Daily Inspiration Quote by E. Franklin Frazier

A sentence like this is designed to sting, because it records a racist reflex with the cold efficiency of a lab note. Frazier isn’t offering a belief; he’s exposing a mechanism: as Black political power approaches something tangible (the ballot box), white society reaches for its most inflammatory stock character (the rapist) to shove that power back into the realm of “danger.” The ugliness is the point. It’s diagnostic.

The line works by fusing proximity and transformation. “The closer” implies motion, momentum, inevitability. Then comes the perverse alchemy: civic participation is made to “look like” sexual predation. That verb matters. It’s about perception as a weapon, not evidence. Racism here is shown as an optics regime, a way of seeing that manufactures threat the moment equality becomes practical rather than theoretical.

The historical context is the Jim Crow South and the long backlash against Black enfranchisement: from Reconstruction-era terror through poll taxes, literacy tests, and lynching, to the early-20th-century politics that treated white women’s “protection” as a pretext for racial control. The “Black rapist” myth wasn’t just propaganda; it was social glue for disfranchisement, justifying violence and legal exclusion as “public safety.”

Frazier, a sociologist of power and family life, is naming how white supremacy polices democracy by sexualizing fear. When rights can’t be argued against on principle, they’re attacked by association: turn the voter into a criminal, and suppression starts to look like self-defense.