The Reality of the White Male Rapist

Chapter 4 examines melodrama in terms of the history of white male rape of black women with two objectives in mind. First, it considers the relevance of black women and families to US-based American political development by pointing to their importance to social contract theory. Second, it investigates the psychological defenses used to ignore or rewrite this US record. Although this reality is well established by historians and treated extensively in black women’s literature, social and political discourses deny, repress, or disavow it. This chapter delineates how this denial, repression, and disavowal occurs and how the history of white male rape of black women nevertheless “haunts” US culture and politics. It traces these psychological responses in three sites regarding The Help, namely: Telling Memories, the book of oral histories Kathryn Stockett uses in writing her narrative, as well as the book and movie versions of The Help. Although some recent work by women’s and gender studies scholars posits that too much of black feminism focuses on black women’s experiences as an archive of pain, this treatment suggests the need for mourning black women’s sexual violation in order to heal.