The rape myth of Black women’s licentiousness served as slavery’s moral justification

Evidence

The legal system that countenanced sexual violence against Black women and girls had required a moral excuse for its barbarism—especially in a nation that espoused ideals of female chastity and male civility. That justification came in the form of a particular kind of mythology that developed during the slavery period that disparaged Black women’s sexuality. Whether free or enslaved, Black women were portrayed as sexually licentious, always consenting, and therefore unrapeable. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 222

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article’s thesis that moral panics over sexuality are class/identity/political signaling — here the Jezebel stereotype weaponizes alleged immodesty to excuse sexual violence.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘unrapeable’ logic: if Black women are always consenting, violation becomes conceptually impossible.
• XREF: Connects to the recurring American contradiction between espoused ideals of chastity/civility and racialized sexual violence. — connects to: Respectable conduct functioned as self-defense against sexual assault for black women — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 891