Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy

4. Scientific Racism and the Threat of Sexual Predation

four Scientific Racism and the Threat of Sexual Predation On Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis, Hosea Williams, Amelia Boynton Robinson, and nearly six hundred other civil rights marchers confronted the Dallas County, Alabama, Sheriff’s Department and a contingent of Alabama state troopers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.1 At issue was African Americans’ right to vote and the fact that three weeks earlier a state trooper had shot and killed a young black man, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who had dared to demand legal protection to exercise that right.2 A hundred and fifty deputies and troopers, some of whom were on horseback, attacked the unarmed assembly with canisters of C-4 tear gas, bull whips, and billy clubs. More than ninety marchers were treated at Good Samaritan Hospital and Burwell Infirmary for gashes, fractures, gas burns, and broken teeth. Seventeen were hospitalized, including Lewis, who suffered severe head wounds, and Robinson, who was nearly gassed to death. Two weeks after “Bloody Sunday,” with their way cleared by an order from Federal District Court Judge Frank Johnson, several thousand marchers proceeded under the leadership of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to take their cause to the governor.3 Before they reached their destination two more protesters lay dead, but 25,000 streamed onto the capitol grounds to confront the civil authorities. The antiblack racism that John Lewis and Amelia Boynton Robinson and all the other marchers stared in the face on Bloody Sunday—racism official, armed, and mounted on horseback—was a direct descendent of the scientific racism that had taken shape a century earlier. Among the claims it made were these: (1) blacks must not have civil status equal to that of whites (specifically, they must not Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America 142 vote, serve on juries, or hold public office); (2) blacks must not attend school with or have social access to whites; (3) blacks must not hold positions of authority over whites in industry, business, or institutions of higher education; and (4) blacks must not be permitted to marry or engage in any form of sexual activity with whites. The reasons offered for these prohibitions rested on the race science of the nineteenth century, which included such propositions as these: (1) black bodies physically contaminate the spaces they occupy, smell bad, are messy and disorganized, and carry disease; (2) blacks are intellectually inferior to whites, have poor judgment, and lack foresight, which renders them irresponsible and impulsive; (3) blacks are lustful and devoid of self-control; and (4) one drop of black blood introduced into a white bloodline will corrupt that bloodline forever, killing or stunting offspring and potentially wiping out the line altogether. In the early decades of the twentieth century, these propositions were regularly articulated in public, and not infrequently they found their way into law and public policy as well as the scholarly and popular presses. By 1965, after three decades of public contestation and scientific debate, they had begun to sound more like irrational assertions than like the objective conclusions of well-supported scientific arguments. But they had been just that: reasoned conclusions resting comfortably on an edifice of empirical data and generally accepted scientific theory. The racism we now know as “race prejudice” and “bigotry” was scientific racism minus its scientific warrant, clinging to the political and social world like the shells that locusts have left behind. From the perspective of the marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, the powers they were confronting were enormous and terrifying. In fact, however, those brutal forces, formidable as they were, were but a meager remnant of the awesome constellation of power networks that had framed, enforced, and furthered those propositions in previous decades, a constellation that included scientific theories and data that not only justified but demanded white domination. This chapter will reconstruct that science and examine its role in shaping modern racist public policy and social practice. It will also tell the story of how the figure of the homosexual arose within those same racist scientific discourses and science-influenced social practices and will show the close kinship between the myths of the black rapist and the homosexual predator. 143 Scientific Racism and the Threat of Sexual Predation The Rising Tide of White World Supremacy Sixty-five years before Bloody Sunday, at the turn of the twentieth...