Racial violence functions as a literal orgasm restoring white masculine mastery.

Evidence

Only the sensation of feeling himself violently stiffen interrupts the beating the rage inspires. As with the lynching that he witnessed as a child, the violence (the castration at the lynching) produces a climax, a moment when ‘the blood came roaring down.’ It is through the violence, a literal orgasm, that the white man knows himself as master of his own fate, as a man not overcome by the singing or by feminine warmth. The violence, the moment of terrible intimacy when the racial and the feminine threat are both averted, offers the only antidote to fear. It also offers a transfer of sexual power from the Black body to the white man. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 172

Categorization

• CANDY: The claim that Baldwin’s sheriff experiences beating a Black prisoner as a literal orgasm is a jarring, memorable tidbit — though grim rather than light.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — the erotic charge and orgasmic climax of ritualized violence against a body parallels the erotic-aesthetic dimension of sacrifice in that essay.
• FICTION: The mechanism — a man who can only reach climax through domination — is a powerful character engine for fiction.