Racial violence encodes disavowed homoerotic desire between white and black men

Evidence

When scholars theorize racial violence as a ritual, they stress that it is an ‘an affair between men.’ As in Baldwin’s story, men’s disavowal of the maternal, the feminine, and the body, as well as the replacing of the body with the phallus, is required to mark the boundary between whiteness and blackness, producing what William Pinar poetically describes as ‘the despair of the loveless.’ For Pinar, racial violence cannot be understood unless queered – that is to say, in the words of Frantz Fanon, ‘the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual.’ The problem is that white men are neither permanently white nor permanently men and white heterosexual manhood is constituted by perpetually disavowing homoerotic desire for black men. … For Robyn Weigman too, the obsession with black men’s genitals in lynching reveals desire and a sadistic homoeroticism that is being disavowed. Similarly, Andrea Dworkin maintains: ‘The essential sexual antagonism that is basic to racism is expressed as if the possession of women were the issue, but fundamentally the antagonism is homoerotic.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 180 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Sexualized racial violence does double duty: it provides the sense of power, control, and mastery and, at the same time, it offers an intimacy to what it is forbidden to desire or to see as human. The ‘lynched Black man becomes a source of sexual pleasure to those who kill him,’ a receptacle for hate and fears and forbidden feelings. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 168 (#expands, via linked claim)

By flaunting their sexual lust for the bodies of black women and their preference for them as sexual partners, white men successfully pitted white women and enslaved black women against one another. In most instances, the white mistress did not envy the black female slave her role as sexual object; she feared only that her newly acquired social status might be threatened by white male sexual interaction with black women. His sexual involvement with black women (even if that involvement was rape) in effect reminded the white female of her subordinate position in relationship to him. For he could exercise his power as racial imperialist and sexual imperialist to rape or seduce black women, while white women were not free to rape or seduce black men without fear of punishment. Though the white female might condemn the actions of a white male who chose to interact sexually with black female slaves, she was unable to dictate to him proper behavior. Nor could she retaliate by engaging in sexual relationships with enslaved or free black men. Not surprisingly, she directed her anger and rage at the enslaved black women. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 451 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Racial proximity that symbolized affection was a lynching catalyst for black men — Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White…, 603; Racism hinges on denied libidinal attraction to the racial other; Racist violence becomes sexually charged to sustain the fiction of permanent racial difference (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Racial violence functions as a homoerotic affair between white and black men. #corroborates (1.00) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 180
• Sexualized racial violence grants both mastery and forbidden intimacy #expands (0.93) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 168
• White male sexual power over slaves redirected white women’s anger onto black women #complicates (0.72) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 451