Book 11, pages 204-206

Please note: this historical chapter in my book I myself find less interesting today where I am more interested in the many parallels between the present day American ghettoization of blacks and the similar European ghettoization of Muslims immigrants. But for some American readers it might be of interest.

What more than anything gives away these liberals as mere philosophers of a new master-slave system is when you occasionally hear them fantasize about black people's sexuality. While master-slave society has done its utmost to nurture a threatening sexual image of the black man originating in various white economic desires, it has spared no efforts in continuing the devaluation of the black woman started in chattel slavery. Probably no other nation has let a whole race of women go through centuries of systematic and often daily rape - and been so successful afterwards in putting the entire blame on the victim herself.

Everything was done to dehumanize and "break" the black woman by selling and flogging her naked in a puritan society as a demonstration of contempt for her sexual integrity - a practice which I found as widespread today in stigmatizing white jokes. To abuse her as much as the white man has (with the white woman then attacking her for seducing her husband) it is necessary in order to avoid feeling guilt to develop an enormous disdain for her. As always with rape-victims, myths were fostered about her bad, morally loose character, while she was in addition given false credit for "animal-like" sexuality in order to justify the continuing attacks on black womanhood attacks which decreased in their most violent form in the 1950's, but which I often saw continuing in various forms under submissive relationships with white male bosses. The depreciation of the black woman has so permeated the psyches of white America that the stereotyping of her in various ways as a "low" woman in TV and media is not even noticed by whites. As in all oppression, blacks have internalized this systematic devaluation which represented a calculated method of social control by the white man.

Whites, guilty about selling children away from mothers and forcing enormous devotion out of self-disdaining nannies for their white children, tried to justify their cruelty by stereotyping the black woman as inordinately strong, able to endure unusual amounts of hardship and pain to the point of being inhuman, - a white image reinforced by seeing the victim rear her own children with harshness. I didn't find it qualitatively more harsh than that of poor whites.

The little difference in degree stems from whites belonging not to an eternal underclass of rejects, but to a lower class with hope for upward mobility, which children are the first to feel. In Africa I only saw harsh parental discipline in areas with strong white penetration.

Chattel slavery's propaganda about the pure white feminine "lady" and the subsequent cult of sacred white womanhood continues in white advertising's equally destructive effect. In order to survive white capitalism's psychological terror, and even in some cases to "pass" as a white, the black woman began making herself white with skin-lightening crème and straightening her frizzy hair in a complicated and painful process.

In addition to the negative effect on the black woman's self-image, these white beauty ideals may have had a divisive impact on the family. The quarrels I so often heard in underclass homes let me feel that the black man has had his view of women effected by society's ideals. Black feminists even suggest that a government report's labeling of black women as "matriarchs," similar to "Aunt Jeminas" and "Amazons" of earlier times, may have increased black men's hostility towards black women. What depressed me most was not the one third of black families having only one parent present, but what I saw in many of those underclass homes still intact - and what this spells out for the future of the black family. Nothing hurt me more than hearing white society's "You ain't shit, nigger" constantly reverberating between these unhappy and powerless partners. The frightening aspect I constantly saw of unemployed black men "hitting on" "their" devalued women just as raping slave masters and Jim Crow whites have done for centuries, reflects the inevitable lack of love and respect in a whole society whose values must be such as to approve or ignore the existence of slavery within it.

One of my privileges as a traveler in a society based on the biggest institutionalized gang rape in history, women constantly remind me, was being male. In black Africa I saw European women hitch-hiking everywhere - no one reporting any problems. Seeing no women hitch-hiking in American ghettos (and only rarely anywhere in America), I could not help feeling to what extent America has been molded by slavery - even though violence and sexism did not start with slavery.