that had been constructed during slavery. As pioneering black feminist academic Hazel V. Carby puts it, “White men used their ownership of the white female as a terrain on which to lynch the black male.” As in other European colonies, only white men were free to cross boundaries with impunity. As white men, they decided they could have sexual access to the bodies of both white and black women and reserved the right to guard this access by terrorizing the black population, all the while projecting their own sexual violence onto their victims. The concept of white women’s virtue is a corollary
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