Slavery Was Defined by Sexual Violence

Trump doesn’t want you to know that.

Earlier this month America’s fascist dictator Donald Trump said the White House was conducting a review of the Smithsonian in order to determine what authoritarian censorship to put in place. He explained himself with his usual delicacy:

The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been -- Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future… This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the 'HOTTEST' Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.

Trump’s plan is to Make America Great Again by erasing all the parts of the American past that were unpleasant or lacking in “Brightness.” Then we can slither into the future unburdened by the smell of our own slime.

The thing about the past is that, to paraphrase Faulkner, it tends to stick around. Trump himself doesn’t care about the violence and evil of the past; he just cares about his own plans for violence and evil in the present. His concern is that a discussion of our forebearers sins will delegitimize his own movement, which is ideologically committed to the idea that those white male rulers in the past did everything better than the “woke”—by which he means Black people.

In this context, it’s worth reiterating that slavery was extremely bad. It was, in fact, so bad that the worst aspects tend to get glossed over or ignored in K-12 education and even in museums intended for an all-ages audience.

Slavery was built on systematic, unremitting, widely accepted extremes of sexual violence; the South under slavery was a giant rape camp, and our most respected Founding Fathers and the architects of our country were in large part vile rapists and/or abetters of rape. Donald Trump, who has been held liable for sexual assault himself, wants to erase this history, because it casts a poor light (to put it mildly) on his own fascist dreams of a hierarchical, patriarchal, racist American future in which wealthy white men are entitled to the reverence, servility, and bodies of everyone else.

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Sexual Violence and American Slavery

Shannon Eaves’ Sexual Violence and American Slavery, published last year, provides a harrowing account of “how critical the systematic rape of Black women especially and the sexual exploitation of Black people more broadly were to the founding of the nation.” She argues that:

as slavery became ever more indispensable in the rapidly expanding South, it cultivated a rape culture that had implications for more than just enslaved populations but would be consequential for the political, social, and economic lives of everyone—Black and white, enslaved and free—living within the South’s plantation complex.

The nature of this rape culture was straightforward: Black women, in the eyes of Southern custom and law, had no right of any sort to bodily autonomy. That meant that white plantation owners, and really any white people at all, could sexually assault and rape Black women at will.

The implications for Southern society were as sweeping as they were horrifying. Wealthy white men saw Black women as bodies for their own enrichment and pleasure. Sometimes they forced enslaved women and enslaved men to have sex with each other in the interest of producing children who could then be enslaved and forced to work. Sometimes they raped Black women themselves. Sometimes they encouraged their sons to rape Black women as the father’s watched as a kind of sexual initiation.

As Eaves explains, this pervasive culture of horrific sexual violence primarily targeted Black women, but it affected everyone. Black men could also be sexually assaulted, primarily by white men, but also by white women. Black men were forced to have sex with Black women against their will for the benefit of whites. And overseers and other white men would often storm into Black people’s cabins at night and force men to watch as they raped the women. The humiliation of the men was also, and was intended as, a form of sexual subjugation and abuse.

White women were expected to look the other way when white men raped or sexually assaulted Black women. Many suffered silently. Many others reacted with jealousy and violence, further victimizing and tormenting the Black women their husbands were assaulting. Solomon Northrup in 12 Years a Slave reports that his enslaver, Edwin Epps, harassed and raped a Black woman named Patsey. Edwin’s wife Mary embraced racist animus and blamed Patsey rather than her husband. Mary would throw broken bottles and pieces of wood at Patsey, or would demand Edwin whip her. She even tried to get Northrup to murder Patsey, asking him to “bury her body in some lonely place in the margin of the swamp.”

White men’s hearts

Trump would perhaps be pleased to hear that some scholars have tried to qualify and mitigate the horrors of sexual violence in the south by arguing that some relationships between enslavers and Black women were loving, or at least were mutual to some degree.

Eaves quotes Marxist (and eventually conservative) historian Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll, in which he argued that most white men “who began by taking a slave girl in an act of sexual exploitation ended by loving her and the children she bore.” This is the lens through which most accounts prefer to view the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a girl he had enslaved. Scholars believe that Jefferson began to rape Hemings when she was 14 and he was 44.

Eaves doesn’t elaborate on the problems with Genovese’s argument. But her entire book can be seen as a refutation of his view. It is certainly possible that some white men had or developed some level of affection for the Black women and girls they raped and assaulted. The question is, though, why is Genovese primarily focused on the experiences and inner lives of the white rapists? Shouldn’t the focus be on the experiences of the people enduring violence and injustice, rather than on the inner lives of the perpetrators? Why is Genovese focused on the “loving” the slavers feel, rather on the way that, as Eaves says, “the terrorism of rape” solidified slaver power by “fortifying their claims of absolute authority over enslaved people’s bodies”?

Part of rape culture (as Eaves and many other writers have made clear) is the ideological understanding of, and the public discussion of, sexual violence. Eaves notes that in the south, white men often discussed their rape of Black women as a “sin” or a “weakness” which their wives and families should “forgive”.

Eaves points out that Jefferson inveighed against the evils of interracial sex and claimed that white men degraded themselves by sleeping with (or assaulting) Black women. But, Eaves writes, “White people’s social commentary against interracial sex failed to change white men’s behavior because the critiques were strategically accompanied by caveats meant to excuse interracial sex in certain instances.”

White men had absolute power over Black people and could do with Black people as they saw fit. If they raped Black women, it was framed as a forgivable weakness, or the actual facts of agency were flipped around, and Black women were blamed for being hypersexual tempting Jezebels. Or, per Genovese, relationships of disproportionate power and sexual coercion were reframed as evidence of love and equality.

Whose story do we tell?

Again, as Genovese and Trump demonstrate, the excuses and explanations and deflections that shielded white men from accountability during slavery are still in many ways in place. The vicious mechanics of rape culture under slavery remain hidden. Thomas Jefferson is not generally thought of first and foremost as a rapist. Discussions of reparations are not generally discussed as an issue of racist disinheritance—even though there is obvious visual evidence everywhere in this country that Black people are the children and siblings of people who have substantial generational wealth.

More sweepingly, you can’t both revere the Founders and honestly contemplate the system of violent rape which those Founders knowingly installed and buttressed. Perhaps some of the Founders believed that slavery was evil and that it would eventually be abolished. But those same Founders also knew that as they signed the Constitution, Black women were suffering systematic, constant, daily nightmarish violence. All the Founders knew of what Harriet Jacobs called “the sad epoch in the life of a slave girl”—the time when young Black girls went through puberty and came to the attention of their waiting enslavers. Jacobs herself was first raped by her enslaver, James Norcom, when she was 15. Norcom studied medicine with Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers.

Trump, MAGA, and Republicans offer a vision of America in which we embrace traditional hierarchies; white rich men are entitled, we are told, to rule over everyone else, as it was of old. MAGA does not want anyone to think too deeply about what actually happened in those old days because to do so would make certain facts about the future, and the present, unendurable. As just one example, knowing as we do what happened in the great prison camps of the South, we can be fairly sure (even without human rights reports) that ICE agents are currently raping and sexually assaulting prisoners. The history of the US shows very clearly that if you kidnap, enslave, and demean a subjugated population, sexual violence follows.

“If we are to better understand rape culture in the present,” Eaves, writes, “we must begin with slavery and the role that the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of Black people, especially Black women, played in the founding and perpetuation of the nation’s political, economic, and social landscapes.” By the same token, if MAGA wants to erase the workings of rape culture—of misogyny, racism, violence and entitlement—in the present, they must begin by erasing the memory of what role sexual violence played in the nation’s political, economic, and social landscape. The assault on the Smithsonian—and on universities—is meant to silence those who suffered in the past the better to ensure that suffering, and silence, in the present can go on, an untrammeled, endless, unspoken panorama of sadism and power.