Jamelle Bouie: Rape as unjustified justification for racist violence

Jamelle Bouie, Special to National Post | June 19, 2015 | Last Updated: Jun 19 2:32 PM ET, Source

Charleston, S.C., shooting suspect Dylann Storm Roof, second from left, is escorted from the Shelby Police Department in Shelby, N.C., Thursday, June 18, 2015.

Amid his Wednesday night rampage at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina—killing nine people—21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof reportedly told churchgoers, “You rape our women, and you’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”

Make any list of anti-black terrorism in the United States, and you’ll also have a list of attacks justified by the specter of black rape. The Tulsa race riot of 1921—when white Oklahomans burned and bombed a prosperous black section of the city—began after a black teenager was accused of attacking, and perhaps raping, a white girl in an elevator. The Rosewood massacre of 1923, in Florida, was also sparked by an accusation of rape. And most famously, 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered after allegedly making sexual advances on a local white woman.

Library of Congress

A shadow of a lynched man superimposed over a crowd of people in a photomontage created between 1920 and 1940. Rape was often used as an excuse for violence against blacks.

It’s worth a look at the second part of Dylann Roof’s claim, which informs the first: “You’re taking over our country.” Behind the myth of black rapists was an elemental fear of black autonomy, often expressed by white Southern leaders who unhesitatingly connected black political and economic power to sexual liaison with whites. “We of the South have never recognized the right of the Negro to govern white men, and we never will,” said Sen. Benjamin Tillman on the Senate floor in 1900. “We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”

This fear took its most violent form in the years after the Civil War—when blacks won their freedom—but it’s been with us for centuries. Throughout the antebellum period, whites lived in terror of a challenge to the racial order and believed that black freedom would lead to a world of “Negro domination” where they lived as slaves, or worse. Likewise, during the 1864 election, Northern Democrats attacked Abraham Lincoln as a “black Republican” who sought to debase the white race with miscegenation. Similar accusations were used during the civil rights movement, and in the North, urban whites justified residential segregation—in patterns that still exist—as necessary protection from the violent, sexually aggressive black criminal.

It’s tempting to treat Dylann Storm Roof as a Southern problem, the violent collision of neo-Confederate ideology and a permissive gun culture. The truth, however, is that his fear—of black power and of black sexuality—belongs to America as much as it does the South.

Sometimes.

Wondering what God was thinking when he made people of different races-din he not know there will be people like redux, caribj and dylann roof.

But God, did place each race within their own borders. However, Greed, Gold and the Euro version of God transgress that precept.

God loves colors-juss look at the beauty of flowers. Colors in magnificent. 

u are a primitive . . . not far removed ideologically from the Dylann Roofs of the world

the limiting element in your 'dangerousness' is the fact that you were not born white

115 years passed. U think the white man going to change his point of view. And he ain talking about only blacks. The italians and everybody else who are not anglos are included. The whites consider all the races in America are visitors. That means, dey duh juss like dey did to the japanese. 

You sound very much like Prashad with that each race within its own borders shyte. Yuh want yuh own country bai?