From “Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair” by Duke L. Kwon and Gregory Thompson
In response to animalization, African Americans and those who supported their equality worked hard to highlight the achievement of extraordinary African Americans. Though fraught with paternalism and with the pressure to conform to White norms, this strategy was effective. Because of their efforts, the notion of Black animalization became increasingly implausible. The dwindling appeal of Black animalization, however, was also partly caused by White supremacy itself. One of the most horrible features of White supremacy was the degree to which it concealed the rape of African American women. The unforeseen result, however, was the relativization of the physical attributes of “Blackness.” As more and more enslaved children were born bearing the physical features of “Whiteness,” attempts to justify their enslavement by appealing to their animal features became increasingly fraught.
These two developments led to a new American framework for African American identity. Black demonization. In this framework, the inferiority of Blacks is not merely physical but moral. This had long been part of the logic of subjugation. Whites broadly characterized Blacks as lazy, deceptive, and duplicitous. But in the years following the Civil War this framework took an even more destructive turn. Blackness was now seen as dangerous. To understand this turn, it is important to remember that the boundaries of segregation were not simply social but moral. By the nineteenth century, policing these boundaries was an American obsession. This obsession was fueled by the convergence of a number of variables: White supremacist mythologies of blood purity, the resurgence of long-held theological justifications for Black inferiority, and Victorian convictions of feminine delicacy and male honor. The social, and in particular sexual, anxiety created by this convergence is almost impossible to overstate, The threat of Black-White sexuality became the moral offense of the White supremacist order. This view profoundly affected the development of Black identity – especially that of African American males. No longer simply viewed as lazy, they were now considered predatory. White supremacists used these fears of Black predation to reassert the legitimacy of White rule and to reestablish that rule through one of the most terrible eras of racially motivated violence in American history.