The U.S. Black Woman Experience

The U.S. Black Woman Experience

by Zakiya Lasley

In truth, specific oppressions (male domination, white supremacy, class exploitation, etc.) rarely work singularly. Instead, oppressions feed off of each other, their dynamics changing according to specific contexts. The current challenge for anti-rape organizers is to develop solid analyses of rape and rape culture that recognize a multiplicity of oppressions that constantly shape and influence each other.

Throughout history Black women have taken deadly risks in confronting rape under extreme fear and terrorism. Black women who were slaves participated in concentrated and deliberate instances of retaliation of rape by their white male slave owners. Documented in many autobiographies and biographies are horrifying accounts of female rebellion manifesting itself in the poisoning of rapists, burning of property, and assassination of their white slave owners. Also in instances of desperation enslaved rape survivors who were mothers often killed their girl children as a form of resistance to slave rape.

Looking at anti-rape activism done on the part of Black slave women forces us to think about rape in a much more complex way. Rape is not only a tool for male domination over women; Rape is also a tool for economic exploitation and white supremacy. The example of rape survivors killing their babies to keep them from being raped is also resistance to the use of rape to promote the institution of chattel slavery after the banning of the Mid-Atlantic slave trade. We can see the dominating forces of capitalist and white superiority dynamics within rape not only in the case of the rape of thousands of black slaves, but also currently in global issues such as “mail-order brides” and global sex-trafficking.

Another anti-rape movement headed by Black women is the anti-lynching movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During post-Reconstruction, southern white people were determined to regain control over Black people. As a result, they instituted a system of lynching Black women, men, and children when they “got out of line.” Lynching was a sexualized form of murder. Often, the justification for lynching Black men was that they raped white women. The issue of rape was utilized as a scare tactic geared directly towards white women. As a result, many southern white women supported lynching efforts instead of recognizing that sexual violence towards white women, by anyone, is deeply connected to sexual violence towards Black people (as well as other forms of oppression). When Black men were lynched, the mobs would often torture them before hanging them, cutting off sexual parts of their anatomy in particular. When Black women were lynched, they were often raped first.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, an activist and writer during this time, spoke openly against rape and did not defend Black men who were, in fact, guilty of rape. But after she researched and investigated 728 lynchings that had taken place during the 1890s, she found that only a third of murdered Black people were even accused of rape, much less guilty of it. Spurred by her investigation, hundreds of Black activists at the time, (including the NAACP and Black intellectuals) developed an anti-lynching movement for which activists were burned out of their homes and businesses, run out of town, and murdered.

In my assessment of the anti-lynching movement, I never stopped to look at the moment as an anti-rape movement because the goal of these activists were not specifically to end rape, but to end lynching. Nonetheless, it is so profoundly an anti-rape movement because the theory and activism work the organizers produced challenged all forms of racialized sexual violence. Deconstructing the myth that Black men are overwhelmingly “more desirous” of white women was critical in order for white women to eventually reflect on the sexual violence being done to them by white men as well as their own sexual freedom. Most importantly the anti-lynching movement forced America’s hand in recognizing that other manifestations of oppression are inseparably linked to sexual violence. There is no genuine way to discuss rape and organize against rape without being committed to deconstructing complex ways that race, ability, religion, age, economics, and sexuality are integrated into rape.

This next phase of anti-rape organizing in the 21st century must be able to hold on to the complexity of rape culture with all of its degrees of oppression. The time for thinking about rape as merely a tool of male domination is over. We must be able to mindfully articulate spaces where anti-rape organizing is inseparably linked to organizing against police brutality, for labor rights, and for immigration rights. And we must show up to these other types of organizing work as allies moving towards liberation.