The black brute stereotype (1870s – ) is one of the pictures white Americans have in their heads about black men: as savage, violent, amazingly strong and not caring about right and wrong. Black men rape and kill for no reason. They cannot control themselves. Whites do not believe that every black man is like that, but they think plenty of them are.
Willie Horton, Emmett Till and Rodney King were all seen in this light. It is why Susan Smith could blame a black man for killing her children and be believed: because black men are like that: they kill for no reason, even children!
It is why whites are afraid to walk alone in black neighbourhoods: some black man might jump out of nowhere and rape or kill them. They especially like to rape and kill complete strangers at night. It is why whites cross the street to the other side – just to be safe! As if savage killers cannot cross the street too!
When a white man kills someone, white people ask, “Why did he do it?” But when a black man kills someone they do not ask why. They already know: because he is black.
As stereotypes go, this one is pretty new: it did not arise till the 1870s, after the black slaves were freed. As slaves they were seen as simple and childlike. Once freed, they were seen as being wild and out of control.
So if blacks were not kept in line by terror and lynchings, black men would freely rape white women. What, after all, would stop them? This became the stated excuse for Jim Crow – to protect pure white women against savage black men. When Congress tried to pass a law against lynching, white Southerners blocked it in the Senate for just this reason.
As it turns out, of all the blacks who were lynched only about one in seven was guilty of raping a white woman. In the case of Emmett Till all he did was call a white woman “Baby”. That was enough for her husband and her brother to kill him, a 14-year-old boy – and get away with it.
The true brutes in Jim Crow times were white men. They raped far more women, black and white – and, in the case of black women, got away with it. They were the ones who carried out the lynchings – which were far more savage and frequent than anything blacks had the power to do.
And even today blacks are three times more likely to be physically threatened, harmed or killed because of their race than are whites. So this idea of whites as peaceful and blacks as threatening to whites is not rooted in fact. It is rooted in something else.
Yes, there are black men who are violent and savage, who do unspeakable things. But there are white men like that too. In either case, they are hardly common enough to reasonably determine one’s ideas about the ordinary people of either race.