Rape of enslaved black women devalued black womanhood beyond slavery’s end.

Evidence

While Brownmiller successfully impresses upon readers the fact that white men brutally assaulted black women during slavery, she minimizes the impact that oppression has had on all black women in America by placing it solely in the limited historical context of an “institutionalized crime” during slavery. In so doing she fails to see that the significance of the rape of enslaved black women was not simply that it “deliberately crushed” their sexual integrity for economic ends but that it led to a devaluation of black womanhood that permeated the psyches of all Americans and shaped the social status of all black women once slavery ended. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 166

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to hooks’s broader argument in the prior chapter that devaluation of black womanhood is foundational; also engages Brownmiller’s Against Our Will directly. — connects to: Sexual exploitation of black women continued and was institutionalized after slavery. — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 189; Women’s imprisonment increasingly echoes slavery, colonization, and genocide. — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 207

Related

• Sexual exploitation of black women continued and was institutionalized after slavery. (similarity 0.91)
• Rape of black women was not a crime under slavery law (similarity 0.88)
• Historians have normalized and minimized the rape of enslaved black women. (similarity 0.88)
• Devaluation of black womanhood licensed exploitation and prostitution (similarity 0.86)
• Abolitionists who condemned rape still blamed enslaved women as accomplices. (similarity 0.85)
• Labeling black women as sexual savages enabled their rapes by denying their humanity. (similarity 0.85)
• Rape of enslaved women functioned as institutionalized terrorism, not lust (similarity 0.84)
• Sexual exploitation dehumanized black women more than labor exploitation did (similarity 0.84)
• Sexism and racism were twin oppressive forces in black women’s slave experience (similarity 0.84)
• Rape of black women was ignored because they were seen as sexually permissive (similarity 0.84)
• Devaluation of black women was a deliberate method of social control (similarity 0.83)
• Institutionalized sexism protected black male sexuality while legitimizing black female assault (similarity 0.83)
• Nineteenth-century sexual morality taught mistresses to blame enslaved women for rape (similarity 0.82)
• Black women’s experiences were ignored and ridiculed as unworthy of study (similarity 0.82)
• Sexism made the black female slave’s lot harsher than the male’s (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Sexual exploitation of black women continued and was institutionalized after slavery. #corroborates (0.85) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 189