The racial dimensions of sexual assault cases involving the likes of Kobe Bryant and O.J. Simpson are no secret. But there’s a world of difference when it comes to trying a powerful, privileged black man in a relatively diverse area versus trying a lower-middle-class black male in a predominately white locale such as Rome, Georgia.

Eighteen-year-old Marcus Dixon is learning this the hard way. Dixon had a 3.96 grade-point average, a football scholarship to Vanderbilt University, and the adoration of many teachers and students at Pepperell High School, but he is also black. And he slept with a fellow student, who was just shy of her sixteenth birthday—and white.

While Dixon has acknowledged that he should’ve simply been punished for statutory rape, he never anticipated receiving ten years in prison for having what he claims was consensual sex with a classmate. But upon taking the witness stand, the young woman, who feared being seen with Dixon because her ‘daddy was a racist and . . . would kill both of us if he knew she was with a black man,’ claimed that she had been raped by Dixon. Prosecutors corroborated the young woman’s characterization of Dixon, referring to him as a ‘sexual predator,’ thereby bolstering a stereotype that black males have struggled to overcome for centuries.

Although a jury acquitted Dixon of rape, sexual battery, aggravated assault, and false imprisonment charges, they found him guilty of statutory rape, a misdemeanor. But due to injuries to the girl’s body, which were never proven to have been caused by foul play, Dixon was also charged with aggravated child molestation. The result, thanks to Georgia’s sentencing laws, was the minimum sentence of ten years in prison.

Many people are now insisting that the trial would have had a very different outcome—and that the prosecution would have had a very different strategy—if Dixon had been white and the young woman had been black. This, of course, is something we can never know for certain.

Regardless of whether Dixon is guilty of child molestation or rape, the characterization of this case by both the prosecution, defense, and the people of Rome, Georgia, suggests that race continues to play a paramount role in the U.S. justice system and that racial stereotypes continue to pervade much of our society. The question now is: Can we find a way to discuss and try alleged crimes such as this one without the issue of race, rather than hard facts, being a—if not the—deciding factor? And if so, how can we go about doing so?

Laura Nathan-Garner