Sexuality In North America Essay

In North America, white female and black male sexuality became central to the development of its racial caste system. The European settlers brought ambiguity towards sex from conflicting ideologies of middle class urban values and traditional sexual freedoms to their frontiers. Fredrickson alluded to Shakespeare's Othello, which he argued showed that "blacks [were] used to symbolize tensions or anxieties that they had little or no role in creating" even before the colonialization.2 In the North American colonies, these anxieties helped shape the creation of race among the permanent settler societies. Legally, the planter class, faced with legal ambiguities as they transitioned from indentured labor to slave labor: white indentured servants began marrying black men, threatening the continuation of slave labor by providing greater freedoms to their children because of the matrilineal nature of slavery.3 Yet Fredrickson also pointed to "the myth of black hyper-sexuality also [playing] a role in the origins of the American miscegenation complex"4: white males may have felt threatened by the idea of competing with black male
In fact, many of the laws produced focus on white female and black male sexuality and miscegenation. For example, one claimed "the disgrace not only of the English but also of many other Christian nations," underscoring the emergence of a white identity independent of specific European national identities.6 Discrimination towards free, mixed children underscored emerged, preventing them from becoming assimilated members of white society, fulfilling the myth of inferiority. The cultural fear of white female and black male sexuality stimulated the race-based infrastructure and