Anti-Black racial violence coincided with backlash against White women’s new independence

Evidence

Enraged enslavers viewed the American Anti-Slavery Society’s postal campaign as an act of war. Raging to defend “our sister states” against abolitionists, White male thugs roamed northern Black neighborhoods in the summer and fall of 1835, looting and destroying homes, schools, and churches. They shouted about their mission to protect White women from the hypersexual Black-faced animals that, if freed, would ravage the exemplars of human purity and beauty. In fact, after 1830, young, single, and White working-class women earning wages outside the home were growing less dependent on men financially and becoming more sexually free. White male gang rapes of White women began to appear around the same time as the gang assaults by White men on Black people. Both were desperate attempts to maintain White male supremacy. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 472

Categorization

• XREF: This is a pure example of Kendi’s mechanism: violent racist policy/action driven by threatened White male self-interest, not by racist ideas about Black savagery arising first. Supports the reader’s core goal of testing the causal inversion. — connects to: Suburban anti-integration appeals target white women’s safety fears — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 498
• QUESTION: The parallel between anti-Black gang assaults and gang rapes of White women as twin defenses of White male supremacy is striking; worth chasing whether historians document these as directly connected phenomena.