White supremacist sexual violence against Black bodies fuses racial domination with sexual excitation.

Evidence

Cardyn concludes that ‘in their quest to possess, inscribe, and finally obliterate the bodies of their victims, lynch mobs unwittingly revealed the awful coalescence of sexual rage, desire, frustration, and obsession that constrained them to act as they did.’ We must turn to James Baldwin for a literary rendition of the ‘awful coalescence’ to which historians refer. In his story ‘Going to Meet the Man’ Baldwin describes a white sheriff who finds himself impotent. Sexual excitement is only possible through blackness, a blackness understood as body and savagery against which must stand the hard erection. The sheriff cannot ask his wife to do what the Black girls he arrests and coerces do, and although the image of a Black girl gives rise to ‘a distant excitement,’ it is only when the sheriff can summon up the sensations of beating a Black prisoner to a pulp and the memory of being taken to see a lynching when he was a child that he is able to generate sufficient sexual excitement to overcome his impotence. As Baldwin shows, the sheriff experiences himself as drowning in blackness, ‘an overwhelming fear, which yet contained a curious and dreadful pleasure.’ — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 171