*The raping, impregnating, and whipping o f black female slaves, women
and girls, affirmed their gender: their slavery was an intensification o f how
men use women, not a contradiction of how women should be used in
terms of sex. Slavery unmanned a man; it sexed a woman, made her even
more absolutely available for sex and sadism. White male sexual domination of her, unrestrained use of her, made Southern white manhood supreme and irrefutable.
and yet I think that that resistance will gradually yield to the
pressure of wealth, education, and high character. 10
By 1894, scores of black men had been murdered, lynched, beaten;
mob violence against black men was frenzied and commonplace.
“Not a breeze comes to us from the late rebellious states, ” Douglass wrote in “Why Is The Negro Lynched? ” published in a pamphlet in 1894, “that is not tainted and freighted with Negro blood. ” 11 The white Southerners, deprived of their unmanned
slaves, had found a justification for racist hatred: the black man—
as part of his racial nature—raped white women. “It is a charge of
recent origin, ” wrote Douglass rightly, “a charge never brought
before; a charge never heard of in the time of slavery or in any
other time in our history. ” 12 The end of slavery unmanned the
white slaveowners. It was the former slaves who reminded them at
every turn of that lost manhood, that lost power. It was gone,
someone had taken it; they had been humiliated by the loss of the
war and the loss of their slaves (those who had not owned slaves
were still humiliated by the loss of them). The whites created the
black rapist to reflect what the whites had in fact lost: the right to
systematic rape of women across race lines. The whites created the
black rapist to justify the persecution and killing of black men—
and the literal castration of individuals to stand in for the symbolic
castration of the whole group under them in slavery, the foundation of their sense of male power, the material basis of their male power. Rape has been traditionally viewed as a crime of theft: a
woman stolen from a man to whom she rightfully belongs as wife
or daughter. The black rapist was accused of a crime of theft, only
what he stole was not the white woman; he stole the master’s masculinity. The crime had nothing to do with women— it almost never does. The white men, unmanned, were accusing the black
man of having raped them; the white woman was used as a figurehead, a buffer, a symbolic carrier of sex, a transmitter of sex
man-to-man*— she almost always is.
Jew ish males have experienced many turns of this homophobic
screw. As the putative killers of Christ, it was hard for the “turn-
the-other-cheek” Christians to take m asculinity from them: killing
God is a virile act. But the early Christians did just that. Jew s and
homosexuals are linked together in Romans in a propagandistic,
highly evocative w ay. What has gone wrong? There are lesbians
and male homosexuals, and the Jew ish relationship to God through
law is not enough. Lesbians are explicitly named to make the social
consequences of sin clear: the women have become unnatural; they
are no longer sexually submitting to men. The men are not just
having sex with each other; they are unmanly enough to leave the
women to each other. Naming lesbians provides a frame of reference in which one can gauge the loss of m asculinity inherent in the unnatural acts of men. The unnatural acts of men are seen to lessen
