RAPE AND RACISM

"No single event ticks off America's political schizophrenia with greater certainty than the case of a black man accused of raping a white woman. Facts are irrelevant to the public imagination. Objectivity is thrown out the window. A maze of angled mirrors buried deep within the individual psyche rises to confront the perceiver and distort the vision. What is the truth? Upon hearing the bare outlines of such a case -- no, upon merely learning the race of accused and victim -- a convulsive reaction sets in. ... Racism and sexism and the fight against both converge at the point of interracial rape, the baffling crossroads of an authentic, peculiarly American dilemma." (p 210)

"In the slaveholding South, revolt and rape by dehumanized black hordes was a classic white male nightmare. The purity of white womanhood, enforced by social mores as compelling as the whip, was as critical a touchstone of white masculinity as the system of slaveholding itself. Aware of his wholesale transgression against the black female slave, which he refused to conceptualize as criminal rape, the slaveholder was eternally vigilant against a reverse of the syndrome." (p 217)

A slaveholder's wife once declared (this is from Brownmiller, p 219): "that she was nothing more than the 'chief slave of the harem' on her husband's plantation. Legal bearer of children, prized decorative ornament, sometime companion, bestowed with the external trappings of privilege but denied real power, the white woman was her husband's choicest piece of property. Valued for her chastity, access to her sexuality was wholly owned by the same white master who could daily violate the sexual integrity of his black females slaves. Chastity of the white woman was a serious matter that the rule of marriage required to ensure legal heirs, just as a corresponding denial of chastity and legal marriage to the black woman gave the slaveholder clear title of ownership of all children born of slaves."

"White men, whether they were slaveholders or not, viewed white women as a private fief of less than equal beings. A white woman could not vote, hold office, or sit on a jury; she could not attain a higher education, and she could not own land, slaves or money in her own right after marriage. The highly vaunted pedestal on which she was placed had a hard-rock base of economic dependence, and the fastest way to get knocked off that pedestal was to show an inclination for sexual freedom. Evidence of a white woman's sexual independence was considered a direct challenge to the white man's inviolable holdings, and when a white woman was discovered to have 'had connection' with a black man in voluntary association, the collective white male mind felt it had sustained a property loss."

Describing the rape complex in the Reconstruction period from the vantage point of 1941, W.J. Cash (a thoughtful white southerner) had written of 'neurotic old maids and wives, hysterical young girls,' borrowing from a latter-day Freudian perspective. From where had the idea sprung? Four years earlier John Dollard, a Yale professor of psychology, had publlished a well-received appraisal of modern life in the South, Caste amd Class in a Southern Town. In it Dollard quoted verbatim the views of Helene Deutsch, which he claimed to find 'illuminating.' Deutsch, he reported, had analyzed several white Southern women in whom she had found 'marked sexual attraction to Negro men and masochistic fantasies connected with this attraction.' Her blanket indictment followed: 'The fact that the white men believe so reaily the hysterical and masochistic fantasies and lies of the white women, who claim they have been assaulted and raped by Negroes, is related to the fact that they (the men) sense the unconscious wishes of the women, the psychic reality of these declarations, and react emotionally to them as if they were real. The social situation permits them to discharge this emotion upon the Negroes.'

And thus we wound up with --- the horrors of the Lynch Era.

Negroes in the traditional lore of this white underground were thought to have tremendous sexual powers (p 157)

Fanon alludes to the pyschological conditions out of which the Black superiority myth arose (white man's feelings of sexual inferiority) p 159

Fanon (p 169) notes the deep rooted connection in the collective mind, that the Negro stands for sex (p 160)

"Negroes symbolize the biological ..... he is hot-blooded ...blood is strong ... he is tough" (167)

Fanon quotes Michel Cournot, Martinique 1948 (p 13-14) "The Black man's sword is a SWORD. When he has thrust it into your wife, she has really felt something. It is a revelation. In the chasm that it has left, your little toy is lost. Pump away until the room is awash with your sweat, you might as well just be singing. This is good-by .... Four Negroes with their cocks exposed would fill a cathedral. They would be unable to leave the building until their erections subsided; and in such close quarters that would not be a simple matter." [cited by Fanon 169]

"For the majority of white men the Negro represents the sexual instinct in its raw state. The Negro is the incarnation of genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions. [From this, the white woman comes to] view the Negro as the keeper of the impalpable gate that opens into the realm of orgies, of bacchanals, of delirious sexual sensations."

Dialog between two of the characters: White woman tells the Negro: "Oh my God, you are so BLESSED!!" (what? compared to someone else maybe?)

The Negro's response: "Hey don't mind me, I can't help it. I'm just a Negro. If I'm endowed, hey, it's a GIFT. You call my masculinity a blessing seems like a curse to me, you know."

Fanon writes: A white woman who has had a Negro lover finds it difficult to return to a white man. Or at least it is so believed, particularly by white men [Fanon, p 171]

Fanon quotes Etiemble:

Racial jealousy produces the crimes of racism: To many white men, the black is simply that marvelous 'sword' which, once it has transfixed their wives, leaves them forever transfigured. [the very hyperbole of it makes it potent]

Fanon mentions that for whites the mere image of the black athlete has become "singularly eroticized." He says: "There is something in the mere idea, one young [white] woman confided to me, that makes the heart skip a beat."

[p 158] Fanon tells of a white prostitute who told him that in her early days the mere thought of going to bed with a Negro brought on an orgasm. She went in search of Negroes and never asked them for money.

"the Negro represents sexual instinct and genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions." How can it be wrong when it feels so right. For the white woman, perhaps especially for the white wife, the Negro, in his terrible potency, is the one who "lights up her life." (if this is so, where is the white man? is it over? is he ended, done as a man? No wonder the white man, in his unredeemed condition, is so racist and chauvinistic, so mean to those around him, such a dominator, a bully.)

The white wife finds the Negro to be "an intensely exciting sex partner because of his forbiddenness and because of the ease with which she can project onto him her own oedipal fantasies." [p 92, Wm H. Grier & Price M. Hobbs]

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Frank Petroni speculates in his dissertation as to the seeming unquenchable infatuation of many white girls. (But what about white wives?) Petroni suggests that white girls may pursue Negroes because they want to spit in the eye of society, or declare their independence, and symbolically get out from under white man's oppressive thumb. "White man's bullying of what he calls HIS woman is really a bullying based on weakness, not strength."

Is there some kind of poetic turnaround going on? All through the first three centuries or so (of American history) there was an underlying theme, everything proceeding against the backdrop of what A.W. Calhoun called, "the Master's right of rape." White man 'owned' body (and soul if he could) of every woman, child, man in his domain. Not all of them abused the almost unlimited power they possessed. But some abused that power brutally. Even his own wife and children were not exempt from the power of this domination, legally, socially, politically. But at least his white wife (whether he loved her or ignored her) had status, and standing. At least she had family and kin who cared how she was treated.

"The Black folk in his domestic household had no protection. "

Yet there was a bitter hypocrisy, a terrible make-believe going on in the minds of the ruling elite. Gunnar Myrdal wrote how "the primary and essential concern of the white man" (and the society he ran, in its official intentions) was to prevent amalgamation. It was an obsession, and a full time preoccupation. Ironically, as Abby Ferber has noted in her discussions of white supremacy, it was a one way street. White man had unlimited access to black females. No such thing the other way around. White woman was chaste, pure, and off-limits to any and all. She alone was required, expected, and forced to remain monogamous in the highest degree. She was the paragon of purity, and all her pampering, all the protection that went into her status, her exalted position on the pedestal, was directed toward the sole aim of her sacred womanhood.

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Grace Halsell explores the attraction between white women and black men. [published 1972] p 109 Halsell interviews a Black woman, Helen Mitchell. Mitchell tells her:

White women today are claiming they dig Black Man, but where were they when the Black Man was being brutalized and lynched? White women say they want to help Black Men, that they feel sorry for them. [But] they can't even help their own [white men]. White women should stick with their white men, and teach them to get rid of some of their frustrations and greed, and to love instead of hate.

Melba Jenkins (she's black) is quoted (p 90)

The white men are afraid that the Black Men are sexually stronger. And I believe they are. And I have had a lot of white girls tell me that in the sex act itself the Black Man stays inside longer. From my own experience I do feel the Black Man is stronger. Rarely will you find a very large sexual organ on a white man

Frantz Fanon (Black Skin White Masks: 1967) quotes Michel Saloman as referring to that "aura of sensuality" that a Negro gives off, and as referring to the "prodigious vitality of the black man." [p 201]

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My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies (1973) Nancy Friday explains that in her estimation, while "most white women haven't [actually had interracial sex with a Negro male,] in their fantasies they do, and everything that worked against it ever happening adds mileage to the fantasy" (p 171). While a number of Friday's white correspondents share fantasies involving Negro males (ibid., 13, 173-75, 295), it is the author herself who explores the matter with the most enthusiasm, noting at one point that

size is the real power of the black-man fantasy .... [The white woman wants] to feel more, to have more novelty and experience under her belt, thanks to the life-enhancing mystical cock and promise of the sexy black man .... In fantasy, the 'big' black man promises to take us to that final exploration of sex, the most absolute orgasmic time it is humanly possible to experience. And then, forever after, at least we'll have known what 'it' is 'all about.' [ibid. 171-72.]

For white man it seems like a brooding torment deep in his bones. He has a gnawing guilt, a "certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation" [Hebrews 10: 27]. He expects wrath, just has he deserves the contempt of his wife. Genet wrote something about the ecstasy of betrayal. Whiteman's salvation must come from choosing to accept responsibility for his crimes against black man, and his crimes against his "own" woman.