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Book 11, pages 204-206
Please note: this historical chapter in
my book I myself find less interesting today where I am more interested in the
many parallels between the present day American ghettoization of blacks and the
similar European ghettoization of Muslims immigrants. But for some American
readers it might be of interest.
What more than anything gives away these liberals as mere philosophers of a
new master-slave system is when you occasionally hear them fantasize about
black people's sexuality. While master-slave society has done its utmost to
nurture a threatening sexual image of the black man originating in various
white economic desires, it has spared no efforts in continuing the devaluation
of the black woman started in chattel slavery. Probably no other nation has let
a whole race of women go through centuries of systematic and often daily rape -
and been so successful afterwards in putting the entire blame on the victim
herself.
Everything was done to dehumanize and "break" the black woman by
selling and flogging her naked in a puritan society as a demonstration of
contempt for her sexual integrity - a
practice which I found as widespread today in stigmatizing white jokes. To
abuse her as much as the white man has (with the white woman then attacking her
for seducing her husband) it is necessary in order to avoid feeling guilt to
develop an enormous disdain for her. As always with rape-victims, myths were
fostered about her bad, morally loose character, while she was in addition
given false credit for "animal-like" sexuality in order to justify the
continuing attacks on black womanhood attacks which decreased in their most
violent form in the 1950's, but which I often saw continuing in various forms
under submissive relationships with white male bosses. The depreciation of the
black woman has so permeated the psyches of white America that the stereotyping
of her in various ways as a "low" woman in TV and media is not even noticed by
whites. As in all oppression, blacks have internalized this systematic
devaluation which represented a calculated method of social control by the
white man.
Whites, guilty about selling children away from mothers and forcing
enormous devotion out of self-disdaining nannies for their white children,
tried to justify their cruelty by stereotyping the black woman as inordinately
strong, able to endure unusual amounts of hardship and pain to the point of
being inhuman, - a white image reinforced by seeing the victim rear her own
children with harshness. I didn't find it qualitatively more harsh than that of
poor whites.
The little difference in degree stems from whites belonging not to an
eternal underclass of rejects, but to a lower class with hope for upward
mobility, which children are the first to feel. In Africa I only saw harsh
parental discipline in areas with strong white penetration.
Chattel slavery's propaganda about the pure white feminine "lady" and the
subsequent cult of sacred white womanhood continues in white advertising's
equally destructive effect. In order to survive white capitalism's
psychological terror, and even in some cases to "pass" as a white, the black
woman began making herself white with skin-lightening crème and straightening
her frizzy hair in a complicated and painful process.
In addition to the negative effect on the black woman's self-image, these
white beauty ideals may have had a divisive impact on the family. The quarrels
I so often heard in underclass homes let me feel that the black man has had his
view of women effected by society's ideals. Black feminists even suggest that a
government report's labeling of black women as "matriarchs," similar to "Aunt
Jeminas" and "Amazons" of earlier times, may have increased black men's
hostility towards black women. What depressed me most was not the one third of
black families having only one parent present, but what I saw in many of those
underclass homes still intact - and what this spells out for the future of the
black family. Nothing hurt me more than hearing white society's "You ain't shit,
nigger" constantly reverberating between these unhappy and powerless partners.
The frightening aspect I constantly saw of unemployed black men "hitting on" "their"
devalued women just as raping slave masters and Jim Crow whites have done for
centuries, reflects the inevitable lack of love and respect in a whole society
whose values must be such as to approve or ignore the existence of slavery
within it.
One of my privileges as a traveler in a society based on the biggest
institutionalized gang rape in history, women constantly remind me, was being
male. In black Africa I saw European women hitch-hiking everywhere - no one
reporting any problems. Seeing no women hitch-hiking in American ghettos (and
only rarely anywhere in America), I could not help feeling to what extent
America has been molded by slavery - even though violence and sexism did not
start with slavery.
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