****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
Frankly, I'm flabbergasted by the shallow and inaccurate reviews of this book that have appeared on this site. Dorr does not excuse all black men accused of raping white women. Nor does she commit the "Harper Lee Fallacy." Lee's novel popularized the notion that all black men in the South lived, constantly, under the shadow of lynching. If they even looked at a white woman, they were doomed. While this fear was a cultural truism that held great power in the black community, it simply was not an accurate representation of reality--not every case, every time, (although it did, tragically, occur all too often). But we've known that since Ida B. Wells proved that less than 1/3 of lynchings resulted from charges of rape.Dorr instead provides a vastly more nuanced argument. She PROVES, through fine-grained research in court records and newspapers, that the interactions of black men and white women that resulted in rape trials became important theatrical spectacles that ultimately upheld the culture of segregation. White male legal officials orchestrated trials to calm local tensions in the short term. Often (roughly 75% of the time), convicted black men were later pardoned. These men were not all lynched. They also were not all executed in a "legal lynching." Instead, complex negotiations--that were seldom about justice--determined their fate. At the same time, white female accusers fell under intense scrutiny--their race provided no immediate shield against questions about their morality. And, while the alleged assailant might be convicted, he might also be pardoned and released back into the community to warn other women whose "respectability" placed them beyond the pale of protection.This is an incredibly well-documented book that upends the traditional verities surrounding black-on-white rape. People on both sides of the issue (that black men rape white women regularly/that no black man is crazy enough to rape a white woman) SHOULD find their beliefs challenged.This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how invidious, pernicious, and unfortunatley durable the culture of segregation was in America during the first two-thirds of the 20th century.
