Blacks are ‘raping our women’ and ‘taking over': Decoding the myth that breeds white supremacists

http://thegrio.com/2015/07/02/white-supremacists-myth-black-people/
<snip>
Dylann Roof’s delusion that black people systematically “rape [white] women” and are “taking over [the] country” is a racist narrative loaded with history, rooted as deeply in the South as Emanuel AME Church. Predating the Civil War, now rekindled in a white supremacist community reeling from Obama-era defeatism, the two parts of this baseless accusation reflect an old tale increasingly forgotten amidst today’s comparatively tolerant race relations, and often whitewashed in the name of this very tolerance.

First, “You rape our women…”

In D.W. Griffith’s acclaimed 1915 silent film, The Birth of a Nation, the violent existence of the Ku Klux Klan was justified as a force necessary to protect white women from the supposedly ravenous sexual appetites and rapist intentions of the country’s recently-emancipated black males. This racist sentiment was rooted in the now-refuted social Darwinian theories fashionable at the time (but still espoused by white supremacists today), which hypothesized in part that black people (and others of non-European origin) are a sub-human species lacking the human capacity for self-control, sexual or otherwise, and thus require brutal suppression for the protection of the white (that is, “human”) community.

These social Darwinian concepts were codified into “anti-miscegenation laws” (some dating to the Colonial era), which included numerous statutes criminalizing even cohabitation between blacks and whites. This discriminatory legislation was judged constitutional throughout the Union until the Supreme Court, reversing a previous decision, ruled to the contrary in Loving v. Virginia. That was 1967.

The election and re-election, therefore, of Barack Obama as President of the United States, who is himself the biological son of a white mother and African father (and, thus, the symbol and offspring of the very “miscegenation” white supremacists believe an existential threat) compounds, and indeed reinforces, Roof and his racist lot’s second great fear: black citizens are “taking over our country.”

This, too, is an old white supremacist anxiety. The South’s antebellum ruling classes, especially in states where blacks outnumbered whites, knew the emancipation of slaves would inevitably result in the enfranchisement of black males, followed necessarily by popular elections of blacks to public office. The Reconstruction era proved those fears right, with both unprecedented black (male) voter turnout and offices won.