Crime as Structured Action

Gender, Race, Class, and Crime in the Making

James W. Messerschmidt

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781506338804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The author of this volume skillfully demonstrates that a vital component to understanding crime is to be able to view it as more than a single activity.

James W. Messerschmidt argues that crime operates subtly through a complex series of gender, race and class practices and these interwoven elements must be seen as part of all social existence, not viewed independently.

Chapter 1

---

Lynchers

---

In the 1924 edition of Criminology, Edwin Sutherland (1924, pp. 239–249) devoted 10 pages to the crime of lynching (the unlawful assault, killing, or both of an accused person by mob action). Sutherland (p. 239) was concerned especially with the fact that lynching, although occasionally employed during slavery, became a systematic event in the South between 1865 and 1900. Sutherland (pp. 242–243) offered two insightful and significant reasons for instantaneous white mob violence. The first, and to Sutherland (p. 242) the “underlying” reason, is “race prejudice or a feeling of white superiority.” In particular, when African Americans were “emancipated” from their subordinate slave position, “great antagonism” by whites took the form of lynching (p. 242). Yet according to Sutherland (p. 243), lynching occurred for a second reason: as “compensation for the sex habits of white men in relation to negro women” (p. 243). Recognizing the widespread rape of African American women by white men, Sutherland (p. 243) continues, “The white woman must be shown to be infinitely different from the negro woman and lynching of the negro rapist is one way of doing this.”

Through his seeming ability to transcend the intellectual climate of his time, Sutherland points to the importance of inequality in what today we call race relations (e.g., maintenance of white supremacy) and gender relations (e.g., sexuality, and its relation to masculinity and femininity). Clearly, Sutherland perceived the theoretical importance of race, gender, and sexuality to a proper understanding of lynching.¹ Although it is not surprising that Sutherland recognized the importance of “race prejudice,” it is significant, and possibly surprising to many, that he underscores the “sex habits of white men” and their relation to African American and white women as well as the alleged “negro rapist.” Yet this is as far as his thoughts reached and they demonstrate the limitations one would expect from pre-feminist work. The social and historical context in which Sutherland wrote embodied a relative absence of sociological/criminological theorizing on gender, race, sexuality, and crime.

Nevertheless, Sutherland was clearly on to something. Although asserting the importance of the “sex habits of white men” and their relation to the alleged “negro rapist” to understanding the phenomenon of lynching, no investigation of the relationship among gender, sexuality, and lynching has emerged in criminology. Indeed, the topic is ignored altogether in recent sociological/criminological accounts.²

In what follows, I take seriously Sutherland’s assertion and argue that a complete understanding of lynching is possible only through a comprehension of the interrelation among race, masculinity, and sexuality. As argued later, during Reconstruction and its immediate aftermath, lynching was a response to the perceived erosion of white male dominance and was an attempt to recreate what white supremacist men imagined to be a lost status of unchallenged white masculine supremacy. Disguised in chivalric intimations, that is, as retribution for the alleged rape of a white woman by an African American man, lynching enforced white supremacy as well as gender hierarchies between men and women and among men. Thus, the specific masculine meanings constructed through particular conceptions of race and the way in which violence as practice is related to those meanings and conceptions are analyzed in this chapter. As such, I argue that only through analysis of racial masculinities, in particular, the social construction of white supremacist masculinity, can we make coherent sense of lynching and other forms of white male mob violence at this time in U.S. history.

Slavery

Slavery legally bound all blacks to the patriarchal “white father” and cut slaves off from all birthrights they may have enjoyed as members of a community. Male and female slaves were without social status or political and economic power; they could not own property, earn a living for themselves, or participate in public and political life. Slavery conveyed to all blacks that the fullness of humanity would never be available to them and overtly sought to reduce them to dependent, passive, childlike characters. In short, slavery produced a white supremacist discourse and practice that declared the physical, intellectual, and moral superiority of whites over blacks.

The master-slave relation constructed a masculine power hierarchy in which the “white master” was the representative of hegemonic masculinity. Indeed, powerful hegemonic masculinity was associated with white male supremacy, inasmuch as citizenship rights meant “manhood” rights that inhered to white males only (Bederman, 1995). Cultural ideology and discourse claimed that the most “advanced” races had evolved the most pronounced gender differences. A white “civilized” planter woman (the mistress) represented the highest level of womanhood—delicate, spiritual, exempt from heavy labor, ensconced in and dedicated to home. A white “civilized” planter man (the master) was the most manly creature ever evolved—firm of character and self-controlled, who provided for his family and steadfastly protected “his” woman and children from the rigors of the workaday world. Indeed, the symbols of hegemonic masculinity during slavery were whiteness; heading a heterosexual family; ownership of land, slaves, or both; literacy; and participation in political affairs. In particular, politics was extremely salient to white hegemonic masculinity in 19th-century U.S. slave society. Paula Baker (1984, p. 628) explains as follows:

Parties and electoral politics united all white men, regardless of class or other differences, and provided entertainment, a definition of manhood, and the basis for a male ritual. Universal white manhood suffrage implied that because all [white] men shared the chance to participate in electoral politics, they possessed political equality. The right to vote was something important that [white] men held in common.

Participation in politics, then, was an essential practice for defining white men (hegemonic masculinity) in relation to black men (subordinate masculinity) and to all women. Indeed, political parties were fraternal organizations that bonded white men through their whiteness—it bound men to others like themselves. The notions of “womanhood” and “blackness” served as negative referents that united all white men. Politics, however, made gender and race the most significant divisions—white men saw beyond class differences and found common ground with other white men (Baker, 1984, p. 630). Participation in politics was an essential practice that triggered and consolidated racial and masculine identities; it was a resource for doing “white masculinity.” Slavery institutionalized black men as “Other” and restricted male slaves from engaging in hegemonic masculine practices (Thorpe, 1967, p. 159). Because “whiteness” was the standard against which all else was measured, white men and white masculinity were constructed in contrast to subordinate “Other” men and “Other” masculinities.

Moreover, according to scientific and popular ideology, the “savage races” had not evolved the proper gender differences that whites possessed, and this is precisely what made them savage (Russett, 1989, pp. 130–155). Indeed, slavery denoted black males and females as more alike than different—“genderless as far as the slaveholders were concerned” (Davis, 1983, p. 5). In the middle of the 19th century, seven of eight slaves (men and women alike) were field workers, both profitable labor-units for the master. Predictably, black slaves did not construct the gender differences of the white planter class. The race and gender division of labor and power in slavery caused black women not to construct themselves as the “weaker sex” or the “housewife,” and not to construct black men as the “family head” and the “family provider” (Davis, 1983, p. 8). Because “woman” was synonymous with “housewife” and “man” synonymous with “provider,” the practices of black slaves could not conform to hegemonic gender ideologies and, therefore, were considered gender anomalies. In other words, black male slaves were defined as less than men and black female slaves less than women (Bederman, 1995, p. 20).

This construction of racial boundaries through gender also had its sexual component. White southerners differentiated themselves from “savages” by attributing to the latter a sexual nature that was more sensual, aggressive, and beastlike than that of whites. Influenced by the Elizabethan image of “the lusty Moor,” white southerners embraced the notion that blacks were “lewd, lascivious, and wanton people” (D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988, p. 35). Both their gender similarity and animallike sexuality, white supremacist discourse declared, proved blacks were a subordinate species; therefore, it was natural that races must not mix and that whites must dominate blacks. Both scientific and popular thought supported the view that whites were civilized and rational, but that blacks were savage, irrational, and sensual (Jordan, 1968; Takaki, 1982). Indeed, it was this notion of race corporeality that defined inequality between whites and blacks and constructed what Frankenberg (1993) recently labeled an “essentialist racist discourse.” Such a discourse constructs blacks as “fundamentally Other than white people: different, inferior, less civilized, less human, more animal, than whites” (p. 61). The articulation and deployment of essentialist racism as the dominant discourse for thinking about race marks the moment when race is constructed as difference: alleged white biological superiority justifies economic, political, and social inequalities in slavery.

Not surprising, social and legal regulations, such as prohibiting marriage between black men and white women, affecting interracial sexuality served to produce and cement racial identities. Slavery “heightened planter insistence on protecting white women and their family line, from the specter of interracial union” (D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988, p. 94). The commitment in slave society was protection of white female virtue and containment of white female sexuality within white, marital, reproductive relations (p. 95). In contrast to this draconian social control of white women,

southern white men of the planter class enjoyed extreme sexual privilege. Most southern moralists condoned white men’s gratification of lust, as long as they did so discreetely with poor white or black women. Polite society condemned the public discussion of illicit sex, but men’s private writings reveal a good deal of comfort with the expression of pure sexual desire, unrelated to love or intimacy. (D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988, p. 95)

Indeed, rape of black female slaves by white masters rivaled separation of families as the most provocative event in black family life (Jones, 1986, p. 37). Slaves endured the daily pervasive fear that such assaults were possible, especially given the easy circumstances under which such rape could be committed. For example, one Louisiana master would enter the slave cabin and tell the husband “to go outside and wait ‘til he do what he want to do.” The black husband “had to do it and he couldn’t do nothing ‘bout it” (pp. 37–38). And Angela Davis (1983, pp. 23–24) points out that the practice was a weapon of domination and repression “whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist, and in the process, demoralize their men.” Indeed, sexual abuse of slave women in the presence of slave husbands/fathers made the point that slave men were not “real men” (Genovese, 1974, p. 482).³ Thus, greater regulation of white women’s sexuality was matched by greater sexual privilege for white men, and “provided white men with both a sexual outlet and a means of maintaining racial domination” (D’Emilio & Freedman, 1988, p. 94).⁴

Moreover, although denigration of interracial sexuality evoked the notion of virility, the sexually active black male as a threat to white women (Fox-Genovese, 1988, p. 291), this clearly was overshadowed by the social control of white female sexuality noted earlier. Indeed, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (p. 291) points out, “The presumed threat of black male sexuality never provoked the wild hysteria and violence in the Old South that it did in the New.” Thus, although approximately 300 lynchings were recorded between 1840 and 1860, less than 10% involved blacks (the majority were white abolitionists). Black lynching was carried out primarily in the wake of an insurrection scare, not because of sexual liaisons with white women, and, therefore, were insignificant numerically prior to Emancipation (Genovese, 1974, p. 32).

Also, during slavery black men could be acquitted or pardoned for raping white women (Hodes, 1991). In slave society rape meant the rape of white women—for it was not a crime to rape black women. Consequently, when a black man raped a black woman he could be punished only by his master, not by the court system (Genovese, 1974, p. 33). Slaves accused of raping white women occasionally suffered lynching, but the vast majority were tried (Schwarz, 1988; Spindel, 1989). Indeed, during slavery mob violence was not the norm as a response to a charge of black-on-white rape but, rather, public policy left the matter in the hands of the courts (Genovese, 1974, p. 34). Moreover, not all rape trials resulted in conviction, and appellate courts in every Southern state

threw out convictions for rape and attempted rape on every possible ground, including the purely technical. They overturned convictions because the indictments had not been drawn up properly, because the lower courts had based their convictions on possibly coerced confessions, or because the reputation of the white victim had not been admitted as evidence. (Genovese, 1974, p. 34)

The latter ground, the reputation of the white victim, is telling. For sexual conduct of slave men seemed to matter less to white southerners than did the sexual conduct of white women. White women who did not practice purity and chastity when unmarried and observe decorum when married were severely admonished (Fox-Genovese, 1988, pp. 235–236).⁵ Indeed, the sexual reputation of the white woman was so important to the white community that even if the evidence was clear that a black-on-white rape did in fact occur, if the victim was of “bad character,” the black rapist quite possibly would go free. James Hugo Johnston (1970, p. 258), in his study of miscegenation in the South from 1776–1860, was “astonished” at the number of rape cases in which

white citizens of the communities in which these events transpired testify for the Negro and against the white woman and declare that the case is not a matter of rape, for the woman encouraged and consented to the act of the Negro.

The case of Carter, a “Negro man slave” in antebellum Virginia, and Catherine Brinal, the white female victim, is an excellent example (Johnston, 1970, pp. 259–260). Carter was found guilty of the rape of Brinal and sentenced to death. Yet the judge determined that Carter was the “proper object of mercy” because community members testified that Ms. Brinal

was a woman of the worst fame, that her character was that of the most abandoned in as much as she (being a white woman) has three mulatto children, which by her own confession were begotten by different negro men; that from report she had permitted the said Carter to have peaceable sexual intercourse with her, before the time of his forcing her.

Consequently, this view of white female sexuality and the social control of that sexuality strongly outweighs the sexuality and social control of black men during slavery (Hodes, 1991, p. 41–42).

In sum, white slave masters and black male slaves constructed unique types of racial masculinity (hegemonic vs. subordinate) during slavery by occupying distinct locations within the particular race and gender divisions of labor and power. Both male groups experienced the everyday world from their proprietary positions in slave society and, consequently, there existed patterned ways in which ra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Structured-Action Theory
• 1. Lynchers
• 2. Hustler
• 3. Bad Girls
• 4. Murderous Managers
• Epilogue: Summary Thoughts and Future Directions Life-History Studies
• References
• Index
• About the Author