The black man was either a faithful old “Befoh de wah” darky worshipping lordly white folk, or a frolicking ape, or a villain, a sullen scoundrel, a violator of womanhood, a low thief and mis-birthed monster. He was sub-normal and congenitally incapable. He was represented [by the white world] as an unfit survival of Darwinian natural selection. Philanthropy and religion stood powerless before his pigmy brain and undeveloped morals.”[i]
“After I am finished with myself, an observer who could read my thoughts and watch my actions would never believe that I was raised in the United States, and much less would he believe that I came from the lowest class, the black stratum of slave mentality.”[ii]
Introduction
While scholars readily associate genocidal and other extreme race or ethnic-based forms of violence with the brutal killing of Black, Jewish or other racialized men and boys, gender theory/genocidal/Holocaust studies have left us with no way to explain the rape and other forms of sexual violence imposed on these bodies historically.
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