Commenting on the flap over George W. Bush's visit to Bob JonesUniversity during the 2000 primary election campaign, journalist HendrikHertzberg claimed that even staunch conservatives decried the SouthCarolina college's ban on inter-racial dating as “indefensible.” “This mayseem unremarkable,” he noted, ”until one reflects how far it was frombeing the case a generation or two ago, when miscegenation was racism'strump card and even the most enlightened Americans, black and white,took it for granted that sexual fear was its unkillable heart.” Hertzbergseems unduly optimistic - violence against the bodies of racial “others’continues to splatter across the American landscape, from the RodneyKing beating to the Amadou Diallo shooting. The police rape of AbnerLouima illuminates how power, not sexuality, informs such assaults.