{"id":153,"date":"2021-02-28T22:14:42","date_gmt":"2021-03-01T03:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/?p=153"},"modified":"2021-02-28T22:16:20","modified_gmt":"2021-03-01T03:16:20","slug":"stuck-on-the-rape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/2021\/02\/28\/stuck-on-the-rape\/","title":{"rendered":"Stuck on the \u201cRape\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We\u2019ve had a lot of great discussions about Wright\u2019s depiction of sexual assault in Native Son<\/em> and our experience with the violence against women overshadowing the message of the novel. I was bothered by Wright\u2019s explanation in \u201cHow Bigger was Born\u201d when he writes, \u201cSo volatile and tense are these relations that if a Negro rebels against rule and taboo, he is lynched and the reason for the lynching is usually called \u201crape,\u201d that catchword which has garnered such vile connotations that it can raise a mob anywhere in the South pretty quickly, even today\u201d (438). The use of quotations here seems to imply that the rape in the novel was not grounded in the real experience of the novel, but served as more of a symbol of the targeted attacks placed against Black men. Wright continues to connect rape as an experience felt by men instead of against women in the line, “But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one\u2019s back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wright\u2019s use of sexual assault, although problematic, shed light on the larger conversation of sexual politics of race and rape in the 20th Century. He depicts the mob vengeance on any Bigger as a defense of white virginity and sexuality as an excuse to enact violence on Black men. Baldwin discusses the racial tension within sexual violence in, \u201cEverybody’s Protest Novel\u201d that, \u201cwithin this web of lust and fury, black and white can only thrust and counter-thrust, long for each other\u2019s slow exquisite death.\u201d Angela Davis expands on this idea in her essay \u201cRape, Racism, and the Myth of the Black Rapist writing, \u201cThere were the circumstances which spawned the myth of the Black rapist\u2014for the rape charge turned out to be the most powerful of several attempts to justify the lynching of Black people.\u201d In the same way that Mr. Dalton hides his involvement in aiding systematically racist structures behind performative acts of charity, white men have defended their brutality towards Black men behind the famous justification: \u201cThey\u2019re raping our women.\u201d The public\u2019s fear and media sensationalism of this is also portrayed in The Birth of a Nation <\/em>by having a white woman choose death over the rape of a Black man that must be defended by the heroics of the Ku Klux Klan. This also connects to our discussion of the removal and agitation of Black male sexuality from film. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The false accusations of Black men raping white women can be seen in numerous cases from Emmett Till, the Groveland Four, the Central Park Five, and many others. Wright draws on this reality in \u201cHow Bigger was Born\u201d when he writes, \u201cAny Negro who has lived in the North of the South knows the times without number he has heard of some Negro boy being picked up on the streets and carted off to jail and charged with \u201crape\u201d (455). However with “rape” in quotation marks, Wright applies this connotation of a false allegation it to Bigger’s encounter with Mary where intent to rape was present. Bigger’s actions coincide with the historic and damaging trope that Black men can’t resist their sexual urges towards white women. The implication of the rape\u2019s portrayal is complicated by Rashid Johnson\u2019s decision to remove the rape scenes in his 2019 film adaptation of Native Son<\/em> because the production team felt \u201cIt would\u2019ve hijacked his character. That\u2019s not who he is.” I am left to consider what effect removing the rape would have on my perception of the themes of the novel and my humanization of Bigger. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019ve had a lot of great discussions about Wright\u2019s depiction of sexual assault in Native Son and our experience with the violence against women overshadowing the message of the novel. I was bothered by Wright\u2019s explanation in \u201cHow Bigger was Born\u201d when he writes, \u201cSo volatile and tense are these relations that if a Negro … Continue reading Stuck on the \u201cRape\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3920,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[471414],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-native-son"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3920"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":156,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}