Slave sexual exploitation affirmed Black women’s humanity while reducing it to sexuality

Evidence

Master/slave sex fundamentally acknowledged the humanity of Black and biracial women, but it simultaneously reduced that humanity to their sexuality. In the Christian world, sexuality was believed to be the animal trait of humans. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 345

Categorization

• XREF: Pattern echoes the tension in the Immodesty book and in broader analyses of how dehumanizing systems partially acknowledge the humanity of the dominated through their sexuality. — connects to: Visual imagery reduced all black women to icons of deviant sexuality — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 874