Police Sexual Violation of Black Bodies
Sex is never simply a sensual experience between two bodies but is also an encounter between social beings endowed with collective memory.1
Sex is the whispered subtext in spoken racial discourse. Sex is the sometimes silent message contained in racial slurs, ethnic stereotypes, national imaginings, and international relations. Although the sexual meanings associated with ethnicity may be understated, they should never be underestimated.2
The noted African American essayist James Weldon Johnson asserted the following concerning U.S. race relations: “At the core of the heart of the race problem is the sex problem.”3 He thus succinctly described the deep sexual subtext that pervades U.S. racial discourse and practices. In other words, conversations about race inevitably are also conversations about sex.
Almost every marginalized or outcast group has its sexuality maligned and stigmatized by the socially dominant or privileged. The denigration of a despised group's sexuality is part of the apparatus of oppression. Therefore, deconstructing systems of oppression, like racism, also must entail the deconstruction of “deep-level investments in sexualized and even eroticized assumptions [and practices] of dominance and submission.”4 That is to say, effective struggle against anti-black racism requires engagement with its sexualized expressions and manifestations.
In plain speech, sex matters in pursuing racial justice. Racial conflicts, hatreds, and antagonisms have been enacted and are still expressed, in no small measure, through sexual relationships and behaviors (e.g., sexual objectification, exclusion or avoidance, violence, abuse, and/or exploitation).
This essay is part of a larger current project tentatively titled “Race, Sex, and the Catholic Church.” In it, I explore the intersections between racial injustice, sexuality, and religious faith. This project takes seriously the deeply sexual subtext of U.S. racism and thus explores the “complicated intermarriage between racialized boundaries as sexual and sexualized borders as raced.”5 Moreover, it also will examine how Catholic practices both reflected and reinforced pervasive race-based sexual beliefs about African Americans and other persons of color. My goal is to set the stage for developing an anti-racist sexual ethics. A central question of this project is: What happens to Catholic sexual ethics if it takes racialization and racism as serious factors in human sexual relationships?
This essay, which is an exploration of anti-black sexual violence and, more specifically, anti-black sexual violation perpetrated by police officers, is a small part of that project. I begin by defining “racialized sexuality” and “sexual racism.” I then examine a particular instance of sexual racism, namely, racist sexualized police misconduct. The sexual meanings of these encounters is then clarified by an excursus into the realm of racist Internet pornography. The paper concludes by noting the silence of Catholic sexual ethics in addressing sexual racism, and how a trinitarian-inspired healthy eroticism might inform more adequate ethical reflection and praxis.
Defining “Racialized Sexuality” and “Sexual Racism”
There are a variety of terms used by authors to describe and discuss the complicated nexus between racialization and sexuality. I here describe my usage of these terms.
By “racialized sexuality” I mean sexual desires, fantasies, prohibitions, aversions, ascriptions, descriptions, depictions, stereotypes, and/or beliefs based upon a person's or group's racial or ethnic identity. With very little reflection, examples come readily to mind. For instance, the pervasive beliefs that black men are well endowed; black women are sexually promiscuous; Asian women are sexually submissive; Latinos/as are passionate or “hot blooded” lovers; black men are sexual aggressors or rapists; white women are pure and chaste; white and Asian men are not well endowed. Racialized sexuality is also evident in phrases or aphorisms such as “jungle fever,” “once you go black, you never go back,” and “the blacker (or darker) the berry, the sweeter the juice.” That such beliefs and phrases are readily familiar testifies to the reality that our sexuality is deeply racialized and cannot be fully understood apart from our assigned racial identities. Racial and ethnic identity not only affects a person or social group's sexual self-understanding but also how they view the sexuality of other racial or ethnic groups.
Racialized sexuality is not inherently problematic from an ethical perspective. That is, it need not always be a negative factor in human relationships. At times, it can have a benign character. However, racialized sexuality is often deployed to the end of sexual(ized) racism when such ascriptions or beliefs are used to justify or maintain racial inequality and social injustice. That is, racialized sexuality becomes sexual racism when race-based sexual beliefs and stereotypes are used as a pretext or justification for social exclusion, inequality, subjugation, control, denigration, and inferiority. For example, racialized sexuality becomes sexual racism when race-based sexual beliefs or stereotypes become the basis for negative public policies (e.g., the sexual subtext present in welfare or immigration debates; the practice of forced sterilizations of poor black women; and the sexual subtext present in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments, where a people deemed sexually irresponsible were deliberately infected with and then left untreated for a sexually transmitted infection).6
Thus, John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman helpfully describe sexual racism as “the [race-based] propagandized denigration of sexuality…to perpetuate social inequality.”7 Sexual racism, then, can be understood as a subset of the broader category of sexual injustice, that is, attacking or denigrating a group's sexuality to establish or justify social hierarchy, inferiority, or exclusion.
There is widespread awareness of race-based sexual myths and stereotypes. What often passes unnoticed, however, is (1) how central they are for U.S. race relations and the maintenance of white (male) supremacy; (2) their enduring power and pervasiveness; and (3) the role of faith communities and religious practices in justifying and maintaining sexual racism, specifically, their roles in policing racialized sexual borders.
Sexual Racism: A Tool of Racial Dominance and Humiliation
Unfortunately, sexualized violence is a constant in U.S. racial and ethnic relationships. Sexual violation, denigration, and humiliation have been staple features in the arsenal of white supremacy, used to manifest and reinforce the superior status of whites in general—and white men specifically—and the inferior status of people of color. Race-based sexual violence has been constant from the days of slavery, through the lynchings of black men and the coerced sexual relationships with black women domestics during Jim Crow, and even into the present.8 I now consider a contemporary instance of race-based sexual violence and violation, namely, the sexual abuse perpetrated by police officers upon African Americans—what in more sanitized accounts may be called sexual police misconduct.
Sexual Violation and Humiliation by Law Enforcement
The sexual humiliation of people of color at the hands of police officers acting under the cloak of law and public authority is far from being isolated, episodic, or sporadic. Rather, it is so recurring that it must be considered a key expression of white supremacist practice. For example, Toni Morrison provides a graphic account of the sexual humiliation of black chain gang prisoners in the Jim Crow South by their wardens in her acclaimed novel Beloved. One also notes the depiction of a black woman's public digital rape by a white police officer in the 2005 Oscar-winning film Crash. Yet there are nonfictional events that are part of the historical record, such as the public strip searches of Black Panther Party members in 1970s Chicago9 and the horrific sodomizing of a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, in a New York City police station in 1997.10 Three more recent instances of race-based sexual police violence and humiliation attest to the continuing need to ethically interrogate this reality.
(1) Recent (2013) strip searches and invasive public rectal cavity invasions of black men in Milwaukee. I cite here from an account provided by the local paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Five black men filed federal suits against eight white Milwaukee police officers accused of conducting or permitting illegal strip searches. Five white officers are accused of using their fingers to probe the men's rectal and genital areas without probable cause; two others watched and did nothing to stop the abuse; one police captain is being charged with failing to supervise and suspend the officers involved…. Plaintiffs Jerrold Ezell (25) and Anthony Pettis (23) charged that officers stormed into their friend's house without a warrant in November 2011 and then shoved two bare fingers into each man's rectum without pausing to put on gloves or wash their hands. “It wasn't right—to just come into the house and stick his fingers into us,” Enzell said, his voice trailing off. Pettis estimated he'd been rectally probed about 30 times, and said he didn't believe the officers when they said they were searching for drugs. “I think it is a powertrip, man,” Pettis said. “Race plays a role in it, too.”11
“Race plays a role in it, too.” Undoubtedly, for while it is not impossible for white men to be sexually violated by law enforcement, there is no documented instance of a white man being so sexually abused and humiliated by white—or black—Milwaukee police officers.
More disturbing is the fact that these two young black men are only the tip of the iceberg. In all, five Milwaukee police officers, all white men, were indicted on multiple charges of illegal strip and rectal searches of at least thirteen victims, all black men. Most disturbing is that the allegations against the purported ring leader of these crimes were known to police commanders for at least five years prior to any legal action being taken against him. The lead prosecutor stated,
“I know Michael Vagnini [the worst perpetrator] understood the sexual undertones of what was going on,” Assistant District Attorney Miriam Falk said. “It was intended to degrade and humiliate them, and that's what makes it a sexual assault.” She said while Vagnini may not have obtained sexual gratification from penetrating his victims’ anuses, the victims felt violated nonetheless.
Yet as part of a plea deal, prosecutors agreed to drop the sexual assault charges since Vagnini agreed to plead no contest to four felony charges and four misdemeanors. Vagnini will no longer have to register as a sex offender.12
(2)Unlawful strip searches by the Baltimore Police Department. In the aftermath of the 2015 death of an unarmed black man, Freddie Grey, while in police custody, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) conducted an investigation of the Baltimore Police Department (BPD). Among its many findings of concern was what the DOJ called a “pattern” of unconstitutional strip searches on the part of police officers.13 The DOJ determined that “BPD officers frequently ignore” the constitutional requirements for legal strip searches, noting that the BPD in the past five years “has faced multiple lawsuits and more than 60 complaints alleging unlawful strip searches.”
The investigation provided detailed accounts of several such incidents. One involved the public strip search of a black woman following a routine traffic stop for a missing headlight. “Officers ordered the woman to exit her vehicle, remove her clothes and stand on the sidewalk to be searched…. Finding no weapons or contraband around the woman's chest, the officer then pulled down the woman's underwear and searched her anal cavity.” This search “occurred in full view of the street” notwithstanding the fact that there was no indication that the woman “had committed a criminal offense or possessed concealed contraband.” Finding no evidence of wrongdoing, the woman was released with only an order to repair her headlight.
The DOJ also discussed another case where a black teenage boy was subjected to two public strip searches in the winter of 2016 by the same officer. “The officer…pulled down his pants and boxer shorts and strip-searched him in full view of the street and his girlfriend.” After the teenager filed a detailed complaint with the BPD over the incident, “the same officer approached [the teen] near a McDonald's restaurant in his neighborhood, pushed the teenager against a wall, pulled down his pants and grabbed his genitals. The officer filed no charges against the teenager in the second incident, which the teenager believes was done in retaliation for filing a complaint about the first strip search.” Citing this event, one local activist declared, “What that officer did is not just violate a body, but he injured a spirit, a soul, a psyche. And that (young boy) will not easily forget what happened to him, in public with his girlfriend. It's hard to really put gravity and weight to that type of offense.”14
The consistency of such sexual humiliation and degradation at the hands of police is confirmed again by other instances cited in the official report, including one of an African American man who was searched by an officer several days in a row, “including ‘undoing his pants’ and searching his ‘hindquarters’ on a public street. When the strip search did not find contraband, the officer told the man to leave the area and warned that the officer would search him again every time he returned.” The DOJ thus concluded that sexual humiliation by law enforcement constituted a “regular rather than unusual practice” against the African American citizens of Baltimore.15
(3)The serial sexual abuse and rape of African American women in Oklahoma City. In December 2015, an Oklahoma police officer of white and Japanese descent was convicted of multiple accounts of sexually assaulting and raping eleven African American women during the period of March–June of 2014. Most of his victims had criminal histories, such as drug offenses and prostitution. Prosecutors and police investigators contend that Daniel Holtzclaw “used his position as an officer to run background checks to find information that could be used to coerce sex.”16 As one investigator noted, “They're the perfect victim. Nobody's going to believe them. If you believe them, who cares? ‘A prostitute can't be raped.’…So that's why he was picking these kind of women, because they're the perfect victim.”17 While Holtzclaw declined to testify at his trial, his public comments since his conviction and sentencing to a 263-year prison term support this contention. Calling into question the reliability of one of his chief accusers, fifty-seven-year-old grandmother Jannie Ligons, Holtzclaw said, “She's not innocent the way people think she is. She had a [drug] bust in the ’80s…. But we couldn't present that to the jury. This is not a woman that's, you know, a soccer mom or someone that's credible in society.”18
The chilling horror, steady drumbeat, and numbing repetition of these events underscore how they are not isolated incidents. We are not dealing with a Milwaukee problem, a Baltimore issue, or an Oklahoma City outrage. These are, in the DOJ's terminology, “patterns and practices” illustrative of a pervasive national police culture. They constitute nothing less than the state-sponsored sexual violation of black bodies. To untangle the complex psycho-sexual dynamics at work in such behavior is far beyond the limits of this essay. But the public exposure of the black body—a body both feared and prized19—as well as its sexualized debasement and humiliation—is a palpable display of the white ability to exercise dominance with impunity. In the words of one black Chicago youth, “It's society's way of saying, ‘You ain't worth shit to us.’ ”20
Racist Interracial Pornography
This “pattern and practice” of the sexual abasement and humiliation of black bodies in the service of white dominance and erotic pleasure is unintelligible apart from a broader context of cultural sexual meanings and identities ascribed to these bodies. In order to excavate these cultural meanings and to demonstrate their contemporary relevance and salience, I now turn to an examination of the genre of racist interracial pornography.
The following observation provides the insight for why this examination is so pertinent to the task at hand: “Pornography is the one media genre in which overt racism is still routine and acceptable. Not subtle, coded racism, but old-fashioned racism—stereotypical representations of the sexually primitive black male stud, the animalistic black woman, the hot Latina, the Asian geisha.”21 Although a provocative topic not commonly examined in Catholic theology, racist interracial pornography is important for several reasons. First, it is the fastest growing segment of Internet pornography.22 Second, white males are by far the greatest producers and consumers of this kind of pornography; yet the dominant “performers” by far are black men and white women. This genre is “produced and marketed for a White male audience” and reflects “a White man's fantasy of Black sexuality.”23 This leads to perhaps the most important reason for turning to this medium for insight, for it provides an unfiltered access to the deep cultural meanings ascribed to the nonwhite body—especially, but not only the black male body—by a white patriarchal mentality, even when these associations are consciously denied or deemed inadmissible in contemporary public discourse. For these porn fantasies don't “work,” and the industry would not be so profitable, in the absence of such deep and pervasive cultural (mal)formation.
In straight/heterosexual racist interracial pornography, one finds works with titles such as Black Poles in White Holes; Huge Black Cock on White Pussy; and Monster Black Penises in Tight White Holes.24
In straight porn, racist interracial pornography performs two functions:
a.It sexualizes inequality between white women and white men. It is a curious phenomenon that much of this genre consists of white men watching sexual intercourse between black men and white women (who are often cast as being the wives of the white man who is watching the interracial coupling). One author provides this account for the popularity of these scenarios: “It is hard to conceive of a better way to degrade white women, in a culture with a long and ugly history of racism, than having them penetrated again and again by a body that has been constructed, coded, and demonized as a carrier for all that is sexually debased, namely the black male.”25 (One should note how such scenarios also sexualize inequality between white men and black men, as the scene is marketed to a white male audience for their erotic enjoyment. The black man “takes” the white woman, but only in a context that allows the white man to “get off” on seeing the white woman so “debased.” The black man's sexual dominance is ultimately at the service of white male pleasure.)
b.It sexualizes inequality between white men and women of color. A staple feature of this genre of pornography is the sexual debasement and humiliation of women of color by white men. This function is perhaps the most pivotal one for this essay. I call attention to how certain films such as “Ghetto Gaggers” and “Degrading a Latina Slut” are marketed to a white male audience. Here is the description provided by the producers of “Ghetto Gaggers,” informing potential viewers of the sexual fantasy and the erotic pleasure to be obtained [offensive language alert]: “Do you prefer seeing ghetto sluts being turned into submissive sistas? if so, Ghetto Gaggers is just what the doctor ordered…. You'll see black pornstars being destroyed by white cocks, and left in piles of puke and spit.”26
There is much that is ethically problematic with such depictions. But it is important to emphasize this: an ethical reflection or evaluation of this genre that focuses only on the morality of pornography in general, or primarily upon the gendered violence present in these scenarios, misses the major and perhaps most salient feature of racist interracial pornography, namely, the nexus between racial identity and sexual behaviors—or, to say this more directly, the eroticization of white male dominance. As one author notes: “In pornography, all of the culture's racist myths become just another turn-on. Asian women are portrayed as pliant dolls; Latin women as sexually voracious but utterly submissive; and black women as dangerous and contemptible sexual animals.”27 This pornographic genre makes explicit the implicit cultural understandings of the bodies of persons of color that are at play in the sexual violation of black bodies by the police.
To further excavate the cultural meanings ascribed to the black male body, we also need to consider the phenomenon of gay racist interracial pornography. In such gay porn, representative titles include Blackballed 8 (produced in 2011—self-described as “one of the most successful series in gay porn history has a new chapter”); Poor Little White Guy 4 (released in 2008—“Oh poor little white guy, thrown down and gang-tagged by a group of fine black brothers. Don't cry too hard for him; he secretly loves it—and so will you!”); Poor Little White Boy 5 (2005); and the Thug Hunter website (which features white men penetrating black men).28 As with its straight counterparts, gay racist interracial pornography has two functions that are staple. Although they seem contradictory at first glance, upon deeper reflection the common purpose they serve is readily discerned.
a.When in the “top” or insertive/penetrating position, black men are depicted as powerful, dominant, and even dangerous. Yet, they are ultimately present to service the white “bottom,” whose pleasure is the focus of the fantasy. The white “bottom” is the center of attention and the “star” of the film. This is conveyed through the white actor's central positioning on the films’ cover and the fact that the white actor is often the only one who is named as starring in the film. Black men are often only credited in reference to the size and color of their phallus (e.g., as a “BBC”—“big black cock”). The fantasy turns on the culturally ascribed hypersexuality of the black man, who is presented as devoid of affection and as the “forbidden fruit” whose sexual energy is alluring and fascinating. His sexual prowess and virility are at the service of the white male, to whom this fantasy is being marketed.
b.When white men are in the top or insertive/penetrating position, they become racially abusive and denigrating, using blatantly racist expressions during the sexual encounter (see, e.g., Thug Hunter 4).29 Here the white male takes pleasure in aggressively subordinating and conquering the supposedly more virile black man.30 The white male's socially superior position becomes even more confirmed through his so-called mastery over and “taking” of the black man in the one area where the white cultural coding of black sexuality would give him a purported advantage. (The relevance of this cultural script for the sexual violation of black men by white police officers is more than obvious.)
Thus, regardless of the sexual role that white gay men are cast in, they “maintain a position of privilege and superiority in their interactions with African American men. They expect to be served sexually, or when they are in the top position, they become racially abusive.”31 Thus in its various manifestations, racist gay interracial pornography—as its straight counterpart—serves to sexualize or eroticize inequality between white men and men of color, especially black men.
No doubt, the reader is by now aware of the disturbing nature of the genre of racist interracial pornography. However, one should not lose sight of the larger point that motivated this seeming excursus: racist interracial pornography does not make sense—it is unintelligible—apart from a wider cultural frame, namely, that of racialized sexual discourse and representation that both manifests and reinforces a social hierarchy of white male anti-black supremacy. Such pornography makes manifest and explicit the pervasive racialized sexuality and sexual racism that is often left tacit and implicit in accounts of police sexual violation of black bodies. This is directly relevant to the discussion of anti-black sexual violation at the hands of police officers. The pervasiveness of anti-black sexual behavior in U.S. policing reflects the influence of pervasive sexual racialization. We see in the police behaviors previously described the denigration, abuse, and exploitative use of black bodies for the sake of white erotic pleasure and social dominance. U.S. policing practices and culture perform, enact, and enforce by means of sexual behaviors the anti-black dominance that is deeply embedded in U.S. society, and indeed Western culture.
Theological Reflection: Toward an Anti-Racist Eroticism
At the beginning of this essay, I noted that deconstructing systems of oppression, like anti-black racism, also must entail the deconstruction of “deep-level investments in sexualized and even eroticized assumptions [and practices] of dominance and submission.”32 The question that now arises concerns the resources present in faith traditions, specifically Roman Catholicism, that can be employed to that end.
Catholic theological reflection on sexualized anti-black racism and its inherent violence faces several daunting challenges. For one, there is the burden of unacknowledged Catholic complicity in U.S. sexual racism. The Catholic Church, through its teachings and practices in such matters as interracial marriage, the ordination of nonwhite men to the priesthood, and the admission of nonwhite women to the religious life, both participated in and reinforced the nexus between racial privilege and sexual denigration existing in wider society.33
Another challenge is that Catholic theological engagement with racial injustice is still quite limited, as I detailed in a recent issue of Theological Studies.34 Even more to the point, a third challenge or obstacle to effective engagement with sexual racism is that Catholic theological ethicists tend to treat racism and sexuality as “standalone” topics. Catholic studies on sexual ethics abound, but do not name or examine racialized sexuality, that is, how racialization impacts sexual identity and behaviors. The limited Catholic ethical literature on racism is largely silent on its deeply sexual character.35
Thus engaging racialized sexuality and sexual racism lies at the frontiers of Catholic theological and ethical reflection. This current project, then, cannot but be considered as a work in progress, one inspired by the following intuition: If a root factor in U.S. racism is the still existing unease with racial amalgamation and a (largely unstated) continuing fascination with interracial—and in particular, black—sexuality, then effective efforts to challenge racism cannot avoid engaging both the U.S. racialized sexual ethos and the religious dimensions of racialized sexuality.36
Given its nascent development, perhaps a useful contribution for an anti-racist sexual ethics would be to state questions that Catholic theological ethics must consider or address: If one of the core functions of sexual racism and racialized sexual discourse is to eroticize social and racial inequality, what resources exist within religious faith traditions—and, specifically, the Catholic faith tradition—and faith-based sexual discourses that would “encourage [racially differentiated] people to express their freedom and eroticize their equality?”37 How can Catholic theological ethics contribute to the overcoming of black “somatic alienation,” that is, a deep estrangement from their own embodied realities and sexual selves, brought about in reaction to white pejorative depictions of their sexuality?38 How must Catholic sexual ethics be reconstructed so as to facilitate the racial “erotic conversion” so desperately needed in both church and society?39
Or, to express the challenge less prosaically and perhaps more adequately: How can Catholic sexual ethics contribute to the building of a world where interracial (and intra-racial) sexual partners “accept [their] nakedness as sacred, and hold sacred the nakedness of another,”40 that is, a world that facilitates racialized persons’ ability to love themselves and others through erotic love?41
My intuition is that a fruitful direction could lie in developing what might be called “the racially erotic Trinity.” In my monograph Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, I noted how appeals to the Trinity are made in the struggle against racism. The nonhierarchical, nonsubordinate relationships constitutive of the Godhead are used to ground models of noncoercive, mutual, and nondomineering personal and social relationships:
We believe the diversity of the human family reflects the interior life of the Triune God. Christians believe in a Trinitarian God, a community of persons who exist in a communion of life and love. In God, the Divine Persons relate to one another in neither domination nor subordination. In God, there is distinction without separation, unity without uniformity, difference without division. Since we are created in the image of this God, God's own life becomes the model for human social life. The variety of languages, cultures, and colors in the human family, then, is a mirror of the Trinitarian God whose essence is a loving embrace of difference.42
“A loving embrace of difference.” This phrase inspires reflection on eros and the Trinity. The Jungian therapist and theologian Ann Belford Ulanov describes “eros” as “the psychic urge to relate, to join, to be in the midst of, to reach out to, to value, to get in touch with, to get involved with concrete feelings, things, and people, rather than to abstract or theorize.”43 Eros, then, connotes passionate, loving connection. Eros is a passion, that is, it is invested and committed, sensual and sensuous. Another author, John Neary, describes eros as “a passionate attraction to the valuable and a desire to be united with it.”44 “Trinity,” then, might be understood as Christian shorthand for speaking of a relational God, an “erotic” God, a God who is constitutively both a relationship and a passion for nondominative and noncoercive relating. Only because God draws near to us erotically, that is, passionately and with desire, are humans enabled or even enticed to engage in “logos” thinking or theologizing about the Divine.
Yet, the Incarnation makes this erotic Godhead in-bodied, that is, enfleshed with suffering and partaking in physical delight. Elizabeth Johnson vividly describes how an incarnational commitment makes the Divine bodily and physically expressive: “Bodiliness opens up the mystery of God to the conditions of history, including suffering and delight. She becomes flesh…irrevocably, physically connected to the human adventure.”45 This embodied/“in-bodied” God gives further insight, impetus, and audacity to speak of an erotic God—and the courage to redeem eros from the realm of the titillating, dirty, and forbidden.
If we are created in the image of the Divine Mystery, whose essence is a loving—dare I say, erotic—embrace of difference, how might this inform human interracial sexual relating? I am not prepared or able to give a fully coherent response to that question; it demands a fuller and more developed study of eros and Trinitarian belief that is beyond the space constraints of this essay. Yet, I believe that such an understanding of the Divine Mystery provides a faith basis for a nondominative eroticism that challenges and subverts the malformed ways that we are socialized into racist sexual identities and behaviors. It would ground what might be considered an essential ethical question concerning any intimate and sexual relation: “Does it embody and promote affection, mutual respect, and equality between the partners—and contribute to the realization of equality between men and women [of all colors]—or does it constitute and further contribute to the degradation of people,” especially by eroticizing racial and social inequality?46
This essay ends on an unfinished note, raising more questions than answers about where Catholic theological ethics needs to go in developing an anti-racist sexual ethics. Yet my intuition suggests that in these first and provisional reflections lies a key needed to rectify the compounded lacunae and omissions that render Catholic theological ethics inadequate, complicit, and impotent (pun intended) in the face of the challenge of anti-black sexual racism and the violence it breeds in our world.
1. Mara Viveros Vigoya, “Sexuality and Desire in Racialised Contexts,” in Understanding Global Sexualities: New Frontiers, ed. Peter Aggleton et al. (London: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 219, explicating Roger Bastide.
2. Joane Nagel, Race, Ethnicity and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 2 (emphasis added).
3. Cited in Charles Herbert Stember, Sexual Racism: The Emotional Barrier to an Integrated Society (New York: Elsevier Scientific Publishing, 1976), ix.
4. Laurel C. Schneider, “What Race Is Your Sex?,” in Queer Religion: LGBT Movements and Queering Religion, vol. 2, ed. Donald L. Boisvert and Jay Emerson Johnson (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012), 138.
5. Zillah R. Eisentein, Hatreds: Racialized and Sexualized Conflicts in the 21st Century (New York: Routledge, 1996), 14.
6. Studies of the infamous Tuskegee experiments, where African American men were injected with the syphilis virus and left untreated long after effective treatments were developed, abound. For a study that notes the sexual subtext of these experiments, see James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1993). For an examination that situates this tragic event within the broader context of medical abuse inflicted on African Americans, see Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on African Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 2006).
7. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 105–6.
8. For a comprehensive presentation of this history and its present-day effects, see Patricia Hill Collins, Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004).
9. For a history of the Black Panther Party that treats the lengths and tactics employed by public authorities to crush this movement, see Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
10. For an incisive analysis of this event, see Carlyle Van Thompson, “White Police Penetrating, Probing, and Playing in the Black Man's Ass: The Sadistic Sodomizing of Abner Louima,” in Carlyle Van Thompson, Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 145–65.
11. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Strip Search Victims Speak of Helpless Humiliation,” (July 11, 2013), http://archive.jsonline.com. In another interview, Pettis further described his excruciating sexual assaults: “I feel humiliated,” said Pettis. “It's like I just want this to end. This ain't right.” Pettis said police followed and stopped him as many as thirty times, doing similar illegal searches on the streets. “Every time they would see me, pull me over, pull my pants down, my boxers—he would stick two fingers inside me,” said Pettis.” See Fox6, “Civil Suit Filed against MPD for Illegal Cavity Searches” (July 11, 2013), http://fox6now.com.
12. Police State USA, “Officer Who Forced Dozens of Anal Cavity Searches for Fun Gets Only Two Years in Prison” (December 28, 2013), http://www.policestateusa.com.
13. It is noteworthy that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has a specific understanding of the phrase “pattern or practice” of misconduct: “The finding of a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within a law enforcement agency does not mean that most officers violate the law. Nor does a pattern or practice reflect that a certain number of officers have violated the law or that the number of unlawful acts have reached a particular threshold…. Rather, the touchstone is whether the unlawful conduct appears more typical than isolated or aberrant. A pattern or practice exists where the conduct appears to be part of the usual practice, whether officially sanctioned by policy or otherwise.” Thus a “pattern or practice” is “more than the mere occurrence of isolated or ‘accidental’ or ‘sporadic’” acts. A “pattern or practice” must be a “regular rather than the unusual practice.” (Note the parallels to what theological ethicists call “social or structural sin.”) See DOJ, “Newark Police Department–Findings Report” (July 22, 2014), www.justice.gov, quoting International Brotherhood of Teamsters v. United States, 431 U.S. 324 (emphases added).
14. Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Findings of Police Bias Have Baltimore Asking What Took So Long,” New York Times, August 11, 2016, A14.
15. DOJ, “Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department” (August 10, 2016), www.justice.gov.
16. Chris Gilmore, “Final Appeal Extension Expected to Be Filed for Holtzclaw Today,” News 9 (February 1, 2017), www.news9.com.
17. Goldie Taylor, “White Cop Convicted of Serial Rape of Black Women,” The Daily Beast (December 10, 2015), www.thedailybeast.com.
18. ABC News, “Ex-Oklahoma City Cop Spending 263 Years in Prison for Rape and His Accusers Share Their Stories” (April 21, 2016), abcnews.go.com.
19. Ellis Cose, The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America (New York: Washington Square Press, 2002). See also Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, The Black Body (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 14.
20. Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes an African American young man in Chicago speaking of his understanding of the wider society's view of his peers: “‘You ain't shit. You not no good. The only thing you are worth is working for us. You will never own anything. You not going to get an education. We are sending your ass to the penitentiary.’ They're telling you no matter how hard you struggle, no matter what you put down, you ain't shit.” See Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic (June 2014). See also Van Thompson, “White Police Penetrating.”
21. Robert Jensen, “Stories of a Rape Culture: Pornography as Propaganda,” in Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry, ed. Melinda Tankard Reist and Abigail Bray (North Geelong, Victoria, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2011), 31 (emphasis in the original). I also want to clarify the limits and intent of this discussion. I am not interested in debating the morality of pornography in se in this project. Nor is it an indictment of all forms of interracial sexual representations in pornography. Rather, this project focuses upon racist interracial pornography, that is, that genre that trades upon racial stereotypes and degrading depictions that reflect and reinforce—that is, sexualize and eroticize—unequal societal racial relationships.
22. Gail Dines, “The White Man's Burden: Gonzo Pornography and the Construction of Black Masculinity,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 18, no. 1 (2006): 285.
23. See Dines, “White Man's Burden,” 285 and 289. Another study notes that such media are “produced and marketed for a White male audience. These films are a White man's fantasy of Black sexuality—the fact that Black men watch them is purely accidental” (Gloria Cowan and Robin R. Campbell, “Racism and Sexism in Interracial Pornography: A Content Analysis,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 18, no. 3 [1994]: 325).
24. Dines, “White Man's Burden,” 285 and 289.
25. Ibid., 285.
26. Taken from www.degradingwomen.com. Note again the intended audience for this fantasy and to whom it is marketed.
27. Cited in Alice Mayhall and Alice D. H. Russell, “Racism in Pornography,” Feminism and Psychology 3, no. 2 (June 1993): 277 (emphasis added). Another study notes, “Black women are portrayed as sexually uncivilized and promiscuous, essentially a whore. The black man is defined solely by the size, readiness, and unselectivity of his penis.” Moreover, black men are portrayed as utterly devoid of capacities for intimacy, even given minimal porn standards for depicting genuine “intimacy.” See Cowan and Campbell, “Racism and Sexism in Interracial Pornography,” 325–26.
28. I quote from the descriptive liner notes that accompanied the various DVDs. These notes are found on the back covers of the original cases of the DVDs. At times, they are also found on various websites that advertise these DVDs or the scenes from them for purchase or downloading.
29. From the video's description: “Big Daddy's Thug Hunter 4 [2013] is four scenes, each one dedicated to finding a hard, horny, and thugged-out man to wreak sexual havoc on.” One reviewer, relating his unease with “racially demeaning gay porn,” notes that only black “thugs” are depicted in the film and writes, “[T]hey also seem to enjoy furthering nonsensical stereotypes. Here are a few samples from the opening scene's dialogue: ‘They all think they're tough,’ ‘They're all down to make money, and they all act like they don't like it,’ ‘That's why we came to this neighborhood here, by the train tracks,’ and my favorite, ‘Half of them are homeless and junkies.’” See “Thug Hunter 4 [Big Daddy],” www.tlavideo.com.
30. The following is a recent expression of this sentiment, where a white gay man tells his scene partner, “I've always wanted to have sex with a black guy. Or, excuse me, to top a black guy.” This is the opening dialogue between “Roman Daniels” and “Ty Royal” at collegedudes.com (emphasis in the original). Note that the white actor makes it clear that his desire is not simply to be sexually intimate with a person of a different race but to dominate over him. This discourse, and the fantasy it expresses, does not make sense apart from the sexual racism that is pervasive in U.S. culture.
31. Niels Teunis, “Sexual Objectification and the Construction of Whiteness in the Gay Male Community,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 9, no. 3 (May–June 2007): 273.
32. Schneider, “What Race Is Your Sex?,” Queer Religion, 138.
33. This is more fully explicated in the larger project. See, for example, the historical studies of Cyprian Davis, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (New York: Crossroad, 1992); Stephen J. Ochs, Desegregating the Altar: The Josephites and the Struggle for Black Catholic Priests, 1871–1960 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); and M. Shawn Copeland's examination of the life of a free woman of color, Henriette Delille, who founded the Sisters of the Holy Family in nineteenth-century New Orleans: The Subversive Power of Love: The Vision of Henriette Delille (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2009).
34. Bryan N. Massingale, “Has the Silence Been Broken? Catholic Theological Ethics and Racial Justice,” Theological Studies 75, no. 1 (March 2014): 133–55.
35. The limited work on this issue has been done by M. Shawn Copeland, when she discusses the situation of enslaved women. However, she does not subject racialized sexuality and race-based sexual violence to in-depth theological or ethical analysis. See her works The Subversive Power of Love and Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010).
36. For recent examples of the continuing fascination and unease with interracial sexuality consider (1) that almost 30 percent of Mississippi primary voters in 2012 believed that interracial marriages should be illegal; (2) that in 2011, a Louisiana justice of the peace refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple; and (3) in 2011, a Baptist church in Kentucky banned interracial couples from membership in the church. Nationally, although 75 percent of whites approve of interracial marriage in the abstract, less than half (43 percent) of white college students report a willingness to date interracially, with blacks being the least preferred dating prospects. See Erik Hayden, “46 Percent of Mississippi GOP Want to Ban Interracial Marriage,” The Atlantic (April 7, 2011), https://www.theatlantic.com; and “Interracial Marriage: Many Deep South Republican Voters Believe Interracial Marriage Should be Illegal,” Huffington Post (March 12, 2012); http://www.huffingtonpost.com. Even more recent reports relate a continuing unease over interracial coupling and sexuality: “People Say They Approve of Interracial Couples but Studies Uncover Bias,” https://www.washingtonpost.com.
37. Anthony B. Pinn, Embodiment and the Shape of Black Theological Thought (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 97.
38. I borrow the term “somatic alienation” as a consequence of white supremacy from Charles W. Mills, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). The estrangement of African Americans from their sexuality in reaction to white Christianity has been well described in the works of Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), and What's Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies/Christian Souls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005).
39. On erotic conversion, see the work of Paul Gorell, “Erotic Conversion: Coming Out of Christian Erotophobia,” in Queer Religion, 21–48. However, note that Gorell does not avert to racial dynamics in his understanding of erotic conversion.
40. James Baldwin, Just Above My Head (New York: Dell Publishing, 1979), 309–10.
41. Pinn, Embodiment, 89.
42. Bryan N. Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010), 127.
43. Ann Belford Ulanov, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 155, as cited by John Neary, “The Erotic Imagination and the Catholic Academy,” in Professing in the Postmodern Academy, ed. Stephen R. Haynes (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2002), 150.
44. Neary, “The Erotic Imagination,” 160.
45. Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 168.
46. Bob Avakian, Break All the Chains: Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution (Chicago: RCP Publications, 2014), 54–55.