Summary

Chapter 3 continues with a section on the fears of miscegenation. The racist propaganda machine worked overtime during Redemption/Jim Crow to declare race mixing an abomination. Black men were depicted as rapists, with segregation the required solution to protect white women's purity. These same stereotypes were used to justify lynchings—a black man could be accused of raping (or even simply giving a suggestive look to) a white woman and he would be executed, hung from a tree by a roving band of white vigilantes. Gates points out that because of DNA analysis, we now know that one in three African American males possess DNA linking them to a white ancestor. The implication is that black women were being raped by white slave owners. Gates includes two lithograph prints featuring images of black men leering suggestively at white women, grotesque caricatures of society's...