Well-meaning mainstream anti-rape literature revived the racist myth of the Black rapist

Evidence

Her most influential academic treatise, Women, Race & Class, appeared in 1981. It was a revisionist history of Black women as active historical agents despite the prevailing sexism and exploitation they had faced, and despite the racism they had faced from White feminists in the suffrage struggles and the recent reproductive and anti-rape struggles. Davis showcased the irony of the most popular pieces of anti-rape literature in the 1970s—Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, Jean MacKeller’s Rape: The Bait and the Trap, and Diana Russell’s Politics of Rape—for reinvigorating the “myth of the Black rapist.” This myth, Davis said, reinforced “racism’s open invitation to white men to avail themselves sexually of Black women’s bodies. The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1082

Categorization

• XREF: A sharp case of ‘well-intentioned’ progressive movements (anti-rape) propagating segregationist ideas — parallels Assimilationist blind spots.