Nate Parker

Nate Parker Talks Rape Allegation and Male Privilege in New Interview

The director of Birth of a Nation apologized for his past actions and discussed how he's changed.
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By Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic/Getty Images.

Nate Parker, the director of Sundance smashBirth of a Nation has been largely silent in the last several weeks as a decades-old rape case from his time as a student at Penn State roiled the film’s fall release. After giving interviews to the trade press—and posting on Facebook about the incident after new reporting found that the alleged victim in the case committed suicide in 2012—Parker has remained publicly silent.

That changed Friday after a screening of the film in Los Angeles, when the actor and director gave a wide-ranging interview to Ebony.com, in which he discussed the case and controversy that has surrounded him over the last few weeks.

“To be honest,” he said at a screening of his film at the Merge Summit, “my privilege as a male, I never thought about it. I’m walking around daring someone to say something or do something that I define is racist or holding us back, but never really thinking about male culture and the destructive effect it’s having on our community.”

The incident has been so much in the news that it’s impossible to talk about Birth of a Nation, once a foregone Oscar contender, without also addressing Parker’s past. When the allegations first resurfaced, Parker, who was acquitted in the case in 2001, had described the incident as “very painful” for him, before he learned that his accuser had committed suicide. In the new interview with Ebony, Parker seemed still somewhat cagey about the incident itself, but revisited his initial response to the latest round of reports: ”. . .I wasn’t being contrite. Maybe I was being even arrogant. And learning about her passing shook me, it really did. It really shook me.”

“All I can do is seek the information that’ll make me stronger, that’ll help me overcome my toxic masculinity, my male privilege, because that’s something you never think about,” he said elsewhere. “You don’t think about other people. It’s the same thing with white supremacy. Trying to convince someone that they are a racist or they have white privilege–if it’s in the air they breathe and the culture supports them, sometimes they never have to think about it at all. I recognize as a man there’s a lot of things that I don’t have to think about. But I’m thinking about them now... I’m trying to transform behaviors and ideas that have never been challenged in certain ways in my life. I’m not the kid that I was at 19.”

Read the whole of Parker’s interview here.