Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations by Pinar Batur & Joe R. Feagin

Author:Pinar Batur & Joe R. Feagin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

12.9 Rape

During the era of legal segregation, recurring sexual assaults against African American women were common knowledge in the white and African American communities. Historically, the research of social scientists has generally failed to document thoroughly these frequent assaults on African American women by white men. That research is more likely to focus on the frequent allegations of rape of white women by black men. However, a more common problem historically lies in the fact that African American families regularly faced the raping or otherwise sexual threats against their young daughters, mothers, and sons by white men, including those with local power and influence (Feagin 2006: ix–x, 74–81).

One of our respondents in her late seventies recalls a family story of rape:

In later years, my mother and her sisters would never tell us anything but I have. …a cousin, I called her Aunt Bell, but she was really a cousin. …She told me, that this white prostitute across the street, Ms. Ann, my Auntie Celeste worked for her and she was over there working one day and this [white] man, that owned a store a block up the street, came to see Ms. Ann. …He was married. Ms. Ann wasn’t there, he raped my Aunt and my Aunt got pregnant and when she got pregnant she told them [her family] what happened, she told them that he had raped her that day and they went to talk to him, and you know what they did? They made her leave town. They said you have to send her out of town, and my Aunt said that is what they did to Blacks. The white men would rape the Black girls, and if the Black girls got pregnant the families would have to send them out of town to have the babies, and the like, so that’s what happened in that situation in the family…She would tell me other families it happened to, in [names town]. …Our family wasn’t one that told a lot of things. You see, they wanted to hide everything that’s what they wanted to do. My mother or my aunt would never have told me about you know her situation they would have gone to their grave. Because I remember when Aunt Bell told me mama knew she was talking about something and then Aunt Bell told me, later on she told me [my mama said to her], “You shouldn’t have been telling them all of that” So they didn’t want you to know what happened.

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