In the mind of the white woman, the Negro is a superior sexual animal. It matters little whether he actually is or not; she believes it because her culture taught her to believe it. She also fears the Negro sexually because her culture instructed her to fear him.
Unable to experience the Negro in fact, the Negro in fantasy becomes the center of the white woman's sexual life -- she elevates him to the status of a god-phallus; she worships, fears, desires, and hates him. Oh how she hates him! Everywhere he is in her midst, and she can neither embrace nor destroy him. Deep in her heart she knows that she does not need to be protected from him. It is the society from which she needs protection, especially if she acknowledges her interest in a Negro. Yet, since she cannot touch him, she desires to be "protected" from him, desires that the Negro touch her, indeed "rape" her.
quoting John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town
Explaining why white men (and women) categorically deny even the possibility of attraction between Negro men and white females in the South, Dollard states that
'white men are unconsciously aware of the attraction but dare not call up the intolerable idea . . . consciously the whole matter is charged off to the sexual aggressiveness of Negro men, and in this way the complicity of the white woman is avoided. [ quoting Dollard page 179 ]
Neither the racist system in the South nor the white man's conscience can bear the open knowledge of a Negro and a white woman being intimate . . . . such an occasion represent a blatant challenge to the most neurotic facet of the white man's ego.
Hernton quotes Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice
Suppose a white woman is fascinated by the taboo against the Negro male. She is unlikely to admit it, even to herself, that she finds his color attractive . . . she 'projects' the feelings . . . and imagines that the Negro is the aggressor . . . she develops an anxiety and hostility respecting the whole Negro race. . .
"reckless eyeballing"
By punishing the Negro for white's own lusts and paranoia, "the Negro can, and often does, become the scapegoat for many anxieties that have little or nothing whatever to do with sex." See more recent cases.
In the Old South, "where white women are largely denied the means and opportunities of economic, political, and social advancement; where their lives are drugged with the boredom of false chivalry and uneventful days and nights, .... [T] he most exciting thing that could happen to many of them would be to experience an 'attack' by a Negro. It is, I submit, a very 'attractive' thing for the white woman in the South to have a man punished, to have him castrated or electrocuted not for trying to rob, murder, or injure her, but for trying to make love to her! I submit that almost every southern white woman has experienced, at one time or another, an intense desire to make love with a black man."
Reasons white women may have for pursuing black men
honest curiosity, infatuation, or simply fascinated by his 'black mystique' (his mystery lends a measure of intrigue to his person), she may find the Negro 'exciting' due to his being seen as 'exotic.' Also, there is in all of us, especially women, a desire for new experience that has the persistence of an inborn instinct. If this is compounded by an unhappy current relationship, say with her white husband, the Negro may seem all the more appealing by contrast.
Then there is the altruistic 'compassion' for underdog motivation. Especially (no doubt) for women from socalled liberal and/or (?) evangelical backgrounds. Also, Hernton mentions in particular Jews (and other ethnic sympathizers)
Racism penetrates every layer and fiber of American culture.
The apparent sexual effects of the Negro upon white women of the North are in many ways similar to those in the South. .... I have stated that whites conceive of the Negro male predominantly in genital terms -- that is, as a 'bull' or as some kind of 'walking phallus.'
revulsion and desire combine themselves in the white woman's psyche .....
So that many white women who have intercourse with a Negro feel as if they have been 'raped.' The Negro may be ever so gentle and kind; the woman nevertheless feels that he has 'ravished' her. Indeed, such women desire to be 'ravished,' and many of them tell their black lovers they can never 'sleep with a white man again.'
There are white women who constantly seek out black men to the exclusion of white ones because their psycho-sexual make-up, through repeated disappointing experiences with white men, has become so deranged that they can experience sexual satisfaction only with Negro men. Many of these women recognize their condition and sadly resign themselves to it. At an interracial party, one white woman remarked pitifully to another: "We both know why we are here."
'black' seems to be the summit of masculinity -- it takes blackness to bring out the 'femininity' in otherwise frigid or near-frigid white women.
Hernton discusses the "guilt" which drives white women to seek "atonement" through some form of punishment. Sometimes their twisted psyche sees the Negro lover as a vehicle to effect expiation, and the afflicted white woman cries out to be hurt, punished, beaten, raped. Merely to be known as a Negro's women will earn her the rejection and scorn of many in the white community. To quote:
She may also desire a more direct, carnal form of punishment from the hands of her black lover. Not only may she want the black man to be brutal in the act of intercourse, she may deliberately or unconsciously cultivate sadistic tendencies in him. "My woman likes for me to beat her," lamented a baffled Negro. "She cries and carries on, but never fails to provoke me until I have beaten her -- then she's sweet as a lamb."
Some such women reject their white husbands for being a "sissy" -- for being "too meek and ingratiating."
Certainly, strict taboos against race mixing are enforced and maintained; but the enforcement is one way. The Negro is segregated in theory and in fact; the white man is segregated only in theory. This type of unequal relationship has an historical basis, stretching back to slavery.
During the era of slavery, white women were inaccessible to black men. On the other hand, all black women were accessible to white men. During this period the white man had as much sex with the black women of his plantation as he did with his wife. Sometimes more. Lillian Smith, a white woman who was brought up in the South and is thoroughly familiar with its history, tradition, and secrets, writes:
In the white southern woman's dictionary, Discrimination could be defined as a painful way of life which too often left an empty place in her bed and an ache in the heart. [ Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream 1963, p 125 ]
Because his concept of the sex act made him think of it as something dirty, sinful, and savage, the white Southerner found it difficult to relate to his own woman. He was inhibited by the Calvinist interpretation of sex as befouling the dignity of man. He therefore cringed from his manly duties towards his wife, and if he did make love to her, the act was marred by his guilt and shame. . . . . [ Out of all this came ] the myth of 'white womanhood.'
'Mongrelization' is the repeated cry of southern racists against extending human rights to Negroes. Yet, it is obvious that if the races have been or are being 'mongrelized,' the white man is basically responsible, not the Negro. Especially is this true in the South, specifically in the Deep South (the 'Black Belt.')
Early during the period of slavery, light-skinned Negroes began to appear in the backyards of the great plantation houses of the South. As more and more of these 'mulatto' children began to run around in the backyards, guilt feelings fell upon the white man's conscience. But the white man continued to visit, with increasing frequency, the black cabins. He stayed away more and more from the big house. Then there arose in him the suspicion of his wife left alone back there in the big house. The white man began to suspect his wife of doing exactly what he was doing. Of course, his suspicion was groundless, it was virtually impossible for white women to 'slip around' with Negro men during slavery. But somehow, someway, the white man had to get rid of his feelings of guilt. In jealous panic he projected his own transgression onto his women and onto the Negro male. A guilt so terrible seized the white man that it is as insane now as it was then -- devolutionary guilt.
History teaches that women are always included among the spoils of conquest and domination. Everywhere, when the invading tribe or nation conquers another people, the dominating group invariably takes free liberties with females of the subjugated group. In the case of the white racists and the American Negro, there is something much deeper than mere conquest and subjugation. Sexual paranoia is an inextricable ingredient in that psychiatric terror known as racism. And this fear, this guilt and terror, in various forms, is directed towards and acted out against both sexes of the Negro population.
Most white people in America project their own inner anxieties onto the Negro to such an extent that they, especially Southerners, imagine black men have large grotesque genitals that stand in perpetual erection. [ p 113 ]
To most white people, the Negro exhumes sexuality. The racist is so full of fear, so twisted sexually, that even a young boy like Emmett Till was murdered and mutilated for speaking to a white woman in a department store.
[ p 114]
Page 115 as follows:
Why, after all, is the white man in the South so preoccupied with the Negro's penis, and with Negroes 'raping' white women! It is nothing to catch white men (and white women, too, of course) in the South secretly eying the front of Negroes' pants. On the streets, in department stores, in buses and other public places, it is incredible to suddenly realize how thoroughly and constantly aware whites are of the black man's sexual existence -- an awareness, affirmed and denied, that dominates and sexualizes the entire range of race relations in the South and in the nation. If the white man is so insistent that, at the twitch of a skirt even, the Negro will be after white women, then the white man must, undoubtedly, yearn deep in the shadows of his soul for the Negro and the white woman to be intimate. There is no other explanation.
Page 173-174,
Calvin Hernton takes up the issue that Negroes are reputed to have larger cocks than whites, and are said to be generally more muscular, more virile, more potent sexually. White racists use these supposed 'racial traits' of the Negro to insinuate that the Negro is more savage than whites, closer to the jungle, to apes and gorillas.
But, Hernton points out, borrowing from Gordon Allport, it is not the actual size of the Negro's cock they are describing; it is the psychological size.
Hernton adds, but suppose it were true or only half true that the black man's cock was bigger, it hardly proves their superior animality. After all, white men frequently have far more body hair, which is itself an 'animal-like' characteristic. Is this a sign of the white man's inherent 'savagery,' his evolutionary kinship to the anthropoid ape?
Page 173 "It is not race that makes a white man tremble on seeing a Negro man with a white woman; it is racism.
In the South the caste system (segregation, discrimination, interracial-marriage prohibitions, etc.) serves to maintain and promote, among other things, the sexual exploitation of Negro women by white men. Because of the law against intermarriage, southern white men are at liberty to impregnate Negro women without the women having any legal recourse for the protection of their illicit offspring or themselves. White women who know (or suspect) that their husbands are having relations with Negro females are virtually helpless also. In the crossfire of this situation stands the Negro male -- he can be lynched for merely looking at a white woman in some places in the South. He can also be falsely accused and jailed, if not lynched, if a white woman desires to have relations with him and he refuses to comply.
Current 'hybrid' population of Negroes in America, according to Hernton, eighty percent (have some white blood in their veins).
whiteman's biggest fear
Calvin C. Hernton -- Coming Together: Black Power, White Hatred, and Sexual Hang-ups
Black women ..... "often put the burden of and the blame for white oppression on the backs of their own black men: hence the constant nagging of black males by their wives and sweethearts that they are shiftless good-for-nothings.
The white man seems to be by nature less sexually aggressive than the black man ......
A group of white girls were marvelling over the differences in sexual aggrssiveness between the white boys and the black boys. One white girl was in absolute ecstasy over the fact that a black boy had just walked up to her and told her that he would like to date her and eventually make love to her. "Why, no white boy would've ever done that!" she exclaimed. She'd been dating the black boy ever since. [ Page 49 ]
What is so uncanny about the historical situation of black men and women in the racist society of America, is that one black man, one single black male personage, has been granted a relatively free range to get all of the sexual goodies that he could possibly obtain from black women, amd from white ones as well. I am talking about the Black Preacher. He has been allowed to be as sexual as any man, black or white, could ever wish to be, in as well as out of the pulpit. The common songs, myths, jokes and ditties about the sexual activity of the black preacher are legend. Black women worship and love him; they will give him not only their good loving but their hard-earned money, even the money that their husbands and boyfriends have slaved long hours to earn. The black preacher has eaten well when other black people have been starving (because they gave him their money and/or their fried chicken and grits and pork chops, and let their own children go hungry). Black men tell jokes and sing ditties, fearfully yet cheerfully, about the preacher having it off with their wives, daughters and sweethearts while the men themselves were toiling in the fields and factories and ditches, deprived of dignity and bereft of love -- because not only have black women historically worshiped and loved the preacher but the men too have worshiped and identified with his unfettered sexuality and his awe-inspiring flamboyance. It mattered not if the black preacher was queer or homosexual or what have you, he was sexy and he got plenty of good black loving, escaping the wrath of both white and black desexing forces that no other black man, be he doctor, lawyer, or undertaker, was spared. Think of what you know about any black preacher -- see, it's true, isn't it?
But to me the black preacher is no enigma. Even when he did not want love, or was impotent or desexed (as were many of the middle-class educated ones in high-class imitation white churches, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Catholic, etc), black women nevertheless flung themselves before the preacher with sweet offerings of their bodies and souls.
The black preacher originated during slavery. He was, and perhaps still is, an historical necessity, a shaman, a witch doctor, a memory in the black emotionality of the African Heritage -- a leader, a father figure, a healer, a psychopath, a strong, ruthless but tender catharsis -- the black preacher was, in the flesh, and symbolized, in the spirit, the Great Black Patriarch which slavery and later on racism and jimcrow destroyed among black people in America. Ergo, he filled a vacuum -- he fulfilled a social function, a political function, and a sexual need, that no other black man was permitted to act out. He was the last, or is the last, of the Great Black Paters.
The church was the Home. The Tribe, the Community. Everything genuinely sexual that remained and still remains in the true folkness of black people, emanated from the black church. The blues songs, the jazz music, the great sexuous rhythm and blues music and dancing, the holy rollies, the bigt lusty spirituals that Mahalia sings, the evil nitty-gritty sex-saturated black songs that Nina Simone sings, what Archie Shepp blows on his saxaphone, all the old and new dances ("doing the grind," "the belly rub"), the shouting orgies, the traditional house parties, rent parties, stealing away from white folks, the arts, all the way from the Baptists, the Methodists, Holy Rollers, Sanctified and Holy (excluding those Negro Bourgeoisie White Missionary influenced ones I've mentioned) -- everything sensual, everything truly sexual: all harp back to the black church. Name me any black artist, writer, scholar of merit, poet, singer, performer, anybody, and I'll tell you whence the ultimate source of his labor comes.
The preacher was the black phallic-vaginal God himself. The black church provided outlet for the welled-up political, social and otherwise sexual frustration, agony and suffering, all at once in great bursts, in great sexual orgies guised in the form of religious worship. The last survival of the African sexual heritage of black people in America.
Black men and white women are not in the least responsible for the utter pollution of the African race in America. It has been white men, particularly white racists, mating with black women, often by force or coercion, who have diluted the genetic homogeneity of black people.
Yet .....
Often I hear blacks of all shades and of all degrees of Black Consciousness admonishing other blacks not to "mongrelize" the race by fooling around with whites. The use of the word "mongrelization" gives them away -- for it is a white racist word, invented out of the white racist's guilt for what he had done and was doing, and skillfully projected onto black people to control and hang them up; black people did not invent this word, nor have they committed the deeds for which it stands; the white race is not "mongrelized." Are we then to shoulder the guilt for what white men have done to black people?
The "mongrelization" of the African race in America is nothing in itself to be proud of or to be ashamed of. It is something to be faced and employed constructively in the making of Black Consciousness . To deny, to refuse to know, any aspect of the past, especially when it is in your face every day, is to be secretly haunted and neuroticized by that particular aspect of one's make-up.
… because of white racism instilled in black people, the racism of sex among them inextricably involves sex with white people, especially the white women, in fantasy and in fact.
Deification of human beings and their qualities [as in the mythicizing or re-mythicizing of white women and black men] is a primitive superstition leading to the wish for exorcism by ritualistic sacrifice.
