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Fact check: What role did slavery-era narratives and racist caricatures play in sexualizing and stereotyping enslaved people?
Executive Summary
Slavery-era narratives and racist caricatures systematically sexualized and stereotyped enslaved people to justify exploitation, normalize sexual violence, and rationalize racial hierarchies; these portrayals ranged from the hypersexual Jezebel to the desexualized Mammy and the violent Brute, and they persisted into later visual culture and practices that commodified Black bodies [1] [2] [3]. Recent scholarship and historical documents connect these stereotypes to concrete practices — inspections, forced erotic exhibitions, and the economic incentives of slave trading — showing a throughline from antebellum sexual violence to modern media representations and legal/medical dismissal of Black victims [4] [5] [6].
1. How a Stereotype Became a Legal and Social Excuse for Abuse
Historians link the Jezebel stereotype directly to justifications for the sexual exploitation of enslaved women: portraying Black women as intrinsically promiscuous made rape appear inevitable or consensual in the eyes of enslavers and bystanders. Contemporary analyses show this stereotype emerged in slavery-era rhetoric and was used to excuse sexual coercion and to deflect culpability from slaveholders, shaping both private practice and public narratives that downplayed assault and excused violence as naturalized behavior [1]. Legal and social institutions absorbed these tropes; courts, newspapers, and medical authorities often treated Black women's testimony as suspect, a pattern scholars trace to the ways caricatures dehumanized victims and reframed consent and agency to protect perpetrators and economic interests [6] [4].
2. The Mammy Myth: Desexualization as Control and Erasure
The Mammy caricature functioned as a strategic desexualization of some enslaved women, presenting Black women as loyal, asexual caregivers who posed no sexual threat to white families while obscuring their vulnerability to sexual violence by employers. This portrayal both soothed white anxieties about interracial sex and erased the reality of enslaved women’s bodies being surveilled, inspected, and assaulted; it sanitized slavery for nostalgic narratives during and after Reconstruction while insulating white audiences from acknowledging abuse [2] [7]. Scholars argue that this duality — hypersexual Jezebel and asexual Mammy — created a binary that allowed varied forms of exploitation to persist under different rhetorical covers, serving both sentimental and coercive functions in society and commerce [1] [2].
3. The Brute and the Racialization of Male Sexual Threat
Caricatures like the Brute racialized Black men as sexually aggressive and violent, a trope used to rationalize lynching, segregation, and vigilante violence under the guise of protecting white womanhood. This stereotype fed legal and extralegal violence, enabling authorities and mobs to claim defense against an imagined endemic threat and to suppress Black autonomy and sexuality through terror. Modern examinations link the Brute to sustained policing and criminalization patterns that shape how allegations are pursued and public sympathy is allocated, showing the caricature’s role in constructing the sexualized threat as a pretext for removing civil rights and reinforcing racial control [3] [6].
4. Commodifying Flesh: The ‘Pornography of Capitalism’ and Public Displays
Primary-source research reveals that enslavers and traders treated enslaved bodies as market objects, using explicit display and inspection — what some scholars call a "pornography of capitalism" — to appraise sexualized desirability and reproductive potential. Auction records, advertisements, and accounts of forced exhibitions document how enslaved women were stripped, inspected, and described in sexually explicit terms as part of valuation practices; these capitalist mechanisms converted sexualized stereotypes into monetary gain and institutionalized the control of bodies for profit [4] [7]. The public exhibition of Sarah Baartman in Europe exemplifies how racialized sexual curiosity moved across continents, turning individual bodies into spectacles that reinforced scientific racism and erotic fantasy [5].
5. Legacy and Ongoing Cultural Circulation of Stereotypes
The historical patterns of sexualization and stereotyping continue to shape media portrayals, institutional responses, and social attitudes: contemporary films, advertisements, and news coverage often recycle elements of Jezebel, Mammy, and Brute archetypes, influencing perceptions of credibility, victimhood, and desirability. Recent scholarship and public-history projects show a direct line from slavery-era images to modern racialized tropes that affect reporting of sexual violence, healthcare treatment, and criminal-justice outcomes for Black people, demonstrating persistent structural effects rather than mere historical artifacts [1] [6] [5]. Critics and curators emphasize this lineage to argue for reparative practices in education, media literacy, and institutional reform, while opponents sometimes minimize continuity by portraying stereotypes as isolated cultural missteps rather than integrated systems of power [1] [2].