Sexuality
Through history to the present day, Black sexuality has invited the gaze, eliciting both violence and wonder. Where race and sexuality meet, narratives of the oversexed Black brute/seductress have been constructed to explain this mythical attraction, propagate injustice, and justify violent acts.
During the years of chattel slavery, slave-owning was justified by the idea that Blacks were ignorant, childlike, and animalistic picaninnies that needed to be kept. The stereotype of the lascivious Black woman, the Jezebel whore, fed the idea that it was impossible to rape them. During Reconstruction (1863-1877), popular novelists of the era introduced the literary Black brute with a beast-like sexual appetite, out for rape (of white women). This narrative helped justify increasingly brutal lynchings as a moral imperative and explains how victim castrations can be seen as killers’ taking symbols of Black sexuality as trophies.
During the years of chattel slavery, slave-owning was justified by the idea that Blacks were ignorant, childlike, and animalistic picaninnies that needed to be kept. The stereotype of the lascivious Black woman, the Jezebel whore, fed the idea that it was impossible to rape them. During Reconstruction (1863-1877), popular novelists of the era introduced the literary Black brute with a beast-like sexual appetite, out for rape (of white women). This narrative helped justify increasingly brutal lynchings as a moral imperative and explains how victim castrations can be seen as killers’ taking symbols of Black sexuality as trophies.
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