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Continents Connect
Power Struggle
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Beyond Race
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'The 18th century was the best time to be white, because in a society like this, white equalled power'
Black life in the Caribbean was shaped by slavery. Africans in vast numbers provided labour for the plantations as part of a system conceived in and maintained by violence.
For slave women however, the threats were different. White men in the plantation world viewed slave women as easy sexual pickings. From their earliest sexual encounters, it was an accepted custom that sexual favours were part of the benefits of owning slaves. Slave women could do little to resist the blandishments or the physical aggression. Slave captains did try to curtail their crews' sexual attacks on the chained Africans below decks, and sometimes planters defended slave women, but the dominant story was one of predatory sexual violence.
But equally unequivocal was the unacceptability of sexual relations between black men and white women. In every slave community, local law and customs were fiercely punitive against such relations. The fear of black sexuality was almost a general psychosis in the plantation world.
Even a hint of sexuality towards a white woman would bring abominable punishment and slaves who engaged in sex with a white woman were killed. Women who dared declare affection for black men were renounced and cast out from local society. Back in Britain there were growing numbers of permanent black-white relations and marriages – Equiano for example married a woman from Cambridgeshire – but in the Caribbean plantation culture even a hint of sexual relations was thought to be corrosive.
'Sex was not just for personal gratification. It was the way the white males controlled slaves in all sort of ways'
The issue of black-white sexuality touched on deep social and personal fears which existed long before Atlantic slavery. But slavery gave such fears substance and purpose. In a world where slaves were dehumanised as chattels it was inconceivable to admit the possibility that the most intimate human relations could develop between black and white.
There was also a collective fear that black men would revenge themselves of the indignities heaped on their womenfolk by raping white women at any given moment.
White tension over slave revolts and discontent was fuelled by sexual fears and fanned by rumour and gossip. In reality, such sexual violations rarely took place. But the existence of such fear provides a powerful indicator of the deep anxiety about black-white sexual relations.
Latest worries of black rape endured long after the end of slavery. In the American South, it provided a recurring excuse for lynching throughout the 19th century and even as late as the 1960s. It had in effect become a 'folk panic', justifying violence and humiliation against black men on both sides of the Atlantic.
What lay behind much of this aggression was a simple matter of power. For centuries, whites had exercised extraordinary power of life and death over millions of Africans and their descendants. Sexual dominance and exploitation was only one aspect of a much broader and violent exploitation.
Contemporary attitudes about sexual relations between black and white have been forged from these and other complex historical forces. In fact, without confronting this legacy, is it even possible to free ourselves from the taint of the past?