Much More Rape Under Oppression

Rape is one of many negative consequences of systems of oppression such as slavery and near slavery/segregation.  Lifelong or generations of oppression touch every area of life.  Oppression creates individual, family, community and  cultural dysfunction.  It creates poverty, illiteracy, etc.

There are no specific statistics on how many white male oppressors raped black slave women during slavery times.  But judging by the color of skin, it is quite obvious that lots of white genes were implanted in the black gene pool.  This racial mixing was due primarily to rape, not consensual sex.

I would guesstimate that for every black male rape of white women, there were 10 white male rapes of black women.   But the propaganda war has been won by whites as they have successfully portrayed black males as the dangerous, criminal ones.  In reality, throughout history white male oppressors have been the dangerous, criminal sex fiends.

A 2010 book by historian Danielle L. McGuire titled "At The Dark End Of The Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance---a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power."  This fine book tells the story of "how it was, in part, started in protest against the ritualistic rape of black women by white males who used economic intimidation, sexual violence, and terror to derail the freedom movement."

In 1994, Gunnar Myrdal wrote: "Sex is the principle around which the whole structure of segregation . . . is organized."

"The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, often heralded as the opening scene of the civil rights movement, was in many ways the last act of a decade long struggle to protect women, like Taylor, from sexualized violence and rape."

"The sexual exploitation of black women by white men had its roots in slavery and continued throughout the better part of the twentieth century."

"Fannie Lou Hamer, a forty-three-year-old sharecropper and freedom fighter from the Mississippi Delta, knew that sexual terror was common in the history of the South.  Hamer's grandmother, Liza Bramlett, spoke often of the 'horrors of slavery.' including stories about 'how the white folks would do her.' .. . . Twenty of the twenty-three children Bramlett gave birth to were the products of rape.  At some point, Hamer's mother must have decided death---hers or someone else's---was preferable to her own mother's experience.  Fannie Lou Hamer remembered her mother packing a nine-millimeter Luger into their covered lunch bucket, just in case a white man decided to attack her or her children in the cotton fields."

For more on women's perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement, I recommend the following books:  My Life, My Legacy, My Love by Coretta Scott King; Freedom Song by Mary King; Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement.