Black men were not portrayed as sexual predators who would prey upon white women during the days of slavery, however:
***** During slavery the dominant caricatures of Blacks -- Mammy, Coon, Tom, and picaninny4 -- portrayed them as childlike, ignorant, docile, groveling, and, in general, harmless. These portrayals were pragmatic and instrumental. Proponents of slavery created and promoted Black images that justified slavery and soothed White consciences. If slaves were childlike, for example, then a paternalistic institution where masters acted as quasi-parents to their slaves was humane, even morally right. More importantly, slaves were rarely depicted as brutes because that portrayal might have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
During the Radical Reconstruction period (1867-1877), many White writers argued that without slavery -- which supposedly suppressed their animalistic tendencies -- Blacks were reverting to criminal savagery. The belief that the newly-emancipated Blacks were a "black peril" continued into the early 1900s. Writers like the novelist Thomas Nelson Page lamented that the slavery-era "good old darkies" had been replaced by the "new issue" (Blacks born after slavery) whom he described as "lazy, thriftless, intemperate, insolent, dishonest, and without the most rudimentary elements of morality."5 Page, who helped popularize the images of cheerful and devoted Mammies and Sambos in his early books, became one of the first writers to introduce a literary Black brute. In 1898 he published Red Rock, a Reconstruction novel, with the heinous figure of Moses, a loathsome and sinister Black politician. Moses tried to rape a White woman: "He gave a snarl of rage and sprang at her like a wild beast."6 He was later lynched for "a terrible crime."
The "terrible crime" most often mentioned in connection with the Black brute was rape, more specifically, the rape of a White woman. At the beginning of the twentieth century, much of the virulent, anti-Black propaganda that found its way into scientific journals, local newspapers, and best-selling novels focused on the stereotype of the Black rapist. The claim that Black brutes were, in epidemic numbers, raping White women became the public rationalization for the lynching of Blacks. <http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/brute/> *****
Two observations:
(1) Slavery required racism but didn't require the idea of sexually rapacious and predatory black men -- in fact, the ideology of slavery demanded an opposite image.
(2) The myth of the black rapist of white womanhood emerged specifically in reaction against the Radical Reconstruction, to control emancipated blacks who began to make organized political self-assertions and gain a modicum of political and economic powers.
At 10:56 PM -0500 3/31/03, Michael Pollak wrote:
>After all is said and done, racial mythology is about who slept with
>who to make you who you are. It's the prime defining line to be
>defended if you want to defend this mythical thing called a race.
>And sexual rapacity is just the will to violate raised to a higher
>pitch, justifying greater ferocity to defend the line. (Because if
>"they" aren't interested in crossing it, "we" don't have to worry
>about defending it.)
Sleeping with the racially oppressed isn't in itself a problem. It was common for slave masters to make sexual conquests of enslaved women, which wasn't a problem as children born to slave women were to inherit their mothers' status -- including racial designation -- rather than their fathers'. The only problem would be children born of unions between white women of the planter class and black men, which wasn't likely to happen, as women of the planter class weren't economically independent of men.
Going beyond racism in the United States, gaining a comparative historical perspective, Anthony Marx offers an intriguing hypothesis about race-making and state-making:
***** Race-Making and the Nation-State Anthony W. Marx World Politics, Vol. 48, No. 2. (Jan., 1996), pp. 180-208.
Abstract
Why was official racial domination enforced in South Africa and the United States, while nothing comparable to apartheid or Jim Crow was constructed in Brazil? Slavery and colonialism established the pattern of early discrimination in all three cases, and yet the postabolition racial orders diverged. Miscegenation influenced later outcomes, as did economic competition, but neither was decisive. Interpretations of these historical and economic factors were shaped by later developments. This article argues that postabolition racial orders were significantly shaped by the processes of nation-state building in each context. In South Africa and the United States ethnic or regional "intrawhite" conflict impeding nation-state consolidation was contained by racial domination. Whites were unified by excluding blacks, in an ongoing dynamic that took different forms. Continued competition and tensions between the American North and South or South Africa's English and Afrikaners were repeatedly resolved or diminished through further entrenchment of Jim Crow or apartheid. With no comparable conflict requiring reconciliation in Brazil, no official racial domination was constructed, although discrimination continued. The dynamics of nation-state building are then reviewed to explain variations in black mobilization and the end of apartheid and Jim Crow. *****
I don't know if Anthony Marx's hypothesis is correct, but it suggests more promising research angles than any "psycho-sexual" paradigm: degrees of intra-elite conflicts, degrees of cross-class political identification between elites and subalterns in the racially dominant group, degrees of political cohesion among the racially oppressed, levels of class struggles, processes of nation-state formations, etc.
Remember that my interest is in explaining historical changes and synchronic differences. "Psycho-sexual explanations" can't explain either. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>