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Sex and Racism in America Paperback – June 1, 1992

by Calvin C. Hernton (Author)

4.5 20 ratings

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As remarkably and chillingly pertinent today as when it was first published in 1965, this now classic study dissects the intersecting myths of sex and race as they are played out in America. No one concerned with issues of race relations in the United States can overlook the conclusions of this book.

Language

English
Publisher

Anchor
Publication date

June 1, 1992
Dimensions

5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0385424337
ISBN-13

978-0385424332
See all details

Calvin C Hernton
Hardcover
10 offers from $17.75

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Indispensable...[written with] creditable research, professional integrity, and considerable good humor."

-- Eugene Genovese, New York Review of Books

"One of the most brutally frank and impressively realistic volumes that has ever been written in its field. It is at once bold and restrained." -- Christian Herald

"It is impossible not to praise Sex and Racism in America. For of the pyramids of books...about this fatal problem -- the most divisive in the world today -- this is one of the few that tell it as it is, if you can take it." -- London Sunday Telegraph

"A provocative, wide-ranging confrontation of the sexual nightmares that give rise to fears and prejudices between white and black." -- Playboy

"Explores the myths which have grown up in the minds of both black and white about the sexual proclivities of their opposites ... It is a dignified and convincing report."

-- London Sunday Times

From the Publisher

As remarkably and chillingly pertinent today as when it was first published in 1965, this now classic study dissects the intersecting myths of sex and race as they are played out in America. No one concerned with issues of race relations in the United States can overlook the conclusions of this book.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (June 1, 1992)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385424337
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385424332
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.5 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,875,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,012 in Psychology & Counseling Books on Sexuality
- #6,169 in Sex & Sexuality
- #9,332 in Cultural Anthropology (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 20 ratings

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4.5 out of 5

20 global ratings

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Eduard Davis

Required reading

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 12, 2021

Verified Purchase

A must read, should be part of high school curriculum for history.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

C. Ferrara

Tells it like it was, and still is..

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 7, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book, written prior to the "politically correct" climate of today, tells it like it is. Written by a prominent black man, who was a social scientist and professor, who lived in the South and has witnessed first hand the tension of sexual relations between the races.

Some may find his claims outrageous. I found it refreshing to read the gritty truth as he sees it, without the need placate the reader and sugar-coat what he found during his lifetime.

The subject is too taboo to speak of today, so if you want a frank, candid account of black and white sexual tension in USA, this is your book.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Akbar

He is outnumbered on pretty much every campus in the United States that is ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 2, 2017

I played sports all my life and lived in the suburbs a lot of the time. I was often one of three Black males in the school the other two were my cousins. There might have been four Black/African females. On my college visits to predominantly white campuses and then to attend college at a predominately white college I knew what was going to happen on the relationship front. White girls everywhere, in every building, doing every job on the campus. Black/African males coming in to study and play mostly football and basketball never had a chance. They are all outnumbered and suffering from culture shock with no place to go but a small Black Student Union Bldg., if that.
I deal with the numbers or the quantitative data that puts those Black men in a situation where sexuality always wins over the construct of race, but it does not undo the symbols created and the power that they have. He is outnumbered on pretty much every campus in the United States that is not an HBCU. It has been this way since Black/Africans could attend college. When they were recruited to play football and basketball and the teams started winning, they became a valued commodity, no need to get to know them beyond using their bodies as they do today. There is so much more here, but I will leave it there...
I am glad that we are revisiting it with the white woman this time as the perpetrator ("Get Out"). I won't say I was ever a victim, but I have fallen for the sex... knowing that I meant very little to her. Any conversation about race was so unequal, with what she knew and what I knew it was never going to work, but was fun if I kept silent. It was almost like "Get Out" which is why it took three tries to watch it; too real. So much symbolism, it was great to see them in the movie. The white woman in this movie kind of gets exposed as not so innocent. My last white lady friend (2013) said that she did not even read my profile on the dating site, she just thought I was cute. I was getting no responses after two years on this dating site (the average for Black Africans on sites not for them). She read some of the academic papers that I had written about race and called them rants?! There are perks that make their white privilege an asset to you, but at the expense of your soul.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Steven H Propp

A PROVOCATIVE PERSPECTIVE ON BLACK AND WHITE PEOPLE

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 18, 2022

Calvin Coolidge Hernton (1932-2001) was an American sociologist, poet and author, who was Professor of African-American Studies at Oberlin College until his retirement in 1999.

He wrote in the first chapter of this 1965 book, “The white man, especially the Southerner, is overtly obsessed with the idea of the Negro desiring sexual relations with whites. The Negro man is secretly tormented every second of his wakeful life by the presence of white women in his midst, whom he cannot or better not touch. Despite the severe penalties for associated with white women---lynching, castration, electrocution---Negroes risk their lives for white flesh, and an occasional few actually commit rape. On the other hand, the white man, especially in the Couth, cannot seem to adhere to his own laws and customs prohibiting interracial intercourse---he insults, seduces, and rapes negro women as if this were what they exist for.

“A preponderance of racial violence takes the form of sexual atrocities against not only black women but black men as well. In the North, Midwest, and West… many Negroes and whites suffer social ostracism and castigation for engaging in interracial relations. What does all this mean? It means that the race problem is inextricably connected with sex… no facet of our psyches, can escape the all but total sexualization of American life… there is but one incessant symbol: the naked or half-naked white woman. .. [which is] the ubiquitous sex symbol of our times. Sex pervades everything.” (Pg. 4-5) Later, he adds, “In fact, there is a sexual involvement … connecting white and black people in America that spans the history of this country from the era of slavery to the present… that all race relations tend to be, however, subtle, sex relations.” (Pg. 7)

He states, “If… the system of racism and white supremacy in the South has twisted the white man’s concept of both Negro sexuality and his own, God only knows that agonies and demons this same system has wrought in the sexuality of the white female… The southern white woman, reared and nurtured in the tradition of ‘sacred white womanhood,’ has had to deny and purge herself of every honest and authentic female emotion that is vital to being a healthy woman… One fact is certain, this myth was not created by the Southern white woman, and it was not propounded by the black woman nor the black man… the southern white man… invented it to salve his own guilt.” (Pg. 15)

He suggests in his chapter ‘The White Woman,’ “Frequently when a white women becomes friendly with a Negro woman or a Negro man, she may be either giving in to latent homosexual tendencies or fighting them. In either case, ‘black’ seems to be the summit of masculinity---it takes blackness to bring out the ‘femininity’ in otherwise frigid or near-frigid white women. Meanwhile, white men find it incomprehensible that some of the ‘whitest’ Caucasian women choose some of the ‘blackest’ Negroes in the spectrum!” (Pg. 43) He concludes the chapter, “I submit---because of … an ABNORMAL society---that the very hostilities of the outside world sometimes tend to weld together… a white woman and a black man more tenaciously than most of us are wont to surmise.” (Pg. 54)

In the chapter on ‘The Negro Male,’ he asserts, “Because he must act like a eunuch when it comes to white women, there arises within the Negro an undefined sense of dread and self-mutilation. Psychologically he experiences himself as castrated.” (Pg. 59) He recalls that after high school, “My dates were always light-skinner Negro girls, never dark or black ones, no matter wo pretty they might have been. For, I know now, my desire for a girl was affected by the myth and taboo of the white woman. I know now why I enjoyed the envy of other black boys---because I had a light-skinned girl friend… I was proud. But not proud enough…” (Pg. 64)

In the chapter on ‘The White Man,’ he states, “The white supremacist in the ante-bellum South … slept with the servants who kept his house and cooked his food… he did it because he felt that black women were not human beings. Black women were… outside of the providence of God… To some degree, however microscopic, all white men in America, save a few, carry in their perception of Negro females a dark sexual urge that borders on the vulgar.” (Pg. 95)

He observes, “it is predominantly the black woman who has managed, God knows how, to maintain those qualities that all men need and yearn for. The southern white man knows this… Through the years, the Southerner’s house, his laundry, his food, have all been attended to largely by black women. Southerners have been suckled and nursed by black breasts from infancy to boyhood. They have been warmed by black thighs from boyhood into manhood.” (Pg. 107)

He concludes the chapter, “Whether the white supremacist is sexually virile or not, he HEARS he is inadequate… he therefore says Negros are oversexed. The racist FEARS his sexuality is sinful, immoral. He therefore creates… objects of degradation upon which he can act out his own feelings of iniquity of vulgarity. The racist FEARS that the relationships between Negro men and women are healthier and freer than those between himself and white women. He also FEARS that black men can be better with white women than he is. He therefore transforms the white woman into … an idol, and he fills her with HIS paranoid fears of Negro men… the racist acquires a false sense of superiority … by imagining that the Negro is a beast bent on deflowering the symbol of his guilt and inadequacy---'sacred white womanhood.’” (Pg. 120)

In the chapter on ‘The Negro Woman,’ he observes, “Black men and women ‘fuss and fight’ constantly, because the values of the white supremacist’s world invade their lives from sunup to sundown… Nothing is free from the effects of the sexualization of racism. They call each other ‘ni-ger’ more frequently and with more contempt than many Southerners would do. For when they look at one another, they see and feel what they have been taught to see and feel about Negroes---something that is esthetically repulsive.” (Pg. 132)

He points out, “throughout the entire span of her existence on American soil, the Negro woman has bene alone and unprotected, not only socially but psychologically as well. She has HAD to fend for herself as if she were a man… she is potentially, if not already, the most sexual animal on this planet. It is not frigidity I am describing. It is RIGIDITY… this quality of austerity in the Negro woman … has enabled her to survive what few other women have ever lived through…” (Pg. 136)

He notes, “The cold statistical facts are that Negro women are not being abandoned by black men who marry white women any more than Caucasian women are being abandoned by white men who marry Negro women… Negro women who become alarmed when they see a black man with a white woman are reacting out of the same race-sex-jealousy emotional syndrome as is a white man who is alarmed over white women and Negro men… Anyway, what is ‘unjust rejection’ in a man-woman relationship? We always feel ‘unjustly rejected’ when we want someone and that person turns us down…” (Pg. 139) Later, he adds, “Predominantly, the women who become most alarmed over interracial marriages are single or are victims of unhappy marriages themselves.” (Pg. 141)

He asserts of the “orthodox middle-class Negro woman” is “her sociosexual morality towards the race problem… They share the same contempt and stereotyped views about ‘lower-class’ Negroes as the outer society. And when it comes to sex, the orthodox middle-class Negro woman is far more rigid, repressed, and neurotic than any other female in America.” (Pg. 147)

Nearly sixty years old, this book has not necessarily ‘aged’ well. (When it was a text for my introductory college ‘Afro-American Studies’ class in the 1970s, however, it seemed quite pertinent. It was also a bestseller, in 1965.) It will still interest some readers---particularly those interested in psychological interpretations of ethnic groups.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Narcissa

Well Thought Out

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 5, 2013

I had Prof. Hernton as a professor in college and read this book and Black Women and the Sexual Mountain. He was and the books are thoughtful, insightful and willing to throw out our sentimental understandings. Calvin changed nurtured my intellect more than nearly any other professor. The books are both intelligent and relatively easy to read. He does not shy away from his personal experiences with racism while at the same time always taking an academic, observational approach. We tend to think that racism and sexism are different worlds and different problems, but he reveals how they are linked and support each other.

8 people found this helpful

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