“I am a Man”: The Queer Politics of Race

Abstract

My argument is straightforward if queer: Racism is some sense an “affair” between men. Of course, racism is not only an affair between men. Women have very much been victims: White men's assaults on Black women from slavery to the present is, for instance, well known. Nor I am suggesting that “race” can be reduced to gender; it cannot. But it does have to do with sex and desire, as the pandemic White male rape of Black female (and, there is some evidence to suggest, male) slaves as well as post-“emancipation” obsessions with Black male sexuality (specifically, rape) make explicit. The centrality of castration in lynching—a primarily post-Civil War phenomenon that took the lives of at least 3,000 mostly young Black men—underscores White men's interest in the Black male phallus. What I suggest is that racial violence and racial politics cannot be understood unless “queered.”