After emancipation, as ex-slave men/colored
men were entitled to vote and some other legal rights, defending dominant-race
power involved the construction of a racist discourse -- black and white masculinities
and feminities through “the language of body”. By identifying black male sexuality as dangerous
to white womanhood, it began a dreadful period of lynching and radicalism
against black men. According to what we
learn from previous chapters in Through
Women’s Eyes, we acknowledge that interracial marriage was forbidden by
social authorities during those eras. Any sexual contacts between black men and
white women were strictly monitored and disciplined; however those white men
who involved with black women were overlooked. From my own perspective and
through reading the Red Record, lynching
was a way for white society to show their disapproval and their way to “talk
back” to a “mess” of social order.
Wells-Barnett through the Red Record also mentioned that lynching’s main
victims was African American men, colored men who were worthy of kindness and
protection. When we think of lynching, we usually think of evil, dangerous
person who harms other people physically, however according to the Red Record,
these poor colored men was lynched for everything “anything or nothing”. They were
lynched for stealing hogs, for wife beating, for a quarrel, even for no offense.
Just because those poor belonged to minority society, just because of their
races, they couldn’t prove for their innocent, and their precious life was
totally ignored.
