European depictions marked Black women as sexual objects unworthy of love

Evidence

In the opera’s plot, a young Frenchman does not find his suitor sufficiently exotic. When she appears disguised as the “Hottentot Venus,” he falls in love. Secure in his attraction, she drops the disguise. The Frenchman drops the ridiculous attraction to the Hottentot Venus, comes to his senses, and the couple marries. The opera revealed Europeans’ ideas about Black women. After all, when Frenchmen are seduced by the Hottentot Venus, they are acting like animals. When Frenchmen are attracted to Frenchwomen, they are acting rationally. While hypersexual Black women are worthy of sexual attraction, asexual Frenchwomen are worthy of love and marriage. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 365

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier chapter on the three-way scheme: this is a textbook articulation of the segregationist hierarchy, with Black women as hypersexual other vs. white women as pure/domestic. Also relates to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ addendum on how purity/virtue discourse maps onto race and class. — connects to: Art provides a hypocritical aesthetic alibi for selling female sexuality — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1682; Visual imagery reduced all black women to icons of deviant sexuality — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 874