The myth of pure White womanhood justified terrorism while masking White men’s desires.

Evidence

Klansmen glorified White womanhood as the epitome of honor and purity (and asexuality) and demeaned Black womanhood as the epitome of immorality and filth (and sex). Some Black men demeaned Black women, too. “Lord, sar!” said a prosperous Black Kansan. “You not think I marry a black nigger wench?” Klansmen religiously believed that Blacks possessed supernatural sexual powers, and this belief fueled their sexual attraction to Black women and their fear of White women being attracted to Black men. It became almost standard operating procedure to justify Klan terrorism by maintaining that southern White supremacy was necessary to defend the purity of White women. Black women’s bodies, in contrast, were regarded as a “training ground” for White men, or a stabilizing “safety valve” for White men’s “sexual energies” that allowed the veneration of the asexual pureness of White womanhood to continue. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 666

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article: the veneration of White womanhood as asexual purity is the same idealization/rejection dialectic as Seneca-on-silk and sumptuary laws — a classed and raced purity standard used to discipline bodies.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ essay with a raced North American case: the ‘training ground’/‘safety valve’ framing of Black women’s bodies shows how the purity discourse of White womanhood required a simultaneously demeaned sexual Other.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘protecting women’ serves as a ready-made moral justification for violence — the Klan’s standard operating procedure parallels contemporary protectionist rhetoric (border, crime, purity) across eras.