11 - Liberating Black Youth across the Gender Spectrum Through the Deconstruction of the White Femininity/Black Masculinity Duality

Summary

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice was conceived and developed by Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, to remember the history of lynching Black people as well as how the practice of lynching morphed into the contemporary incarceration and capital punishment of Black people. When one visits this memorial, there are plaques that tell a brief story for each lynched Black person for whom the Equal Justice Institute was able to find a record. Five examples of these plaques follow:

‘Oliver Moore was lynched in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, in 1930 for frightening a white girl.’

‘David Walker, his wife, and their four children were lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, in 1908 after Mr. Walker was accused of using inappropriate language with a white woman.’

‘Frank Dodd was lynched in DeWitt, Arkansas, in 1916 for annoying a white woman.’

‘Mary Turner, eight months pregnant, was lynched in Georgia in 1918 for publicly speaking out against her husband's lynching the day before.’

‘Laura Nelson was raped and lynched in Okema, Oklahoma, in 1911 for allegedly shooting a sheriff while trying to protect her son.’

While the information provided is minimal, these plaques capture a pattern of Black men, women, and children being killed for the trivial actions of breaking social norms with white women.

Historians’ writings explain this extreme pattern of punishment. Authors such as Brett (2020) and Hamad (2018, 2019) show how white women were socially constructed in a way that justified both their protection from and the punishment of Black people. This protection of white women and the punishment of Black people became inextricably linked. In addition to the lynching and incarceration of Black people, white women as ‘damsels in distress’ were used to justify federal decisions that impacted many Indigenous and other people of color. Examples include the expansion of the United States, resulting in the mass killing and rapes of Indigenous people from North and Central America, limiting the immigration of Chinese men, and the internment of Japanese families (Brett, 2020). However, for the purpose of this chapter, we will focus on the duality between white femininity and Black masculinity.