How Racial Violence is Also Sexual Violence
Oftentimes racial violence, such as the lynching of black people, is also a form of gender based and sexualized violence.
Police killings and violence by random citizens taking the enforcing of white supremacy into their own hands are both longtime killers amongst black people; however, it is rarely acknowledged in our public conversations--whether in news media or on social media-- that this racial violence is often as much about ideas of gender and sexuality as it is about ideas regarding race. White supremacy often relies on ideas about gender which are based in traditional European culture. In fact, many mainstream American ideas about gender were brought to America by colonizers who in many cases viewed native people in the Americas and in Africa to be less human because they did not share traditional European ideas about gender or have the same gender roles. This use of ideas about gender to paint people of color and black people in particular as less human or as backwards continues until today.
In many of the most explosive moments of racial violence there has been a reliance on ideas about gender as well as heterosexuality to justify acts of racialized violence. Also, there have been characteristics that differentiated the experiences of women versus men. The role of sexism and heterosexism in providing a logic for ideas about racial difference is sometimes overlooked and the need to confront dominant ideas about race, gender, and sexuality all at once is less understood. Furthermore, the gendered and sexualized aspects of racial violence are often left out of the memory of the public as most public discourses do little to highlight the nature of violent acts against black people as about reinforcing traditional European ideas about gender and sexuality.
The word gender specifically describes the social differences that arise from the distinct roles assigned to each sex by the society in which they live. These distinct roles include instructions of what to wear, how to behave, and even with whom to have sex. Different cultures may assign different meaning or roles to each sex and may have more than two genders. For instance in Indigenous (Native American) communities there is recognition of two-spirit persons and in India there is legal and cultural recognition of the Hijra. Mainstream society in the western world has promoted the idea that gender is an either or situation with masculinity and femininity representing two opposite sides of gender. Feminity is ascribed to women whereas ideas of masculinity are ascribed to men. Feminine characteristics include softness, being passive, and purity. Being feminine is associated with being sexually innocent and having a submissive personality while being masculine is associated with having sexual freedom and being aggressive in personality. Characteristics said to be masculine include being without emotion , assertiveness, and being a natural born leader.
In Black Sexual Politics, author Patricia Hill-Collins discusses how ideas about gender are constantly used in anti-black ways. As Patricia Hill-Collins explains, being black is to already be defined by myth and stereotype as being sexually promiscuous or possessing a violent sexuality. Traditional European ideas about gender, for example, construct men as sexually aggressive and women as sexually passive or void of sexual ambition. The black male body, instead of possessing this normal definition of gender and sexuality, is stereotyped and represented in the media as hyper-masculine or animalistic as well as predatory; and similarly, the black female body is not stereotyped as the definition of being a properly feminine female body but one that is sexually promiscuous instead of void of sexual desire. The black body is made to symbolize being both negatively gendered and sexualized, existing outside of traditional European heterosexual norms of behavior that frame our definition of how humans should behave. All of these ideas about gender and blackness are often reinforced through acts of racialized violence.
For example, to justify the use of mob violence during Jim Crow black men were accused of being violently attracted to white women. As a result, rape became increasingly understood as an act committed by black men against white women while rapes committed against black women were ignored. In speaking about this association of black people with a perverted sexuality, “Scholar Estelle Freedman writes that white people ‘deepened the association of rape as an act committed by a Black man against a white woman’ during Reconstruction and ‘presumed that Black women either welcomed [forced sexual relations with white men] or had no moral purity to defend.’ This idea that rape was an act committed against white women by black men was often used to justify the prevalence of lynching in the south; however, lynching was in fact a form of violence often used to reinforce ideas about black gender and sexuality.
When we think of lynching we do not often think of gender or sexuality but dominant ideologies about both have often played a role in the killings of black people. Emmett Till was a 14 year old boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi on August 28, 1955. In defense of this gruesome lynching, the killer leverages the ideology which author Adrienne Rich describes as the myth of “compulsory heterosexuality” (or the idea that hetrosexual attraction is natural and automatic) that gives life to the myth that black men are automatically attracted to white women. He coupled this idea with the myth of the black overly sexual male body in a co-conspiracy to negatively sexualize and gender a black child who was accused of “whistling” at a white woman.
This idea of being overly sexual is used against black bodies--both men and --women, and often appears as a bundle deal with compulsory heterosexuality in creating the myths of the oversexualized black body which work to create blackness as a social threat. Without gender and compulsory heterosexuality, the coding process of the hyper-sexual black male body, the threat against white womanhood that needs to be neutralized, is incomplete. Emmett Till was discussed as a sexual threat, even as a 14 year old, and his killer was seen as a heroic husband defending his wife’s honor as men should. In this way, ideas about gender work to justify Emmett Till’s murder by creating the logic by which his murder is explained. Without the logic of gender and automatic heterosexuality there is no ready explanation for the murder of Emmett Till.
Lynching often served as an act reinforcing not just white dominance but white male dominance in particular. It was usually mobs of all White men who acted as the main culprits in seizing black people from jails or their homes to carry out lynchings. The rape-lynch myth, which is a myth that black men possessed a violent sexuality and wanted to rape white women, was often used as a justification for lynching at large; however, an overwhelming amount of lynchings did not result from accusations of rape. Still, the myth of a violent sexuality particular to black men coupled with the idea that they would automatically be attracted to white women combines ideas about black people not being able to live up to the traditionally held European ideas about gender with the dominance of the ideas about automatic heterosexuality to create a justification for why black people needed to be controlled through lynching.
We see this same trend happen today with young black boys who are killed by police or individuals acting as deputies. Mike Brown for example was not labeled as having the normal assertive attributes of a masculine consciousness but instead he was described as hyper masculine, too in motion such that he was a threat, aggressive, even described by the officer as “demonic.” Gender plays a role in providing this characterization. It is because Michael Brown is both black and male that he is stereotyped as physically threatening and violently aggressive. Because of the way we see masculinity, as an automatic expectation of aggression, the black male body is able to be read as hyper-aggressive according to that social norm and the black male body becomes stereotyped as violent as a result. The traditional European ideology of gender is required to code black bodies as being socially opposite and an affront to traditional norms surrounding gender. Often, violence is justified through gendered ideology but sexualized and gendered violence is also used to reinforce anti-blackness.
One instance where gendered and sexualized violence were used to reinforce notions of anti-blackness was the lynching of Laura Nelson and her son. Laura confessed to shooting a sheriff to protect her son L.W. Following her admission, Laura Nelson was seized by a mob of white men along with her son. Laura was then gang raped by several men before both she and her son were lynched in Okemah, Oklahoma on May 25, 1911. Black women who were lynched were often gang raped. This act is meant to demonstrate an absence of purity and thus proper womanhood according to traditional European gender roles which label women as sexually pure. Black women were often stereotyped as being impossible to rape as a result of them being sexually insatiable and the public gang rape before lynchings reinforced this idea about black women’s sexuality. Another instance of gendered violence being used to reinforce anti-blackness was the gruesome lynching of Mary Turner. Mary Turner was brutally lynched for her vocal disagreement with her husband’s lynching. During her lynching by a white mob, even her motherhood was symbolically destroyed by the heinous mangling of her womb. She was pregnant and the skull of the fetus was cracked and left to hang from her body after being ripped from her cut open womb. Her lynched body was left out for all to view in its devastated and deceased state.
In the case of lynching, a black body’s gender determined in what ways they were labeled as perverse or promiscuous and in what ways their sexuality would be symbolically mutilated. Lynching was particularly gendered. For example, men were often castrated, representing emasculation through the removal of the penis; likewise, women who were lynched were often gang raped, to represent a destruction of proper femininity. Each body, being a black body, was subject to rituals which re-assert their status as not human such as dismemberment and the act of lynching itself but the gender of that body determined what events would occur as they were lynched.
Somehow such brutal gendered sexualized acts of terror are left out of public memory of racial trauma and lynching. Creating a memory of lynching that does not understand the act of lynching as also part of operations of gender and sexual violence, misunderstands the reality of racial terror which is part of a long line of state sanctioned violence that reinforces white male dominance in particular. Still for some reason, it seems Mary Turner and Laura Nelson did not make it into the sacred halls of our public memory of lynching, which is not viewed as a gendered sexualized act of racial violence but as purely a racial act of dehumanization. Such a misremembering denies Mary Turner proper remembrance, for a second time we leave her body out. Still, I remain hopeful that we can recover her memory for proper grievance, claiming and lamenting her heroism.
We see the importance of properly remembering lynching as an act of racial, gendered, and sexualized violence in the case of Anita Hill. In the case of Anita Hill somehow this gendered sexualized component of lynching gets lost in the public memory that Clarence Thomas attempted to use in his own defense. How would we answer such a misuse of the public memory of racial trauma that ignores the gendered and sexualized parts of that trauma? Clarence Thomas’ description of lynching ignores important facts about the history of anti-black violence as also a form of gendered sexualized violence. Black men were never lynched in defense of black women but gender and sexuality were often part of the justification of lynching.
Anita Hill’s combing through instances of sexual harassment in a public forum at the hands of a committee of all white men is part of a long standing anti-black tradition of black women being forced to publicly experience humiliation of a sexual nature, similar to the long standing anti-black tradition of ignoring sexual violence against black women. However, holding men accountable for sexual violence towards black women is not part of the history of lynching or racial violence. On the contrary, doing as Clarence Thomas did and erasing or misremembering the sexualized and gendered aspects of that racial violence is deeply part of that anti-black tradition. This is exactly what happened in the discourse surrounding lynching here.
After the case of Anita Hill, where she was publicly humiliated for the nation to see by a mob of white men who shamefully were also elected representatives, Black feminist scholars scrambled to fill the gaping hole in our racial politics that left enough room for Clarence Thomas to even attempt to use public memories of lynching in his defense. How could he use such a painful memory of racial trauma, even if it went against known historical facts and against the interests of anti-racism, with such ease?
In his statement that the congressional hearings investigating Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual assault against him, was “a high tech lynching” for “uppity negroes,” he misrepresents the historical reality of lynching. Again lynching, while often being for petty crimes of class involving theft, was never in defense of black women. Instead lynching often involved rituals of sexual violence against black bodies; moreover, this was the exact allegation of which he stood accused. Although lynching for black women often meant public gang rape by white men, in Thomas’ account of lynching this act of violence was not remembered as an act of gendered sexualized violence like the act of which he stood accused.
In The Red Record, Ida B. Wells details accusations against those who were lynched. In justifications for lynching, victims were often accused of being poor (having a need to steal), or acting outside of gendered sexual norms of white evangelical society which forbids sexual encounters between black men and white women. Many accusations which describe the body in question as not properly gendered but instead deviant to normal gender roles often served in the justifications provided for why someone was lynched and their gender played a role in the manner in which one was to be lynched. The lynched person would often stand accused of a violation which included having a perverted sense of gender, sexuality, or class.
If traditional European ideology about gender is a key element of the logic of racial violence then we can better see the urgency in fighting sexism and these ideas about gender in fighting how racism and racist violence work within American society. Without sexism and ideas about automatic heterosexuality as dominant ideologies, racial violence would often have no way of claiming moral justification. Instead racial violence often justifies itself through the logic of gender reinforcing the dominance of both ideologies. We can come to see many acts of racialized violence as also acts of gendered sexualized violence. In fact, such a remembering of some forms of racial violence such as lynching as gendered and sexualized acts reinforcing white supremacy as well as sexism and heterosexism serves to paint a more accurate understanding of this violence while also acknowledging the experiences of many victims of anti-black violence as also victims of gendered sexualized violence.