Colonial legal treatment of Black women still shapes racial monitoring today.

Evidence

Black women were crucial to the racial-classification system established by white colonists to maintain and manage slavery. The colonial legal apparatus treated them as innately unrapeable and their children as innately enslaveable, while the culture justified that barbarity by slandering them as lascivious Jezebels. This destructive thinking has been reinforced by laws, policies, and myths that, to this day, monitor racial boundaries and Black women’s sexuality and childbearing. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 242

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the reader’s core thesis: slavery as foundational origin, not peripheral — the ‘innately unrapeable / innately enslaveable’ legal apparatus is a design feature whose effects persist, not a deviation.
• ADDENDUM: Parallels the argument in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ — how a moral/cultural category (lasciviousness) is constructed to justify political control.