Myths of Sexual Danger

Media Clip (News Report): Well, a grand jury in Mississippi today, declined to indict the white woman whose accusation set off the lynching of Emmett Till nearly 70 years ago. Carolyn Bryant Donham, now 88, initially claimed that Till made unwanted advances towards her at her family's grocery store. It led to the brutal torture and lynching of the 14 year old. The prosecutor said the grand jury found insufficient evidence to charge Dunham.

Media Clip Intro: ...country, very courageous young people who say, 'I'm willing to stick to my claim, make a pledge, and I will abstain until I'm married.' I'm not married yet. I made a claim a long time ago, but I want to recommit myself to say that I will wait until I'm married. So I'm going to do it with them. I'm very proud of y'all. They're so awesome in number, I'm looking at an ocean of young people. And not only do they represent themselves, but each teenager out here, each young person, represents pundits back home that couldn't make it. As they stake their individual claims, their individual commitment cards and drive them to the ground here in the National Mall.

Sara: Welcome back to Pure White, a podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy. A co-production of Axis Mundi Media and the After Purity Project. I'm your host, Sarah Moslener. Welcome to episode five: Myths of Sexual Danger. A bit of a warning with this one, this episode contains stark descriptions of anti-Black, anti-Asian and misogynistic violence. So please do what you need to do to take care of yourself.

Carolyn Donham Bryant is an infamous American figure-- a person who played a key role in one of the most gruesome and consequential acts of racial terror in US history. In many ways, she represents almost the entire story of this podcast. Though she became famous nearly 70 years ago, she only died in April of 2023. And as her story reminds us, she died an innocent woman. You may have noticed a theme in the last three episodes: sexual danger. For enslaved women, this was very real. But the sexual threats against them were based on sexual stereotypes that had existed since Europeans first started writing about African women. The over-sexualization of Black women and men was well established by the 19th century in both Europe and the United States. A myth that was used to point to a race-based inferiority. Being 'over-sexed' meant being uncivilized. Conversely, white women were under-sexed. 'Dispassionate' was the word the Victorians used. And white men... well, as usual, they could do whatever they wanted without repercussions, including the formation of a controlling stereotype. Throughout the era of US nation-building, the myth of sexual danger loomed large. In 1915 the film 'Birth of a Nation' captivated white audiences with a plot that featured a white woman chased by a Black man yelling expressions of desire for her-- or rather, a white man in blackface, it was 1915 after all. His chase is portrayed as foolish. A simple Black man who believes he has the right to express interest in a white woman. Deeply alarmed, she runs away and inevitably throws herself off a cliff. The scene is played as much for humiliation as it is for sexual threat. The man has no ill intent toward the woman, but his affection for her is perceived as just that. The film was a hit among white people. It was even screened in the White House for President Woodrow Wilson, his family, and his entire cabinet. By 1915 racial terror lynchings were a feature of southern life. Either northerners pretended the problem didn't exist, like Francis Willard, or they didn't see it as a problem. And so the lynching myth that Ida B. Wells spoke of persisted. Even today, myths of sexual danger offer consistent narratives that portray the vulnerability of white women and children. From Satanic Panics to Central Park Dog Walkers, sexual vulnerability is a trait that quickly becomes a weapon in the white racist imagination. Oh, I should throw in drag queens there, absolutely. This episode digs into the impacts of these myths. Myths are not simply stories, but narratives that confirm broadly held beliefs, that make stereotypes appear to be common sense rather than projections of fear. And they create justifications for controlling the bodies that threaten. So this episode is three stories, three acts, if you will, about sexual danger and white supremacy. Act One: Emmett Till. Act Two: Lionel Richie. Yep, that's right. And Act Three: Atlanta.

Act One: Emmett Till. At the top of this episode, we heard a news story about Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who accused Emmett Till of making improper advances. The exact events of what happened between Bryant and Till have been speculated on for decades. Did he grab her hand? Did he tell her he had been with white women? Did he whistle at her? But none of this mattered to the courts who exonerated Bryant's husband and his brother for Till's murder. All they needed to know was that Till was a Black man and Bryant was a white woman. Till, of course, was only 14 years old, a child. But, as often happens with Black children, his age, size and threat were enlarged in order to fill the space within the white imagination. If you've never heard this story before, it's time. Here it is told by the Equal Justice Initiative and its founder, Bryan Stevenson. It's about eight minutes long. I'll see you on the other side.

Media Clip (Mamie Till Mobley): I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me. And with the death of my son can mean something to the other unfortunate people all over the world. Then for him to have died a hero would mean more to me than for him just to have died.

Media Clip (News Reporter): Emmett Till 14, was kidnapped and killed, allegedly for wolf whistling at the wife of accused Roy Bryan.

Bryan: It's not just that they discover his body and that he's been killed. He has been brutally, brutally beaten. As a criminal defense attorney, when we look at crimes, we often try to put together a picture about what happened, and it takes a lot of hatred and a lot of rage to do the kind of violence that was done to Emmett Till. Being a Black boy in the American South could be quite perilous. The allegation that Emmett Till was being social with a white woman was considered an affront, a threat to the racial order. And I think the shock of his death was compounded by the brutality of his death. Emmett's mother couldn't actually conform to the conventions of the time, and she did something really quite remarkable. She made the really unorthodox choice of having a funeral with an open casket that was going to be very widely publicized, that was going to be attended by the national press. She wanted civil rights leaders and political leaders to see what they did to her child. She invited David Jackson and JET magazine to take pictures of this child's battered body. And these images were widely circulated. JET magazine was a publication that was primarily produced and distributed to the African American community that had been trying to educate the rest of the country about the horrors of segregation and racial violence and lynching in the American South. And the images were really, really challenging. It was the kind of visual that you didn't typically see. You certainly didn't see it outside of a war zone, and you certainly didn't see it with children. His face was grotesque. You could see eyes, but you couldn't really distinguish all of his facial features, that's how much violence he had been subjected to. Emmett's mother's presence in the photo is really important, because she's really giving witness to victimization and violence. The other images that Emmett's mother provided just created this notion of a very respectable young boy who was trying to make the very best impression on everyone he met. The juxtaposition of a little boy in a suit and a tie with his battered face was a stark image that made it really impossible for anyone who saw it to be silent about it. Mainstream publications like Look and Life began talking about this issue. It became an issue that elected officials were being questioned about. These images made it impossible for white families in other parts of the country to stay indifferent, to stay neutral.

Media Clip (News Reporter): Never has this quiet little cotton-growing community of Mississippi seen so much publicity and so much excitement as in the past few days. Nearly 200 of the town's five or 600 residents have packed into the courthouse to hear the day's proceedings.

Media Clip (News Reporter): Do you have any evidence to bear on this case?

Media Clip (Mamie Till Mobley): I do know that this is my son.

Media Clip (News Reporter): How long do you expect to be here?

Media Clip (Mamie Till Mobley): Until the trial is over.

Media Clip (News Reporter): Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted by this jury. And subsequently, even though they admitted taking the boy from the house, they were freed of kidnap charges.

Bryan: The inability to hold anyone accountable for his murder, and the comfort with which the men who killed him were able to talk about the violence was just adding to the injury. They weren't just killing a boy. They're expressing something rooted in these decades of animosity and fear and anger.

Media Clip: A boy, a 14 year old boy, was killed brutally. And one of our objectives here is to see to it that the boy, whose picture you see there, does not die an inconspicuous death. And that his case will be remembered and something will be done about it.

Bryan: These images became powerful forces in organizing a new level of commitment and resistance. The brutal murder of Emmett Till really pushed Rosa Parks to a deeper level of activism that was one of the motivating forces behind her choice to not give up her seat on that bus. And in many ways, it was an organizing and galvanizing moment for the civil rights movement in this country. These shootings of unarmed Black boys and men have been going on for decades. It is a manifestation of this same presumption of dangerousness that killed Emmett Till. That killed thousands of people of color during the lynching era. Imagery and photography is a really important tool. Without the imagery, there would be no one who's prepared to believe some of the violence that we've witnessed.

Media Clip (Mamie Till Mobley): It's such a gratifying feeling to see you all sitting by and standing by, because I realized shortly after this thing happened that it wasn't a fight that I could do-- that it was going to be a fight that we had to do. That the people would do for me, more or less.

Bryan: We've never made progress in this country around important social justice issues until we've given marginal victims a face. That image still has resonance. It still has power. I think it still expresses the pain and anguish of a huge part of our population that is still hoping for basic recognition of their humanity.

Media Clip (Mamie Till Mobley): And I want you all to stand by me, because it's going to be a fight. And if you will stand by me, I will stand by you because I am not afraid.

Sara: So two things I want you to understand. The murder of Emmett Till is largely recognized as the moment the efforts toward Black liberation, long thwarted by white ignorance and violence, became the civil rights movement as we know it today. The death of a child, kidnapped, and murdered displayed for the nation to see. It did something. It showed white America who we were. That our status quo was steeped in anti-Blackness and fears of race mixing. And the cause of it all: a white woman's claim that she had been sexually threatened by a Black boy.

Sara: Act Two: Lionel Richie. You've already met Vron Ware, the British journalist and academic who's been writing about whiteness since the 1980s. Her book opens with a story that she heard from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from well, you know how it goes. I'll let her tell it.

Vron Ware: The friend of a friend had gone to New York, so it happened in New York, not in London. But the friend was from London. And she told me this story. And then I subsequently kept hearing about from other people who swore they knew the person to whom it had happened. They didn't know that person, but they knew their friend. In other words, it was an urban myth. It was a hearsay story. And shall I tell a story? [Yes.] Okay, this is a story about a woman. She's, I can tell you all her details. She was a social worker. She was going to New York on her own. I think she may have even recently been widowed. You know, very sort of specific information. She's in quite a fancy hotel. She's in Manhattan. She's just about to go back to the airport, and she is-- she gets into the elevator, and the doors close, she goes down a floor, and a man comes in. This is a very well dressed African American man with a big dog. There's nobody else in the elevator, so she's actually terrified. So the doors closed, she can't get out. And then the man-- she hears the man saying, 'Lady, lie down!' And she's absolutely terrified, so she sort of goes to her knees. Where upon-- just to get to the end of the story-- it turns out the man was talking to his dog. And, obviously, very embarrassing, horrible. Next morning, she's checking out, and she has a bunch of flowers, and there's a message from a man-- the man who was in the elevator-- saying, 'Thank you for this incredibly, you know, memorable moment,' signed Lionel Richie.

Sara: So of course, I had to look up this story. Not because it's true, it's not. The internet, and your common sense will quickly confirm that for you. But I wanted to know more about the process of myth-making that involves white women and Black men. Turns out, there are many versions of this story, and many Black male celebrities who it's purported to be about. One version has it set in Las Vegas, the man in the elevator, Eddie Murphy. Other versions named: Reggie Jackson, Wilt Chamberlain, O.J. Simpson, Mean Joe Greene, Jesse Jackson, Jackie Robinson and Michael Jordan. Now, if you're like me and obsessed with chronology, Jackie Robinson, the oldest of the group, died in 1972 according to Ware and the account she heard, this encounter took place in the 1980s.

The themes of the story are familiar: scary, Black man, timid white woman, an enclosed space. This is not a new tableau. In fact, the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 happened because a Black man entered an elevator with a white woman working as its operator. There were rumors. By the time it was confirmed, they were, in fact, just rumors. Entire city blocks of the local Black community, a thriving economic center referred to as Black Wall Street, had been turned to dust by violent white mobs. I guess it's progress that the worst that happened in this story was an embarrassing encounter. A white woman temporarily experiencing fear later replaced by shame. It's her imagination we are asked to enter into. A white imagination. I know I've been using this term a lot, so let me expand on it a little bit. Filmmaker Kasi Lemmons, she directed 'Eve's Bayou' and the biopic about Harriet Tubman. She calls the white imagination a lack of imagination. She says, 'maybe that explains this lack of imagination,' she wrote in The Washington Post. She was trying to make sense of white apathy toward the death of George Floyd. So she continues to explain, 'The price of truly understanding Black life in America is just too high, that understanding demands too much. If you felt this rage yourself, you would have to acknowledge what it caused and what it makes you want to do.' The white racial imagination, then, is simply white racial ignorance. It's a place where difficult knowledge and information are either ignored or entirely erased. Artists, authors, and other commentators who write about the white imagination are not simply talking about the imaginations of white people, but about a mindset in which one encounters information that creates cognitive dissonance. Instead of resolving the dissonance with factual information, the white imagination strings together a series of narratives, stereotypes, and anxieties in order to justify one's own violent urges or apathy. And that brings us to Act Three: Atlanta.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): We now know more about those deadly shootings at three Metro Atlanta spas. The suspect says the motive behind the attacks his: sex addiction.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): Authorities say 21 year old Robert Long confessed to being the gunman in the shooting rampage that killed a total of eight people-- nine victims in all. And the only surviving member remains in the hospital tonight.

Media Clip (Speaker 1): Reporter Denise Dillon joins us live in Cherokee, County at the scene of the first shooting.

Media Clip (Speaker 2): And Denise, friends of that victim at that spa, have been coming all day to pay their respects.

Media Clip (Reporter): They sure have. You can see all the flowers and cards, and candles left behind. And right there, a list of the names of everyone who was shot. Now, earlier today, as investigators released details about the man, now in jail for the shootings, they said had an arrest not been made so quickly, there may have been even more violence.

Media Clip: I'm lost. I'm confused. I'm hurt.

Media Clip (News Reporter): A heart broken mother, trying to understand the death of her daughter. Delana Yon was at Young's Asian massage Tuesday with her husband when a gunman opened fire, killing Yon and three others. And wounding a fifth person.

Media Clip: I just want to see her one more time.

Media Clip (News Reporter): Less than an hour later, Atlanta police got calls of shootings at the Aromatherapy Spa and Gold Spa on Piedmont Road. Police say four people were killed at those spas. Investigators knew who they were looking for. After putting out surveillance photos of the suspected gunman, 21 year old Robert Long's parents contacted them, telling police it was their son.

Media Clip (Baker): He apparently has an issue; what he considers a sex addiction. And he sees these locations as something that allows him to--- it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate.

Media Clip (News Reporter): Cherokee County Sheriff's Captain Jay Baker says Long told them he had planned to carry out more crimes.

Media Clip (Baker): He was headed to Florida, and that he was going to do similar acts in that state. My understanding, it was some type of porn industry in that state that he was willing to go do some similar act in that location.

Media Clip (News Reporter): Those who live near Long's family in Woodstock call the shootings senseless.

Media Clip (Neighbor): It's a horrible tragedy. You just, you can't, you can't help but feel for everybody involved, it's beyond the scope of normal, rational thought.

Sara: What didn't appear in the media reports at first was that Aaron Long was a born-again Christian, who'd been baptized at the age of 17, just three years before his shooting spree. Long was a member of Crabapple First Baptist Church, a church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. Long was a member of the SBC, the son of a youth minister, who had previously been sent to a treatment center for sexual addiction. As a Christian who believed his sexual desire and practices were in contradiction to his faith, Long claimed that he was tortured by sexual temptations. He also claimed to visit sex workers at spas, including one he targeted during his shooting rampage. Given that his Christian beliefs would not allow him to accept his sexual practices as part of the normal spectrum of human sexuality. He projected his ire onto the women whom he had come to see as objects of his sexual desire. When his parents kicked him out of the house for his sex addiction, his distress drove him to eliminate the people whom he felt were responsible for his lust: Asian and Asian-American women.

On social media, former evangelicals immediately understood what the sheriff's department meant when they said that Long was, quote, 'trying to eliminate temptation.' One of these was Angie Hong, who later published an article about purity culture and anti-Asian racism for the Atlantic. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Angie about the Atlanta shooting, here's what she said:

Angie Hong: He attended a church that had these ideals of virtue and purity. He constantly failed. Found himself being tempted. The objects of his desire were Asian women. And he, I don't know what, you know, what flipped the switch on, 'Like, if I get rid of this, then I won't be tempted anymore. Or I just need to get rid of this because I'm so sinful, and they're the objects of my sin, and I just need to get rid of them. Just get rid of the evil industry, and then the sin won't happen like I won't be tempted. Nobody will be tempted to break the holy rules of, you know, chastity and purity or whatever.' And that's sort of what I was thinking as I wrote about it, you know. But it's hard to know, because we don't know him. We don't know him, and we haven't heard from him. And, you know, apparently he just had a bad day.

Sara: Angie is the former Creative Director at the Chicago campus of Willow Creek Community Church. In 2019, its founder, Bill Hybels, resigned after numerous allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse of authority surfaced. She left the church and her job shortly afterward. The Atlanta shooting reminded her of the purity teachings she learned growing up in her Korean-immigrant churchstudying the writings of Joshua Harris and other purity teachers. For women of color recovering from purity culture is a set of challenges layered with religious trauma, sexual shame, and racial identity loss.

Aaron Long's violent actions happened because we have failed to understand the racial and racist dynamics of evangelical purity culture. Angie is just one of many who is hoping to fill this knowledge gap that she helps move people toward healing and recovery from purity culture and white supremacy.

Each of these stories offers a slightly different take on how the virtue of sexual purity informs the white imagination, creating a dangerous situation for people of color. Carolyn Bryant was exonerated for her part in the most well known murder in US history. The English woman, her instincts told her to be afraid of a Black man with a dog. And Aaron Long believed Asian women were a threat to his sexual purity. In each case, an individual's white racial identity allowed them to invoke their innocence or vulnerability in relationship to a person of color. I don't think I have to belabor the point that myths of sexual danger are deadly. Even whispers of a threat are enough to peak white racial rage bent on eliminating what they fear. The ideology of sexual purity and its mascot: 'pure white womanhood' are effective tools for channeling the depths of racialized sexual anxiety, running roughshod over any effort to pause and reflect on how these myths have become mistaken for truth. This has been Pure White. A podcast about sexual purity and white supremacy. Made possible by Funding from the Louisville Institute and the Luce Foundation project on Religion and Sexual Abuse. Next week, we get into the belly of the beast: True Love Waits, its origins, its intentions, its remarkable ability to make us cringe still. If only that were the worst of it. Special thanks this week to Vron Ware. Be sure to check out her books, 'Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History' and 'Out of Whiteness: Color Politics and Culture.' She was writing about white racial identity long before it became merely fragile. Yes, it never was. Thank you to the Equal Justice Initiative for their incredible work memorializing racial terror lynchings and the educational resources they create for exhausted teachers like me. And to Angie Hong, be sure to read her Atlantic article linked in the show notes. She is a warrior. Pure White is a co-production of Axis Mundi Media and the After Purity Project. Created by me, Sara Moslener. Executive produced by Brad Onishi. Editing, audio, and music by Scott Okamoto. And production assistance from Kari Onishi. See you next time.