Kobe Bryant was a hero. But, to a lot of people, he was also a rapist.

What's the right way to reckon with Kobe's legacy? Despite his accomplishments on the basketball court and off the court, he was still accused of rape. I have seen a lot of people question whether we can still mourn Kobe and his legacy while paying respect to his accuser.

I personally took affront at people who nonchalantly call Kobe a rapist. That was my gut reaction -- despite the accusation, Kobe was not convicted. He did a lot more good for the world and so many children than he did harm. His accolades, from philanthropic to athletic feats, made him still a hero, even though he was flawed. His contributions to women's sports and his support for his daughter Gianna's basketball future were unwavering.

He and his daughter had just died in a plane crash. It seemed incredibly insensitive, to me, that people would insult Kobe's legacy just hours after his death.

Now, however, it might be time to start talking about it. Kobe Bryant was accused of rape in 2003. He had the luxury of society looking the other way on male transgressions and acts of violence against women, especially high-profile men like Kobe. If he was accused in 2017 or the past three years, Kobe's fate in the arena of public opinion would likely have been drastically different.

Kobe was accused of violently raping a 19-year old woman in Colorado in 2003. Kobe invited her into his room, and the two started kissing. Afterwards, what happened in Kobe's eyes was consensual sex. What happened in the woman's eyes was that Kobe raped her. The woman had a cruise on her neck and tears in her vaginal wall during a hospital examination. Both her underwear and Kobe's shirt were bloody. Kobe's lawyer, Pamela Mackey, said the accuser's name multiple times in a hearing even though the police emphasized keeping her name confidential. She presented evidence of the accuser's use of anti-psychotic medications as proof of her inability to accurately remember what happened.

The accuser refused to testify and the prosecution dropped the case. Kobe issued a public apology that even though he believed the experience to be consensual, he could understand how the woman felt like she did not consent.

Again, if the trial and the case happened today, people would likely have had a very different perception of Kobe. But I can't see him differently than I already do, as a hero, and as no saint myself to judge him for accusations that were never proven in a criminal court.

In my classroom of inner-city kids in Baltimore, I can't count to you how many times a day kids will roll up a ball of paper and shout "Kobe!" as they roll up their paper and shoot it into a trash can. Kobe is such a legendary figure that he has been transfigured into a beacon of hope, especially for kids of color that grew up idolizing his game and his legacy.

I was inspired to write this article after reading ZUVA's article, "When Discussing Black Role Models, You Can't Neglect Mentioning Race". ZUVA talks about that, even though she didn't follow basketball and even though she wasn't American, Kobe was still an icon of hope for the Black community. ZUVA discussed frustration that white feminists were calling black women "rape apologists" for mourning Kobe's death.

For ZUVA, a big portion of the rush to judgment for Kobe was the role of race. But the fact remains that Kobe was one of the only men in the limelight to apologize for his actions out of his own judgment. Kobe, throughout the rest of his career, continued to grow and learn from all his mistakes, and started working with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation after using "gay" as an insult.

"In a world where Black men are seen as one dimensional and white men are seen as redeemable works in progress, it is clear why so many people have forgotten to take account his growth," ZUVA says in her closing paragraph.

And I wholeheartedly agree with ZUVA. We are in a world that, yes, sexual assault has not been taken seriously enough. But throughout our nation's history and even in the public world of limelight that Kobe occupied, Black men and boys have not usually been given the benefit of the doubt when accused of violent acts of assault. We can look to modern times to see the atrocity of Emmett Till's murder after allegedly flirting with a white woman. We can look to the five Latino and Black boys wrongfully accused of brutally beating and raping a white jogger. It is a history that goes on long past the Civil Rights movement and goes back to the earliest days of our nation's existence. Fears of miscegenation led to Jim Crow laws that perpetuated our long-standing history of segregation.

Again, this article isn't to say that rape isn't a serious crime and something we haven't been taking seriously enough. But the long-standing history, dating back to slavery, of Black men being wrongfully accused of raping white women gives us cause for pause.

That is, perhaps, why we struggled so much reckoning with the legacy of R. Kelly. "Surviving R. Kelly" was a Lifetime documentary about a public that knew about R. Kelly's character and 25-year history of sexual assault allegations, most of which were against minors, and a public that did nothing about it. Jelani Cobb puts it best in a January 2019 article in The New Yorker:

There's a gulf between the accusations directed at Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and Les Moonves—wealthy white men whose alleged excesses were understood as a perquisite of their status—and those directed at Bill Cosby and R. Kelly, black men for whom success represented some broader communal hope that long odds in life could be surmounted. Cosby and Kelly know this, which is part of the reason that they were so effective at manipulating public sentiment around their various accusations.

We can remember Clarence Thomas referring to sexual assault allegations against him by Anita Hill as a "high-tech lynching".

Of course, Kobe was not R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, or Clarence Thomas. His sins, no matter how bad they may have been, will never rise to the level of R. Kelly or Bill Cosby. Kobe was not Clarence Thomas either. Nor was he Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, or Les Moonves. Kobe was accused by a white women, while Clarence Thomas and R. Kelly were accused of victimizing other black women.

Kobe is different from all these men in that he publicly apologized, when it seems like the standard operating procedure for a man of fame and power is to unequivocally deny allegations, much like the names listed above or even more high-profile political figures like Brett Kavanaugh or Donald Trump.

What matters is that race complicated matters of the #MeToo movement. White America has plenty of heroes and plenty of representation to take up the mantle -- and perhaps that's a reason why white feminists can be so quick to replace the head of the snake of their most respected beacons of hope. These men are replaceable because there are plenty of them and plenty of exposure to them in our popular culture.

I am not Black, so I will not speak for Black America. But as an Asian-American, I can tell you first-hand that Asian representations in media are very, very important. If a scandal befell popular representations in TV and film like Jet Li, Jackie Chan, or Donnie Yen, who else would we have?

At some level, the rush to judgment of the #MeToo movement is a luxury when we consider the complexities of race. But perhaps we minorities cannot give up their own because we have so much to lose. We give the benefit of the doubt of our Black, Latino, Asian, or Native American beacons of hope and role models because we have to. Until we see overwhelming and "beyond a reasonable doubt" level evidence, we'll always have to move on and forgive, because people of color in America have always known what it's like to be judged one-dimensionally on your appearance or one thing you do.

And until we see the racial power dynamic of the country swing, the conversation around men of color and the experiences of survivors and women of color will continue to be marginalized.