[WHITE] middle-class women share qualities with the "good victim" or the "non-victim," according to Madriz (1997). They have more access to an education, and they are more likely to be considered feminine (according to dominant media images). Their cultural capital serves to exonerate them from the harsh judgments of public consent about (rape) victims. Ideologies of crime offer fictitious and dichotomous categories of the "deserving victim" and the "innocent victim," which are, in turn, reified by mainstream media depictions of who "real" victims are: white, virtuous women. Since many white middle-class women often identify with these images, as opposed to that of a poor, woman of color, they are encouraged to feel more vulnerable since they are the ones with (supposedly) more to lose from a violent crime. For example, in Canyon Gorge, almost all rape/sexual abuse stories that get media attention involve white women/girls. The distance between self and victim becomes negligible as many white middle-class women, already living in a culture of fear, identify with those victims. For example, Patty, a 24-year-old graduate student, told me that the catalyst for her taking the course was because of a widely publicized "gang rape" of a young white woman by an "Asian gang." This event, occurring in August 1999, entailed a female college student walking alone at approximately 3 o'clock in the morning when a van with six Hmong men abducted her (later identified as belonging to the "Asian crips" gang from a local suburb). They held her for two hours and raped her repeatedly. She was thrown out of the car on a remote canyon road where she made her way to a nearby home and was able to provide sketches to the police, who were then able to find the rapists and arrest all but one (he committed suicide before he could be apprehended). Patty said, "I was like, Jesus, that could be me. This has been happening more in my safe little world that I live in, and it's not a safe little world anymore." When sociologists (and non-sociologists as well) speak of race, such as a "racial analysis" or a paper on "race relations," they have historically referred to people of Other-than-white race/ethnicity. Sociologists also tend to qualify "race" as a social construction, one that rescues us from essentializing and reproducing eugenicist discourses. Though "white" as a "race" is just as much a social construct as "Black" or "Asian," it is typically left untouched by "racial analyses." As Ware (1992) argues, there is a general failure of the dominant to reflect on their dominance. Additionally, the reflection sometimes manifests as qualifying statements in footnotes about "different" experiences of "different" women (Harris 1997). However, as my analysis demonstrates, what is left unsaid is often more important than all the politically correct two-stepping we do as social scientists.