of white men torturing, killing, and raping women and children—and one in which race isn't acknowledged at all.

In the first episode, we learn why two retired women in their 60s—Abbie Schaub and Gemma Hoskins—spend every waking moment of their golden years investigating the still-open murder of Sister Cathy, their teacher at Archbishop Keough High School a half-century ago. But the shit really hits the fan in the second episode when we learn that Sister Cathy was likely killed because she was about to blow the lid on all the wicked goings-on at Keough. The school counselor, Joseph Maskell, was not only accused of raping students himself in his office—he allegedly organized the rape of many girls by other priests and police officers across Baltimore as he kept watch. Word got to Sister Cathy about what was happening, and when she vowed to act on it, she wound up dead. The nun's killing sealed the abused girls into a vow of silence for decades.

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But though as many as 100 people eventually came forward about Maskell's alleged abuse, he was never charged with rape; Sister Cathy's murder case, likewise, remains open. In this way, director Ryan White masterfully shows the connections of gendered power at play. Maskell doesn't just represent a sexually predatory Catholic church: he also served as a chaplain for the Maryland State and Baltimore County police as well as for the Maryland and the Air National Guard. If Maskell were to be exposed, they'd be, too—and the combination of his holy cover and their military power protected him.

But White, who co-directed HBO's terrible documentary The Case Against 8 (which purported the misnomer that LGBT rights were only achieved because of enlightened white people), leaves unsaid that these mass rapes happened inside of an all-white world, hermetically trapping white people with each other because of segregation.

Abbie Schaub and Gemma Hoskins in Netflix

I don't know for sure if white people are more likely to rape and murder, but I am certain, as The Keepers inadvertently makes clear, that only white people could get away with such widespread rampant abuse because whiteness controls powerful institutions such as the Catholic church and the police. After Brown v. the Board of Education forced public schools to integrate in 1954, white Christians—even protestants—flocked to Catholic schools like Keough. In seven hours, I never recall seeing a single non-white parent, family member, teacher, nun, priest, or police officer in the world in which Sister Cathy lived and was killed.

The Keepers inadvertently makes it clear that only white people could get away with such widespread rampant abuse because whiteness controls powerful institutions such as the Catholic church and the police.

A white priest makes threats with guns, a white child plays with a gun while his relatives allegedly move the body of a dead white nun, a white police officer rapes a girl as a white priest keeps watch—and race is never mentioned. If the perpetrators had been black, they would have been pathologized as representative of black depravity by the police, the church, and the press. If these rapes and murders had happened inside a black church—or even a synagogue, a mosque, or an LGBT community center—these crimes would stand as a larger problem within a marginalized community, regarded as archetypical of the group of people at the center of the scandal.

But because they happened among white Christians, they're not.

The Keepers skewers the myth of "stranger danger": the idea that someone lurking out in the big, bad world is intent on harming you and your family. It's very American to imagine the stranger outside is worse than a member of your own family, but it's bullshit: Studies show that only one-hundredth of 1 percent of all missing children are kidnapped by someone they don't know. For the women of The Keepers, the danger comes in the form of their priest, the police, and their own fathers. This is most painfully dramatized when Sister Cathy's sister, Marilyn Cesnik Radakovich, says that their father chastised the nun when she was attempting to leave the convent, suggesting that she wasn't ready for the dangerous outside world beyond its confines.

Since at least 1915's Birth of a Nation, American media has employed "stranger danger" to create the idea that black men are waiting to rape and kill white women. The Keepers' silence on white pathology is loud, especially considering the rich body of film and TV set in Baltimore which wrestles with race. The Wire explicitly problematized the flat tropes of "bad" black Baltimoreans as all drug dealers and "good" white Baltimore cops. Among John Waters' films, Hairspray deals with Baltimore's racism most directly, and Desperate Living's Mink Stole and Jean Hill become interracial lesbian lovers after killing Stole's violent husband and escaping a cop who tries to rape them. This is Waters brilliantly skewering the wretchedness of straight white husbands and police officers in his native city in a way that The Keepers' director White never pulls off.

Sister Cathy Cesnik and her father, Joseph Netflix

For about five minutes we see black people in the series: in an interview with State Attorney Sharon May, who seems weirdly disinterested in prosecuting any crime; on a plate of Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone With the Wind on the wall of a relative of someone suspected of killing Sister Cathy; and most extensively, in a minute or so scene about Baltimore's 2015 uprisings.

That latter scene is ham-fisted and awkward. In it, Theresa Lancaster—who had been known as "Jane Roe" when she charged Father Maskell in the '90s—talks about finally becoming a lawyer at age 49. "Over the past week," she says over footage from 2015, "there's been protests going on in Baltimore, to get to the bottom of how Freddy Gray was indeed murdered, when he was taken by police. Your neck doesn't break by itself." It was admirable that she connected the violence of Sister Cathy, a white woman, to Gray, a young black man, when the former is imagined as undeserving and the latter as deserving of police execution in much of the American imagination.

But then the footage moves to images of Baltimore burning from decades earlier. "I've lived in Baltimore all of my life," Lancaster says. "I remember the riot of 1968." She doesn't say that the '68 riots were a reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, and she leaves unsaid that the riots were due to the kind of segregation which made Keough all-white—and which facilitated the white control of her school and the police.

Father Joseph Maskell Netflix

This unbridled white power let those men hold hostage so many women's pain for decades. And yet, even as systemically pervasive as the rape of Keough's girls was—and even though the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements have done so much to show how police themselves are the problem—Lancaster made sure to qualify that "a lot of people in the police department are good and they're laying their lives on the line, and I thank them for that."

The Keepers does present one male sexual victim of Father Maskell. Charles Franz is not just an outlier in his gender, but also in that he is the only victim we meet whose parents avenged what happened to him as a child: He tells his mother, she tells the church, and Maskell is transferred. We never hear about a girl telling her father about Maskell, however—they are silenced for decades. This speaks volumes about our society's proclivity to listen to and protect boys more than we do girls, and it's key to understanding that the girls of Keough—and Sister Cathy herself—had to suffer without justice because of misogyny within their own families which maybe rendered them less credible than if they had been boys.

While The Keepers doesn't confront race, it does, in quite a genius fashion, illuminate a paradoxical tension within American misogyny about women. American patriarchy hates women, but it likes to use white women to maintain its power. America embraces the ideal of a chaste, desexualized, pious white woman like Sister Cathy as the perfect victim; she is such a pure idea that we never see her dead body (unlike how we routinely see beaten and killed black bodies on TV, or fictional young women with promiscuous pasts).

Sister Cathy was a hinge between a world where white men have an impulse to "protect" some like her and a world where they have a murderous rage against a woman who is willing to expose them. She paid with her life for straddling this paradox. The Keepers is explicitly aware of tackling the deadly ways patriarchy and misogyny are manifested in Baltimore's Archdiocese and by its police. But it isn't self-aware at all of how whiteness is at play. This omission to see race reveals something insightful not just about the wicked ways of white segregationists left to their own devices—but of white power's ability to conceal.

Steven Thrasher Steven W.

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