Daina Ramey Berry

“As one formerly enslaved man succinctly put it, “white men got plenty chilluns by the nigger women. They didn’t ask them. They just took them.”76 Sexual desire and obsession, backed by racial and male privilege and pride, often led to physical brutalization for those who dared to resist. “Granny,” who had been enslaved in Alabama, recalled that she never developed anything close to a romantic, or even emotionally supportive, relationship with her owner who was the father of her five children. Always afraid that she would be tortured if she refused him, Granny revealed, “I didn’t want him, but I couldn’t do nothin’. I uster say,”
― Daina Berry, Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas