african+american

=**African Americans and Sexuality** =  By: Charlotte Ganong



History of African American Sexuality
 An important point in history with which to discuss African Americans and sexuality is the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and the enslavement that stemmed from that. When Westerners first came across the African Coast, they found that the African people would enslave prisoners of war from other villages. However, their enslavement was not as brutal as enslavement within the Americas would soon become. When Westerners began trading with the Africans, they would trade goods for slaves and so began the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. From the very beginning of the slave trade, sexuality was a large part of the humiliation that slave traders put African people through. In order to check for disease, they were stripped naked and were often sold that way. The hardships of slaves' lives included physical violence, sexual exploitation, and verbal abuse that they were forced to tolerate. The role of a slave in American society was one of an inferior social status and an inadequate sexuality.  [citation needed!] 

White Men's Perceptions of Enslaved Women
 Within the Americas, African and African American women were believed by many white people to be overly sexual beings. Jennifer Morgan discusses European men’s’ perceptions of African American women’s’ bodies in the 1500s to 1770s in her article entitled “Some Could Suckle Over their Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology”. The men would call the African women savages so as to distance them from any kind of familiarity that they may have had. They would also focus on the women’s’ physical features, such as their breasts in order to humiliate them. As Jennifer Morgan describes, “male travelers to Africa and the Americas contributed to a European discourse on black womanhood. Femaleness evoked a certain element of desire, but travelers depicted black women as simultaneously un-womanly and marked by a reproductive value dependent on their sex”. With that, we can see that the European men found the African American women desirable, but were forced to call them “savages” because it contradicted white female respectability. In addition, Morgan describes a slaveholder, Richard Ligon's, account of black women, "Taking the female body as a symbol of the deceptive beauty and ultimate savagery of blackness, Ligon allowed his readers to dally with him among beautiful black women, only seductively to disclose their monstrosity over the course of the narrative". This again depicts black women as picturesque beings, but ultimately  [word missing?]  savagery in the minds of the white men. In addition, the July 21, 1778 issue of __The North Carolina Gazette__ lists advertisements for runaway slaves. The advertisements are often derogatory and degrading and portray the runaway in a very sexualized manner. An advertisement written by John Collins about his runaway named Dilch describes her as, “a tall, lusty, black Wench”. The term “lusty "  creates the idea in the reader’s mind that this woman is an overtly sexual being, which many slaveholders believed was commonplace for the black woman. The runaway named Edith as portrayed in the runaway slave advertisements of the __North Carolina Gazette__ is described as "full breasted, has remarkable Lips" in the advertisement written by William Gregory. This ultimately demonstrates how her master finds her physical appearance appealing even though she is a black woman and depicted in society as a lesser being.

 <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Female slaves were exposed to sexual exploitation on an everyday basis. A master could sexually abuse his slaves at any point in time and they often did. In addition, because female slaves were not in control of their own bodies, if they were to have a child, the master could sell it away. Also, if a female slave had a child, that child would follow the status of the mother and become a slave themselves right from birth. The sexual encounters between slave and master also caused jealousy by many slaveholders' wives. This brought about greater abuse against the enslaved woman. Enslaved women were placed in the most undesirable situations that enslaved women were house servants. <span style="color: rgb(255, 0, 255); font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[fix grammar] <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Peter Kolchin explains the unwelcome situations that enslaved women were forced into, “The close contact that existed between masters and slaves worked special hardship on slave women, who were vulnerable to sexual as well as labor exploitation”. There were most likely very few enslaved women that were safe from unwanted sexual advances in their everyday life. As Kolchin explains, the matter of domestic work came to be associated with sexual harassment and helplessness, “often, slaves who had sex with whites did so against their will, whether the victims of outright rape or of the powerlessness that made resistance to advances futile and the use of force on such advances unnecessary”. David Gaspar further explains the slave owners’ reasoning behind sexual harassment as a form of domination, “for slave women, sexual harassment was the ultimate oppression; it has been variously termed ‘a psycho-physical dimension [of oppression] that male slaves did not experience’, a threat to women’s ‘self respect and their emotional and autonomy’ and a means of bestializing her and breaking her resistance, violating her only area of possible autonomy’”. The sexual exploitation experienced by enslaved women is also prevalent when they were stripped naked before they were beaten or whipped, when they were forced to commit sexual acts, and whey they were stripped naked for the amusement of the white community. For example, Mary Prince, a slave of the West Indies describes her owner as having made her wash him on multiple occasions. Another cause for much of the sexual abuse imposed upon enslaved women was the widespread erroneous belief that black women were naturally promiscuous. This became an extensive justification for the rape and sexual harassment of enslaved women.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> African Americans and Sexuality Today
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Although circumstances have changed since the days of the enslaved Africans, the sexuality of African Americans is still scrutinized. The idea of the defenseless white female and the black male rapist still exists today. In addition, female respectability is often still associated with white women. However, this idea has lessened greatly over time.