As human beings, we cannot inhabit one another’s experiences. But when we share the same political goals, we can at the very least listen to each other’s stories with a lucid mind and an open heart. The hardest part, however, may be to acknowledge the rational basis of one another’s fears. In a recent diary I tagged the campaign calling for Al Franken and John Conyers to step down as evidence of “white skin privilege”. Several commenters exclaimed that race had nothing to do with the issue of sexual harassment and others went on to tell me what a disgusting, anti-feminist nincompoop I was, possibly even reveling in the sexual abuse of white women. Okay, well. . . I had made the rather snide comment that these delicate lilies would probably be vacationing in the Caribbean when we needed them most.
I apologize for not being more direct and less sarcastic about my fears. Actually, “fears” is too soft a term for the terror that keeps me awake at night as the Trump regime spreads its toxic miasma over the American landscape. It is the creeping shoot-a-black-teenager (like my beautiful, handsome, son)-for-target-practice police state, packing the courts with neo-Nazi judges, destroying immigrant families, accelerating the crisis of climate change, smothering healthcare, and every institutional safeguard that differentiates us from just another corrupt, banana-republic dictatorship.
But I digress. This diary is really about the roots of sexual assault in America and the reason most black women feel our first priority must be to rid ourselves of Donald Trump and his fascist GOP Congressional majority in order to end it. But it is also about our fear that white feminists will abandon us when we need you the most.
So, I will be blunt.The root cause of rape culture in America was sexual slavery in the antebellum South. The commanding posture of Robert E. Lee astride his stud, Traveller and other Confederate monuments of equally imposing physical stature never symbolized the values of honor, heritage, pride and family that today’s loyalists attribute to them. American history books have for the past century and a half projected onto the nation’s collective psyche an imagery of “chattel slavery,” depicting a field of laborers picking cotton and the stalwart Mammy in the kitchen. However, the actual system of bondage in the South was one in which all female slaves and at least some of their male counterparts were subjected to non-consensual sex, and proffered no legal recourse in cases of rape or physical assault. The simple truth of the matter was that the slave master owned the virginity of his young female slaves. The appropriate contemporary term for the system of bondage practiced in the antebellum South is “sexual slavery”. This is the nomenclature used in international law and historical documents to describe a labor system for primarily non-sexual purposes, for which non-consensual sexual activity is common.
After 1808 when Congress banned the further import of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean, plantation owners saw a financial incentive in forceably impregnating female slaves as a means of increasing their assets. Antebellum theologians defended the system of sexual slavery, some of whom according to Frederick Douglass had slave children themselves. The clergy referred to the setup as one that protected “ the purity of white womanhood” against men’s baser instincts. When finances were tight or gambling debts owed, slave owners were known to sell mulatto daughters at premium rates in what were known as “fancy girl” markets, that is, to brothels.
Our society has never grappled with the wrenching ways in which this institution tore the society away from its ethical moorings, especially in the Bible Belt, which pretended to serve as moral authority for our secular nation. For a century and a half, slaves wrote diaries with the help of white female abolitionists describing bondage’s twisted and perverse effects on Southern society and the sexual amorality that it embedded in the region’s understanding of acceptable Christian behavior.
The voices of these women were dismissed as scatological, abolitionist propaganda. However, it is only now with contemporary Y chromosome DNA testing that we must face the truth of sexual slavery. It shows that 27.5% to 33.6% of African-American males have a direct line, pre-1860 paternal ancestor from England or Ireland.
While their Southern sisters accepted the adultery of husbands and the abuse of slave women with silent acceptance, Northern women refused to back down. They even prepared for war. Abolitionism was a powerful shared goal. But such was not the case after the Civil War as female activists sought to bring white Southerners into the suffragette movement, and realized that the racial caste system made it too awkward for them to recruit blacks as well. Similarly, when the Ku Klux Klan swept through the South and midwest in the early twentieth century, it left in its wake more than 2,800 dead bodies, hanging from the limbs of trees. They were generally black males lynched for presumably raping white women, but in most cases new investigations show two motives for these murders. The first was growing economic competition with whites, when blacks opened competing businesses, and secondly, as a form of terrorism to force African-Americans off the voting rolls. The black anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells Barnett was rebuffed at the time by her white contemporaries Frances E. Willard, national president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Susan B. Anthony, a leader in the suffrage movement along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Frances Willard even went so far as to proclaim that “the safety of [white] women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities (by black males).” The white feminists were angry that the 15th amendment gave black men the right to vote in theory, even though terrorist lynching campaigns made it impossible for them to do so in reality until passage of the 1960s Civil Rights Acts.
Donald Trump may be a New Yorker. But the men and women who elected this pussy grabber to the White House, and the women who wear those tee-shirts saying “I wish he’d grab my pussy too”, and those Alabama voters supporting pedophile Roy Moore represent a solid third of American society that never embraced democracy. They are not just Southerners. After the Civil War, many fled the South for the Midwest and Pacific coast, bringing with them a church no longer moored to the Christianity of the former slave trader turned abolitionist, John Newton, who wrote “Amazing Grace”. It was rather to the Biblical inerrancy and literalism that Confederate theologians had used to justify slavery by riffling through the Bible for mention of the institution in ancient societies. Patriarchal amoralism drawn from the culture of sexual assault on slave plantations formed the true basis of their ethical code. The patriarchal figure determined what was right and wrong, even what was true and what was fake. The woman’s role was to validate his declarations of truth, however pathological they might be.
So damned what if a handful in the Midwest voted for Obama. The majority inhabit a culture that has always found comfort in authoritarian ways of thinking and do not share our values, regarding women’s rights, gay rights, civil rights, the rights of immigrants or anyone else, the value of education, the value of science, the environmental fragility of our planet, the value of democracy, our vision of the world, our vision of the future, or even our precious embrace of the human spirit. Don’t let these vile people jerk you around and play with your emotions. Just slam the door and don’t let them in however dolefully they moan. We’ll have plenty of time to reckon with wrongdoing among our own when the menace of nuclear war has ended, when Trump is gone.
