LEGITMATE RAPE

Last night's episode of Totally Biased with (my son) W. Kamau Bell, opened with a wry comment on Todd Akin's faux paus about the inability of women to get  pregnant when they are "legitimately raped." Bell said if that were true, "Why are there so many light-skinned folk in Alabama?" And he could have added, "Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, North Carolina, the U.S. of A."

Then it hit me: RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE DURING SLAVERY! That's why we have such a large number of light-skinned folk in this country. In order to increase the number of slaves, and his net worth, the progeny born of the white master's  rape of an enslaved woman, was always black, another slave, never counted as white or bi-racial. THIS RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE! 

There wasn't a court in the country that would have prosecuted any white man for forcing any woman to have sex. The custom (and it may as well have been the law) was that white men could do as they pleased with any woman—black, white, married, or single. With a powerful white male protector some women were immune from being considered fair game, but any black man who objected to the exploitation or abuse of a woman could be killed with impunity. RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE!

W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar, historian, and activist who was a founder of the NAACP put it this way. “To the ordinary American or Englishman, the race question at bottom is simply a matter of ownership of women; white men want the right to use all women, colored and white.” 

The ownership of women. This is what the Republican War on Women is all about: returning to the days when powerful men could do as they wished with women; to the days when RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE. Todd Akin's casual remark merely referred to what they've been doing for some time now with their attacks on Planned Parenthood, trying to criminalize abortion, forcing pregnant women to have unnecessary procedures. Todd Akin did not step out of line; he merely reiterated Republican policy. This is nothing new. It's a significant plank in their platform for the 2012 election. Todd Akin simply made it crystal clear that the Republicans want to return to the days when RAPE WAS LEGITIMATE.

Ethnic Identification

With a view toward dividing the country into black and white and pretending that no other ethnic identities exist, laws were passed during the formation of the U.S that isolated people of African descent by placing us outside the "mainstream." Everybody else, unless whites said no, was white and presumably a part of the mainstream. These laws and the unwritten customs that accompanied them operated to maintain the myth of white supremacy. They also made black the embodiment of all that is bad/evil/wrong, and of course white the opposite. Other "obvious ethnics" (see W. Kamau Bell's comic turn on this term) resent this black-white division with good reason.

One result of lumping all Europeans into the "white" category is that many of them no longer have any notion of their ethnic origins. And, in California I've observed that many could care less as more and more people ignore ethnic boundaries. I know one young man who is the product of an Italian-American mother and Mexican-American father. His wife is the product of a father who is Greek-American and a mother who is Korean-American. They have two children. How do we classify them? And, who cares?

At some point we may even stop using that ridiculous appellation, "bi-racial," usually reserved only for the offspring of one white parent and one obviously ethnic parent. Unless, of course, that offspring becomes the first black president of the United States.

At this point, as global interaction on every level increases, I think ethnic identification will become far less significant than it has been. That won't happen anytime soon, but things are certainly moving in that direction.