Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Black Women and Rape

Interesting discussion, at New Model Minority:
Black men have been lynched and Black women have been raped, historically, in the US to maintain the hierarchical, racial, gendered, social order. This terror was particularly acute 1880′s-1920′s in the south, as the US tried to figure out what a post slavery nation would look like.

Historically Black women are seen as UNrapeable. Naturally lewd, lascivious, fast and promiscuous. The social system of slavery needed us to be seen this way to normalize the domination of our reproduction and our manual work during US chattel slavery.

Because Black women were the two-fer, we worked in the fields and gave birth to enslaved workers, our sexuality was and in many ways still is looked at in a very particular way, even in 2010.

My understanding of this comes from two books. The first is Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South by Hannah Rosen and At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power by Danielle McGuire.
The piece loses a little coherence as it continues, but RTWT: "Misogyny and Genius: Assange + R. Kelly."

I'll take that experience over the #MooreandMe totalitarians.

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