"The negro has suffered far more from the commission of this crime against the women of his race by white men than the white race has ever suffered through his crimes"
About this Quote
Wells is doing something rhetorically risky and morally bracing: she flips the era's most weaponized narrative about Black men and white womanhood back onto white power itself. In the late-19th- and early-20th-century South, the specter of the Black male "rapist" was the go-to alibi for lynching, disenfranchisement, and the policing of Black mobility. Wells refuses to argue on the mob's terms. Instead, she exposes the alleged "protection" of women as a public relations cover for racial terror.
Her specific intent is comparative and prosecutorial. By asserting that Black people have suffered more from white men's sexual violence against Black women than white people have from the crimes used to justify lynching, she punctures the asymmetry of sympathy: whose violated bodies count as a crisis, whose are treated as collateral. The sentence is built like an indictment. "This crime" points to an open secret; "commission" implies routine, almost bureaucratic repetition. She's not describing an aberration. She's describing a system.
The subtext is also intra-racial and feminist. Wells insists that sexual violence against Black women is not peripheral to racial justice; it is central evidence of white supremacy's daily operations. She challenges both the white public's selective outrage and any Black political strategy that would downplay gendered harm for the sake of respectability.
Context matters: Wells wrote amid anti-lynching campaigns, when newspapers and politicians laundered violence as moral necessity. Her line yanks that laundering into the light, naming what polite society depended on not seeing.
Her specific intent is comparative and prosecutorial. By asserting that Black people have suffered more from white men's sexual violence against Black women than white people have from the crimes used to justify lynching, she punctures the asymmetry of sympathy: whose violated bodies count as a crisis, whose are treated as collateral. The sentence is built like an indictment. "This crime" points to an open secret; "commission" implies routine, almost bureaucratic repetition. She's not describing an aberration. She's describing a system.
The subtext is also intra-racial and feminist. Wells insists that sexual violence against Black women is not peripheral to racial justice; it is central evidence of white supremacy's daily operations. She challenges both the white public's selective outrage and any Black political strategy that would downplay gendered harm for the sake of respectability.
Context matters: Wells wrote amid anti-lynching campaigns, when newspapers and politicians laundered violence as moral necessity. Her line yanks that laundering into the light, naming what polite society depended on not seeing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|
More Quotes by Ida
Add to List
