October 4, 2015

Langston Hughes, Lynching, & the Intersection of Race and Gender

Silhouette by Langston Hughes
"Silhouette" by Langston Hughes is a bitterly poignant look at the way the sexualized, post-Civil War narrative exposes the intersection between race and gender for a very specific purpose. Hughes' audience in this poem is not the black community, though they would certainly still be able to appreciate the speaker's virulent tone. Instead, "Silhouette" is directed at white Americans and has very gender specific messages.


To white men -- the speaker is pointing out the hypocrisy inherent in "how Dixie protects / it's white womanhood" (9-10). This is the speaker addressing the most popular idea at the turn of the century, that, as Robert Nowatzki writes, "black male victims of lynching were punished for raping white women" (161). Though this fear was unsubstantiated and though only about a quarter of black men who were lynched were accused of rape or a related crime, as black men began to gain legal equality, the narrative of "Negro domination" (Nowatzki 161) gained strength. It was an effective story. Casting white women as the victims of black male brutality solidified white male power on all fronts, Not only was this excuse used to violently subdue any black men whose franchise was threatening, but it also deprived white women of any agency they might claim by painting them as "gentle" (1) and in need of masculine protection. It's the hypocrisy in this hysteric narrative that the speaker in "Silhouette" is satirizing when he tells the "southern gentle lady" (1) about the lynching. The speaker is questioning how hanging "a black man / to a roadside tree" (5-6) is protecting anyone, but he's also questioning the implied vulnerability of white womanhood -- whether the lady is in need of any protection in the first place or whether this is really more an issue of "Dixie" (9) protecting itself.

To white women -- the speaker satirizes white male rhetoric to expose the ways in which it is ultimately aimed at infantilizing women. This begins in the very first line when the speaker refers to the white woman as "Southern gentle lady" (1), playing off the stereotypical, ideal southern belle, and continues into the second line where he tells her not to swoon. The use of the word swoon is important because within the context it has multiple meanings. Was the speaker a white man, "do not swoon" (2) would be a way of reassuring her that her womanhood is safe; she need not worry about the black male threat. Within the satiric tone of the poem, though, it takes on another dimension. The speaker is really criticizing the lady's reaction to the lynching on two fronts, first that she might swoon with gratitude at the white man's brutality and second that she might swoon at the horror of the image. For her swoon to be one of gratitude would be hypocritical because the idea of the white man as a protector serves to disenfranchise and oppress white women as well as black men. For her to be sickened by the murder of the black man would be equally hypocritical because in the eyes of the speaker the black man was killed for her, not in spite of her. The speaker returns to this idea at the end of the poem when he mockingly tells her to "be good" (12). He knows very well that there is only one way for her to be good, and it's to silently embody the virtuousness of white womanhood; the woman characterized in "Silhouette" has no agency to resist the rhetoric that silences her and hangs black men from trees, so to be told to be good is really a stinging reminder of the way she allows her privilege to imprison her. This was a very real concern for any white woman seeking suffrage at this time, for example Rebecca Felton. The first woman to be elected to the United States Senate and an advocate for women's suffrage, Felton was an avid supporter of the myth of the black rapist. As Nowatzki explains, she "[appealed] to the manliness of her white male listeners... [and] encouraged them to take the law into their own hands by lynching" (116). This is the hypocrisy the speaker is railing against, the white women who propagate fear-mongering that infantilizes them in an effort to curry favor with white male power brokers.

To us in the present day -- "Silhouette" speaks to an important part of the American narrative to often overlooked, the way race and gender were constructed intersectionality to justify lynchings and white male supremacy. This story, the one Hughes is telling in "Silhouette" has a legacy that endures, not just into the twentieth century in novels like To Kill a Mockingbird, but into the present, as Martha Hodes discusses, asserting that there is an "ongoing legacy, in both North and South, of white ideologies about black male and white female sexuality" (417). This legacy is pervasive, but nowhere more so in the continued characterization of black men as sexual predators and of white women as "as a metaphor for the South and as the means of propagating the white race" (Nowatzki 116).

Works Cited
Hodes, Martha. "The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War." Journal of the History of 
               Sexuality 3.3 (1993): 402-17. JSTOR. Web. 4 Oct. 2015.
Hughes, Langston. "Silhouette." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed. Vol. D. New York/London: W.W. Norton, 2012. 879. Print.
Nowatzki, Robert. "Race, rape, lynching, and manhood suffrage: Constructions of white and black masculinity in turn-of-the-century white supremacist 
               literature." Journal of Men's Studies, 3.2 (1994): 161. ProQuest. Web. 4 October 2015.

NOTE: If you want to know more about how white male supremacist rhetoric defined the conversation about race and sexuality in the context of lynchings at the turn of the century, Nowatzki is a good place to start. If you're specifically interested in the sexualization of politics at the turn of the century and their lasting impact, look at Hodes' work. Ida B. Wells is also a great resource, especially if you want the perspective of a woman of color something generally left out of the lynching conversation. She was an anti-lynching activist, one of the founders of the NAACP, a prolific writer, and just generally an incredible person. And for a contrasting female perspective, here are some excerpts from Rebecca Felton's speeches.

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