Green Glove Rapist

Imbued with both tongue-in-cheek humor and biting criticism, Robert Colescott’s Green Glove Rapist depicts an imagined scene of a sting operation. A scantily-clad vixen, “the police decoy,” feigns sleep with her window wide open, luring the criminal into the trap set by the hiding policeman. The scene reflects a real case in the mid-1940s, when an allegedly black serial rapist wearing green gloves was ravaging the city of San Francisco.  The media launched a full anti-black campaign around the situation, at the height of which cops patrolled demographically black areas in search of the perpetrator. After weeks of terrorizing the community and in an almost comic turn of events, the culprit turned out to be a white man. Colescott grew up in the Bay Area and would have been in his early 20s at the time of the case. In Green Glove Rapist, Colescott depicts the scene as the media and public saw it, rather than portraying the actual white culprit. In so doing, Colescott underscores the problematic association between crime and the black community in America.  As Colescott quipped, “to make a statement about white perceptions of black people by redoing a stereotype, who ever thought such a thing could happen?” (Colescott quoted in Holland Cotter, "Unrepentant Offender of Almost Everyone," New York Times, 1997, H35). Colescott’s paintings illuminate the stereotypical values associated with race through his unique brand of humor, sparking conversations about race and identity that remain prescient and necessary in our current world.