34 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020WHITE FRIGHT
The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America’s Racist
History
By Jane Dailey
343 pp. Basic Books. $30.
There’s a moment in Raoul Peck’s 2016
documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro,” in
which James Baldwin explains how white
Americans’ emotional poverty, their “terror
of human life” and of their own private
selves have contributed to what they called
“the Negro problem.” “This ‘problem,’ which
they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has
made of them criminals and monsters,” Baldwin says.
“And this, not from anything Blacks may or may not be
doing, but because of the role a guilty and constricted
white imagination has assigned to the Blacks.”
This idea, that American white supremacy was built
from white anxiety over purity — sexual and otherwise
— forms the foundation of Dailey’s well-researched new
book. It’s not a belief likely to surprise those literate in
African-American history, but her argument that fear of
Black sexuality and miscegenation has been thedriving
force behind structural racism and white supremacy is
confident and persuasive. A historian at the University
of Chicago, Dailey takes readers through the history of
racialized anxiety directed at Black men and Black wom-
en from Reconstruction to Jim Crow, as well as during
the battle to desegregate American public schools and
secure voting rights for Black people. Along the way, she
highlights some provocative sources, including the white
Southern writer Lillian Smith, who believed that white
anxiety over Black male sexuality was rooted in white
male suspicion of white women, and the Black journalist
Ida B. Wells, who in 1892 explained, “White men lynch
the offending Afro-American not because he is a de-
spoiler of virtue but because he succumbs to the smiles
of white women.”
Strangely missing from Dailey’s book is any considera-
tion of white women’s complicity in racialized anxiety
and violence against Black people. Though she devotes
attention to Emmett Till, she has little to say about Car-
olyn Bryant Donham, the white woman who set Till’s
murder in motion by falsely accusing him of assault.
Surely white women contributed to what Baldwin called
white Americans’ “infantile, furtive sexuality” and
played a significant role in reinforcing, upholding and
exploiting this country’s racial apartheid.
WHITE TEARS / BROWN SCARS
How White Feminism Betrays Women of Color
By Ruby Hamad
280 pp. Catapult. Paper, $16.95.For those looking for a tighter focus on
white female complicity, Hamad’s new book
might or might not be the answer. It was
inspired by an article she published in The
Guardian in 2018 arguing that white women
often cry victim or shed “white tears” (as in,
literally crying) to distract from their own
aggressions directed at women of color and their collu-
sion in denying or dismissing such women’s concerns
and feelings.
In “White Tears / Brown Scars,” Hamad’s indictment
is aimed less at white women in general than at white
feminists, whose stated commitment to issues of social
and gender justice has long given them a pass with
respect to their decades-long, destructive stumbling
around racial issues. White women’s tears, as Hamad
contends, and others have pointed out, can be deployed
as a way to avoid accountability for personal and politi-
cal missteps and to recast white women as victims to be
protected.
Hamad, an Australian journalist of Arab background
who is completing a Ph.D. in media studies, does a fair
job of distancing herself from the mainstream conception
of “feminism” as a social movement centered on the
needs of white women. “The white feminist battle” does
not aim to dismantle the social hierarchy, she writes, but
“merely seeks to ensure that white women join white
men at its helm by agitating against those limitations
imposed on their sex.”
Yet her primary thesis, that white feminists are dis-
missive of and destructive to women of color, is not par-
ticularly provocative or new. She also asserts a familiar-
ity with the Black American experience that feels both
awkward and unearned, and she has an unfortunate
tendency to undercut the power and the clarity of a point
she is trying to make by invoking the sort of academic
phrases — “settler colonialism” is one that makes a
frequent appearance — that are inaccessible to most lay
readers. Ultimately, it’s not clear whom this book is for.
Though admirably ambitious, it is also frustratingly aloof
in places.BLACK WOMEN, BLACK LOVE
America’s War on African American Marriage
By Dianne M. Stewart
326 pp. Seal Press. $30.This book, as Stewart explains throughout,
was a long time coming, an outgrowth, in
part, of her own and other Black women’s
struggles in a society that devalues not just
what she calls “Black love” but Black wom-
en in particular. But within the first eight
pages, Stewart, a professor of religion and
African-American studies at Emory University, asserts
that the legacy and scourge of what she calls “forbidden
Black love” has been neglected by historians and cultur-
al critics and “is our nation’s most unrecognized civil
rights issue.”
The notion that the challenges faced by Black women
in romance and marriage constitute an issue of “civil
rights” might grate at first. But Stewart marshals sub-
stantial evidence to back up her thesis — proof of a
centuries-long assault on Black love and marriage that
in her hands takes the form of persuasive case histories
of women, past and present.
From the forced fracturing of Black families during
American slavery to rigid Christian ideas around what
constitutes a “moral” marriage and contemporary state
and federal laws undermining the ability of Black wom-
en to find, and sustain, marriage, Stewart makes a
pointed, though sometimes hard to follow, argument that
social freedom is “necessary to actualize a truly healthy
love and marriage.” She cites the predicament of bond-
women — including Margaret Garner, the inspiration for
Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” who on her deathbed told her
husband, “Never marry again in slavery” — while high-
lighting the continued toll of ugly and persistent notions
about Black female sexuality and desirability.
Though the intended audience for “Black Women,
Black Love” is no doubt the demographic referred to in
its title, it offers a fresh and surprising look at the eco-
nomic, spiritual, structural and emotional constraints on
the hundreds of thousands of Black women for whom
love and marriage are neither blithely expected nor
easy. In that, it feels not so much necessary as needed.ANNA HOLMESis a writer and editor, and a creative director of Barack and Michelle Obama’s company Higher Ground. ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALL
The Shortlist/Race and Relationships/By Anna Holmes