Accusations of sexual immorality often took two forms. The first was the charge of dangerous hypersexuality. In the second—and counterintuitive—form, the sexual outcast becomes the object of repressed sexual fantasies of the mainstream culture. This was certainly the case in America, in which dominant culture’s sexual fantasies were projected onto the sexuality of the enslaved Africans. These myths included prodigious sexual desire in African women and men and, in the post–Civil War years, the idea that all African men were capable of sexual violence and rape. These projections were used by
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