Fears of black men were manufactured through mass culture since before the founding

Evidence

Since even before this country’s founding, fears of black men have come from ideas and beliefs about who they are and about what they’re capable of. Those ideas and beliefs circulated in newspapers and in popular culture, and eventually made their way into the first feature-length film in the United States, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was based on the 1905 novel The Clansman by Thomas Dixon. They made black men subhuman. As the anti-lynching crusader and black feminist Ida B. Wells-Barnett put it: “[T]he world has accepted the story that the Negro is a monster, which the southern white man has painted him. And, today the Christian world feels, that while lynching is a crime…it cannot by word or deed, extend sympathy or help to a race of outlaws [emphasis added].” A race of outlaws or monsters is to be feared and policed, because they pose a threat not just to individuals but also to a cherished way of life. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 203