"The psychological mechanism of animalization has been so deeply implanted in white culture, with respect to African Americans, that most white Americans have been unaware of their usually unconscious complicity as well as the significant benefits they have reaped from their 'transcendent whiteness.' Especially during the period of racial slavery, the process of animalizing blacks enhanced whites' sense of being a rational, self-disciplined and ambitious people, closely attuned to their long-term best interests. Racism became the systematic way of institutionalizing and justifying the individual white's projection of an 'animal Id' upon blacks. It took the form of an intellectual theory or ideology, cloaked in science, as well as actions and behavior legitimated by laws, customs, and social structure...
"Finally, as we have seen, the populist lynching of blacks began to reach epic levels in the 1880s and '90s. The widespread acceptance of scientific racism, a central prop for Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy, reinforced the traditional fear of sexual contamination through rape or intermarriage--the invasion of the black Id, a reprisal of all of the animalistic traits that had been projected on blacks to achieve white purity. In 1897, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent Georgia feminist, journalist, and eventually the first woman to become a U.S.Senator, aroused national attention with a near hysterical speech on the peril of black rapists: '[I]f it takes lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts,' she cried, 'then I say lynch a thousand [blacks] a week if it becomes necessary.' Later, emphasizing the 'moral retrogression' of blacks since the days of slavery, Felton accused the 'promoters of Negro equality' of preparing the way for an imminent 'revolutionary uprising' that 'will either exterminate the blacks or force the white citizens to leave the country.' Fortunately, such extremists never came close to shaping federal policies, but it is significant that at the turn of the twentieth century the Chief Statistician of the U.S. Census, Professor Walter Francis Wilcox, and other prominent statisticians, happily predicted the gradual extinction of the Negro race."
P.20-22, THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION by David Brion Davis (Alfred A. Knopf, NY: 2014)
Saturday, February 22, 2014
PROBLEM SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION, excerpt...
"The psychological mechanism of animalization has been so deeply implanted in white culture, with respect to African Americans, that most white Americans have been unaware of their usually unconscious complicity as well as the significant benefits they have reaped from their 'transcendent whiteness.' Especially during the period of racial slavery, the process of animalizing blacks enhanced whites' sense of being a rational, self-disciplined and ambitious people, closely attuned to their long-term best interests. Racism became the systematic way of institutionalizing and justifying the individual white's projection of an 'animal Id' upon blacks. It took the form of an intellectual theory or ideology, cloaked in science, as well as actions and behavior legitimated by laws, customs, and social structure...
"Finally, as we have seen, the populist lynching of blacks began to reach epic levels in the 1880s and '90s. The widespread acceptance of scientific racism, a central prop for Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy, reinforced the traditional fear of sexual contamination through rape or intermarriage--the invasion of the black Id, a reprisal of all of the animalistic traits that had been projected on blacks to achieve white purity. In 1897, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a prominent Georgia feminist, journalist, and eventually the first woman to become a U.S.Senator, aroused national attention with a near hysterical speech on the peril of black rapists: '[I]f it takes lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts,' she cried, 'then I say lynch a thousand [blacks] a week if it becomes necessary.' Later, emphasizing the 'moral retrogression' of blacks since the days of slavery, Felton accused the 'promoters of Negro equality' of preparing the way for an imminent 'revolutionary uprising' that 'will either exterminate the blacks or force the white citizens to leave the country.' Fortunately, such extremists never came close to shaping federal policies, but it is significant that at the turn of the twentieth century the Chief Statistician of the U.S. Census, Professor Walter Francis Wilcox, and other prominent statisticians, happily predicted the gradual extinction of the Negro race."
P.20-22, THE PROBLEM OF SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION by David Brion Davis (Alfred A. Knopf, NY: 2014)