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Part III. “Nigger:” A Racially Gendered Citizenship
A. Mothering, Reproduction, & Production
Images of white women as pure, fragile, and emotional were juxtaposed with images of Black women as oversexed, strong beasts of burden . . . Enslaved women were considered fair game for any white man's sexual desires, and in the process lost control of their bodies and their reproductive rights.
Profit had to be wrung out of an erotic wilderness that could make a man forget why he was there in the first place.
One of the more significant problems in Kennedy's work is the omission of gender in his development of theories about “nigger.” Kennedy's mistake merges black women's experiences into those of black men. However, there is a profound story to be told about how the myth of “nigger” controlled the sexuality, citizenship, maternity, identity, and freedom of black women. Although a social construction, the “nigger” image of black women had (and continues to influence) significant legal, social, and moral consequences. Black women were essential to the creation of more slaves, but were equally loathed for their role as mothers, as they created the very individuals so incredibly despised. Caught in this irony, black women were subjected to the same forms of brutality as black men, but were also subjected to sexual violence.
Black women were not free from lynching as witnessed in the most troubling and gruesome photographs and illustrations found in the book and currently touring exhibit, Without Sanctuary. While sexual violence against white women was decried and punishable in the most tyrannical fashions, sexual brutality against black women ultimately elicited limited, if any, protection by courts. Early efforts to limit sexual intercourse between white men and black *161 women were soon answered by laws that denied inheritance for any mulattos born from such misdeeds. Such laws also provided that the children born of slave mothers would be slaves themselves, thus protecting the estates and families of white men from any black or “nigger” blemishes. Such laws would also serve to free white men from any restraints in their sexual prowess and aggression against black women. Their interests were not economically harmed by such dalliances, and somehow white men, their wives, the law, and the church seemed to reconcile the adultery with a particularized “nigger image” of black women as lascivious, libidinous, and oversexed sirens who held the power of coercion.
Cole and Guy-Sheftall ask how whites could maintain diametrically opposing standards for white and black women. Their answer points us in the direction of a gender construed nigger image. They argue that the solution was to “generate images and stereotypes of black women that removed them from the standard definitions and descriptions of womanhood.” This image casting was purposeful, according to Giddings. Black women's “nigger image” was juxtaposed to that of “white women as pure” and fragile. Instead, black women were cast as “oversexed, strong beasts of burden.” Whether black women *162 were considered in John Lennon's famous song, “Woman Is The Nigger of The World,” is unknown, however, its legal and social meaning carries significance for African American women in the United States.
Citizenship in the United States was not only racially construed, but also by gender, “configured and structured” with legal as well as social boundaries. Consequentially the reproduction of “nigger” was a gendered reproduction as slave status itself was equated with an intensely degraded sense of black humanity. In this deeply racially and gendered-conscious construction even the children of slaveholders were subjects of tiered citizenship that resulted in them being cast as subjects. Naturally, tensions arose as the status of motherhood between black women and white women were differently conceptualized, leaving the children of black mothers and white fathers differently recognized by the law than those of white mothers. Arguably, this unacknowledged legal and social distinction and its powerful remnants haunt the political and social relationships and status gap between black and white women today.
The legal distinctions between white and black women illuminate the awkward, but nevertheless privileged, position of white women during and post-antebellum. Consider here, Harriet Jacobs's account of her white mistress's position on slave marriage and family:
My mistress, like many others, seemed to think that slaves had no right to any family ties of their own; that they were created merely to wait upon the family of the mistress. I once heard her abuse a young slave girl, who told here that a colored man wanted to make her his wife. “I will have you peeled and pickled, my lady . . . if I ever hear you mention that subject again. Do you suppose that I will have you tending my children with the children of that nigger? The girl to whom she said this had a mulatto child, of course not acknowledged by its father.
In her recent novel, Property, Valerie Martin bravely captures the sexual *163 brutality experienced by black women at the hands of white men, but also the dominance and violence projected from white women. As Dorothy Roberts notes, “maternalist legislation was intended to assimilate women who had the potential of becoming citizens.” Naturally, blacks lacked this potential, and therefore “stood entirely outside the elite white women's paternalistic concept of national community.”
The intersection of racial and gender oppression through citizenship created “oppositional images” of black women and white women. It configured the concept of womanhood, property, and reproduction along racial lines that, as Harris describes, simply mirrored reality. Both social sanctions and legal rules controlled this complex gender ideology. In this, the “nigger” (whore)/white (virgin) dichotomy emerged and was regulated by law. To view a black *164 woman as a “thinking, feeling creature” with “individual strengths and vulnerabilities,” was to see “some horrifying apparition,” according to Stephan Talty. Under Harris's analysis, the policing of race lines required the policing of gender, and the policing of gender required the regulation of race. The policing occurred through both rules of inheritance and rules of contract, where white women were coerced and excluded from marrying black men, and therefore could only legally marry white men. By this, property inheritance and positive social status (which was racially construed) could only legally be conferred upon children with white mothers. Of course, the slave trade itself (with little regard for maintaining families) meant that a core aspect of citizenship was denied black women: the right to parent, as their children could be and often were sold.
Charles Johnson and Patricia Smith describe the bittersweet irony of “giving birth to a child you could never really call your own:”
And as the white child suckled at her breast and drew life from it, the slave was tortured by the knowledge that the child nurtured owned both her and her newborn utterly and completely. The white child could grow to separate the slave mother and her child, sell one from the other, demean and humiliate them, dispense lashes from the whip. *165 He was born with that power. And by offering him her milk, the slave woman helped him become more powerful.
Rules of inheritance fundamentally correlated to notions of citizenship, and figured critically in how black women were perceived and treated. Black women could not legally marry anyone, neither white men, nor indigenous men nor black men, although symbolic acts such as jumping over a broomstick, a not uncommon expression to show a personal commitment to a particular person, were permitted by slave owners. Kennedy makes passing reference to this point in a passage quoting Harriet Jacobs. Nor could black women be a vessel for positive rights, social status, or inheritance. They were, in the more basic sense, legally and psychologically treated by legal and social custom as stock or breeders, and their sexual subordination seemed to help fuel the continual replenishment of slaves. Their children were legally fatherless. Through laws of inheritance, the rigid constructions of caste and social status were continually reaffirmed, especially because slave status was inherited through black mothers regardless of the father's status. Thus, it seems that black women held a rather unique position as social pariahs in America. They were labeled unchaste and whorish, but by the very nature of the slave system, they could not redeem their status as they were acted upon and had no privileges or rights over their own sexuality and reproduction. Consequently, black women were at once legally and socially positioned in the most inferior caste, and punished for being in that position.
B. Sexual Violence
Randall Kennedy reminds us that the worst thing a black woman can do is to lie about rape, particularly if she accuses a white man, as this has set race relations “behind.” Kennedy gives short attention, however, to a bounty of scholarship that addresses centuries of sexual and physical assaults against black women under the law's gaze and also addresses the ongoing cases of past murders or rapes. This is ironic for a number of reasons, not the least of which *166 is that during the writing of Nigger, white men were finally brought to trial for the murders of black women and girls committed forty years before. Among these men were Bobby Frank Cherry, age 71, when finally brought to trial for the murder of four black girls in 1963; Kenneth Clay Richmond, whose daughter witnessed him stab to death a black woman selling encyclopedias in 1968; and a former mayor of New York, Charlie Robertson, who participated in the 1969 murder of a stranded motorist trying to change her tire. Nor does Kennedy address how America's legal system systemically and institutionally failed to protect African American women from common race-driven sexual and physical assault.
Rarely were white men punished for sexual (or physical) assaults against black women. Consider for example, that only recently white men been brought to justice for the bombing of four black girls in an Alabama church or for other disturbing acts in the 1950s and 1960s, fifty years earlier. Theresa Stacy testified that her grandfather, Bobby Frank Cherry “said he helped blow up a bunch of niggers back in Birmingham,” and that “he seemed rather jovial, braggish about it.” Stacy is referring to the bombing of four black girls while preparing for *167 Sunday school. One might read Nigger and never fully comprehend that black women were chattel, forced to labor under incredible circumstances, denied sexual independence, physically and sexually abused, and regarded as libidinous, lascivious sexual tyrants. In other words, one might never know that black women were (and are) considered “niggers” too. As for the few cases of black women making false claims of racist attacks, which Kennedy highlights, it is ironic that the author does not posit that the actual cases of rapes and sexual violence (against black women by white men-- and women) might be what mires race relations.
The burden of being America's social pariah and procreator of “nigger” image was not only psychologically damaging for black women, but also sparked the unleashing of strange forms of physical and sexual punishment and exploitation. Black women were sought after for sexual relationships in the American South as “white women were scarce and died young.” Nevertheless, black women bore an insurmountable burden to defend themselves from sexual attack and public criticism. In blaming black women for these liaisons, a pathology developed that suggested that black women “ruined” white men and “inspired lust” through their gestures and bearing. Sexual assaults and rapes against black women were decriminalized. Black women were subjects to be acted upon, not citizens protected and recognized by the State. In fact, most often overlooked in our historical rereading of American slavery is the dual function of the black woman slave; she was not only an unpaid laborer, but often also served as concubine. Therefore, they could be and often were, even as girls, sexually abused by white men without the intervention of the law. These sexual encounters were not always passively accepted by white wives or in the white female social community, as Harriet Jacobs retells in *168 her autobiography. At the insistence of wives, slave women or their mulatto children were sold off the plantations, whipped and brined (a procedure commonly referred to as peeling and pickling), or their daily toils made more challenging.
Black women, for the most part, were legally powerless, and therefore could not use the legal system to alter their social situation. Accordingly, black women's resistance involved the very characteristics sometimes associated with “nigger image.” Three examples help to illustrate my point. First, their physical resistance not only implied, but also was a criminal act of insubordination. It also connoted an inability to exercise self-control and restraint, demonstrating that they could not behave in a “lady-like” manner. While perhaps given more scrutiny today, being recognized as a “lady” carried significant social power and conferred status. Paula Giddings carefully documents the punishment borne on women for their resistance, including being “burned at the stake” for possessing devilish intentions.
Perhaps the acute violence against black woman also informs us about the power of “nigger image.” Consider the story of Mary, a free woman who is treated with immense cruelty; the carnal acts which led to her death were not isolated. Upon learning of the lynching and disembodiment of her husband, Turner, eight months pregnant, vowed to have the law respond to her family's misfortune, by having those responsible for her husband's death punished in court. For her outspokenness, a “mob of several hundred men and women determined to ‘teach her a lesson.”’ Litwack writes:
After tying her ankles together, they hung her from a tree, head downward. Dousing her clothes with gasoline, they burned them from her body. While she was still alive, someone used a knife ordinarily reserved for splitting hogs to cut open the woman's abdomen. The infant fell from her womb to the ground and cried briefly, whereupon a member of this Valdosta, Georgia, mob crushed the baby's head beneath his heel. Hundreds of bullets were then fired into Mary Turner's body, completing the work of the mob.
Later, the Associated Press would observe that the mob responded to Turner's “unwise remarks” about her husband's misfortune. The people, according to the article, “in their indignant mood, took exception to her remarks *169 as well as her attitude.”
Second, infanticide and suicide were not entirely uncommon among black women. As an alternative to lifelong subordination and enslavement, African American women took their children's lives and sometimes their own. The Margaret Garner story, made popular by Toni Morrison's Beloved, illuminates that type of desperation and infanticide. However, such acts were understood as not only irrational, but also as acts of theft as within the law they were not killing their own mulatto and black children, but the property of white masters and mistresses.
Third, learning to read and write, which would debunk the myth of intellectual inferiority, was nevertheless a crime against the state. Reading was punishable by thirty-nine lashes, even if the material was religious. Furthermore, even spiritual assembly and preaching were considered forms of civil disobedience with legal consequences in some southern states. Undoubtedly, the psychological and physical implications of bearing “nigger” status for black women were overwhelmingly burdensome, and the physical punishment for resisting was extreme and inhumane.
The psychological and legal implications of black women's slave-linked sexual subordination and denial of motherhood and womanhood have yet to be fully explored within the law and are not provided treatment in Kennedy's critique. This intersection of gender, race, and the law is complex, as it requires not only a certain historical knowledge, but also a contemporary willingness to confront a richly unexplored history. Consider for example, the progeny of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, who for more than a century, sought recognition from the former president's descendants. Jefferson's descendents responded with disbelief and denial, urging deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) tests *170 that later confirmed the president's paternity.
That some historians continue to struggle with the idea that Thomas Jefferson could have had amorous feelings for Hemings perhaps reveals the contemporary power of “nigger image.” Their resistance seems less to do with preserving the image of the president as a man beyond the reproach of adultery (as many presidents were not). Nor does it seem that her age (at fourteen she was almost thirty years younger than Thomas Jefferson when they traveled to Paris) and the fact that she was a minor stir their disbelief. Rather, their strange skepticism seems more closely connected to the idea that Hemings was a black woman. Embodied in her black womaness was the image of something psychologically grotesque, arguably the “nigger.” Historians seem to accept the fact that Thomas Jefferson may have had sex with Hemings, but falter at the hint of paternity and attraction extending beyond the sexual.
The desire of Hemings's grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be recognized may quite possibly have had less to do with notions of financial inheritance, but more with shedding an illegitimacy that forever marked the matriarch in their family and them. Notions of blackness and “niggerness” are turned on their heads when one considers that white men sought the sexual comfort of black women, who through propaganda promoted and distributed by white men, were cast as animal-like. Jefferson himself was guilty of this. These realities were possibly as difficult for white wives to reconcile during slavery and beyond, as they are now, generations removed, for their families. Were white stepmothers oblivious to their husbands' fornication? What sacrifices beyond human bondage did blacks and whites suffer in the American caste system? And perhaps a more compelling question, could centuries of white fathers abandoning “nigger” children have any correlation to current struggles to resolve these types of issues in the black community? At the website entitled “Nigger Jokes,” one such unfortunate, but telling offering asks: “Whats [sic] the difference between the holy grail and a nigger's daddy?” The offered answer: “you may find the grail.”
