Just Shy of a Call for a Lynching…
*Content Warning*
sexual violence, racist imagery and racial terrorism discussed here.
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I promised that I wouldn’t engage with the local “news” Blogs, especially the one that went after me and my family. The (then) owner seems to have sold his page, to people who are somehow even MORE terrible then he ever was.
Let’s just say it’s not a frequent stop for me on social media, but every once in a while I’ll come across it, and it will make my blood boil, albeit in a way they probably did not intend it to…
Before I go any further, this is not about the speculation of guilt or innocence of the suspects, nor an attempt to deny the terribleness of what happened to this woman. But there is obviously a long history of what media chooses to show, and stuff like this post is perpetuating a dangerous and racist myth that is rooted in our nation’s history of white supremacy, and which has very real effects in the present day.
During the time of overt chattel slavery, caricatures of Black people tended to infantilize them, painting enslaved peoples as “docile” and “unintelligent”, and otherwise “harmless”. This served a very specific purpose, for it assuaged white consciences. Because if those who were enslaved could not otherwise take care of themselves, then their enslavement was in fact “a good thing”.
This all changed after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. New caricatures and stereotypes had to be constructed in order to reassert control of newly freedmen and women by white power-holders. The “Brute” caricature is one of many that came out of this period.
Black men (in particular) were negatively portrayed as violent “beasts”, who were by “nature” inclined to engage in criminal behavior, most notably by raping white women, who in turn had to be protected “at any cost”. Such a stereotype justified all manner of white violence.
Probably the most infamous portrayal of this caricature occurs in D.W. Griffith’s racial propaganda film “Birth of a Nation”
In this scene, Gus, a former slave turned union soldier (played by a white actor in Black face) is implied to be threatening the white female character with rape. Following her suicide, (she jumps off a cliff so she won’t be raped by Gus) he is subsequently hunted down by the newly formed KKK and lynched.
That the only solution for her character was to choose a violent death rather than being “violated” by a Black man speaks volumes as to the conditionality of the “protection” of white women. An extreme example is shown in Yale Professor Lisa Cardyn’s work “Sexualized Racism/Gendered Violence: Outraging the Body Politic in the Reconstruction South”
Klansmen, for instance, devised a hideous punishment for a white woman found to be cohabiting with a black man. “[T]hey took the woman, laid her down on the ground, then cut a slit on each side of her orifice, put a large padlock in it, locked it up, and threw away the key, and then turned her loose.” For two or three days she suffered, in excruciating pain and nearly immobilized, before finally sending for a local doctor who helped free her from the klan’s torturous device.
That this type of punishment was inflicted on white women who chose to “betray” their race does not diminish the fact that brutal punishment was more often directed towards the Black community (and Black women in particular) following accusations of the rape of white women.
Whites also sought retribution for alleged rapes by targeting entire Black communities with violent, public, and sexualized attacks, including forcing victims to strip, binding them in compromising positions, and whipping their genitals; widespread rape of Black women, sometimes in front of their families; and genital mutilation and castration.
The mere accusation of rape was enough to prompt white rage. In the Equal Justice Initiative’s seminal report “Lynching In America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror”, it is shown that allegations of rape were simply an excuse for violence.
Nearly 25 percent of the lynchings of African Americans in the South were based on charges of sexual assault. The mere accusation of rape, even without an identification by the alleged victim, often aroused a mob and resulted in lynching. In fact, the definition of Black-on-white “rape” in the South was incredibly broad and required no allegation of force because white institutions, laws, and most white people rejected the idea that a white woman could or would willingly consent to sex with an African American man. When Black Memphis journalist Ida B. Wells published an editorial challenging the myth of widespread Black-on-white sexual violence and insisting that consensual interracial sex did occur, white mobs burned her newspaper’s offices and threatened to lynch her. Whites’ fears of interracial sex extended to any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman. In 1889, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, Keith Bowen allegedly tried to enter a room where three white women were sitting; though no further allegation was made against him, Mr. Bowen was lynched by the “entire (white) neighborhood” for his “offense.” William Brooks was lynched in 1894 in Palestine, Arkansas, after he asked his white employer for permission to marry the man’s daughter. General Lee, a Black man, was lynched by a white mob in 1904 for merely knocking on the door of a white woman’s house in Reevesville, South Carolina; and in 1912, Thomas Miles was lynched in Shreveport, Louisiana, for allegedly writing letters to a white woman inviting her to have a cold drink with him. In 1934, after being accused of “associating with a white woman” in Newton, Texas, John Griggs was hanged and shot seventeen times and his body was dragged behind a car through the town for hours. Whites’ fear of sexual contact between Black men and white women was pervasive and led to many lynchings. Narratives of these lynchings reported in the sympathetic white press justified the violence and perpetuated the deadly stereotype of African American men as hypersexual threats to white womanhood.
Some of the most terrible acts of mass white violence occurred following accusations of rape of white women. The thriving community known as “Black Wall Street” In Tulsa, OK was erased from existence following allegations of rape that fell on a Black teenager. Similar accusations sparked the Rosewood Massacre in Florida in 1923. (That Black prosperity also played a role in sparking white rage is another aspect that is often ignored)
One did not even have to be an adult to be accused of sexual impropriety.
In August of 1955, 14-year old Emmett Till was lynched following allegations made that he had acted “inappropriately” towards the wife of a white store owner. That the allegations made by the wife were later recanted did not erase the fact that Emmett was brutally murdered because of those allegations, nor that those responsible for his lynching were acquitted.
This was just one aspect of the myth of “Black criminality” that came to be in the post-reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. And like how the legacy of chattel slavery is continued in our system of mass incarceration and for-profit prisons, the black “brute” caricature endures well beyond the late 19th and early 20th century.
Despite what is often idealized about the news media, what is shown may be “factual” on some level, but bias creeps in and perpetuates stereotypes and re-instills false ideas and beliefs in the public.
The Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C. based non-profit that advocates for an end to racial bias in the American criminal justice system, explains this in their report Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies:
“Media crime coverage not only increases the salience of crime, it also distorts the public’s sense of who commits crime and triggers biased reactions. By over-representing whites as victims of crimes perpetrated by people of color, crime news delivers a double blow to white audiences’ potential for empathetic understanding of racial minorities. This focus at once exaggerates black crime while downplaying black victimization. Homicide, for example, is overwhelmingly an intra-racial crime involving men. But media accounts often portray a world overrepresented by black, male offenders and white, female victims. One study of how Columbus, Ohio’s major newspaper reported on the city’s murders — which were predominantly committed by and against black men — examined whether unusual or typical cases were considered newsworthy. The researcher found that journalists gravitated to unusual cases when selecting victims (white women) and to typical cases when selecting perpetrators (black men). Yet reporters did not choose to cover the most infrequent murders, of blacks by whites or of white men by white women. This peculiar focus suggests that newsworthiness is not a product of how representative or novel a crime is, but rather how well it can be “scripted using stereotypes grounded in White racism and White fear of Black crime.”
Unable to portray Black people as “childlike” and “docile” as they did during the periods of chattel slavery, whites needed new ideas. The “Black Brute” caricature (among other stereotypes) as well as the general racialization of crime and punishment, served the purpose of evolving the justification for white supremacy in America.
That the post shared by this self-identified “news” site is referring to what, on the face of it, appears to be an actual crime (which of course has yet to be determined by a court of law), does not change the fact that there is a history of using the myth of the “Black Brute” to stoke racial fear in white Americans and to justify terrible acts of violence.
In love and solidarity,
-Your friendly neighborhood Rice Traitor
