Separate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South
38 pages • 1-hour read
Melton A. McLaurinSeparate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South
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Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Betty Jo”
Chapter 4 turns to the subject of interracial sex, one of the biggest taboos in the South. Despite fear and disgust over interracial sex, it was common. The prevalence of sexual contact between races made it “a symbol of both the reality and the futility of segregation” (65). Sexuality was policed by white men. Relationships between African American women and white men were more common. African American women were discussed in crude sexual terms and said to have insatiable sexual desire. Relationships between African American men and white women, however, were perceived as sins “against God and against the white race” (69), highlighting how controlling sex was a form of social control. These racist ideas have tangible consequences. McLaurin writes that a local white man caught his white wife in bed with an African American man. The white man kills both of them. Despite his guilt, he is acquitted.
After establishing the social norms of the period, McLaurin describes his sexual awakening as a teenager. In particular, he reflects on the African American women he was sexually attracted to in order to show the complex reality of interracial desire. For instance, the subject of a 14-year-old McLaurin’s first sexual fantasy is an African American woman named Jessie Florence, a nurse who “wore her sexuality well” (76). A young girl named Charlene with ample breasts is the subject of many of his fantasies.
Most significantly, McLaurin develops a crush Betty Jo McAllister, a beautiful young African American woman. He tries to connect to her on a personal level, but the separations imposed by race, class, and sex stand in the way. Betty Jo is significant to McLaurin’s story because his attraction to her “taught me that she was really no different from the white girls I dated” (85), undermining segregationist sexual morality that objectified African American women but did not treat them like human beings. His feelings for her—he likes her as a person—challenged the white male narrative that African American women’s only value was for work and sex.
Chapter 4 Analysis
Chapter 4 describes how segregation infected all aspects of life, even sexuality. McLaurin argues that the policing of interracial sex is about white men maintaining power and control. The neo-Calvinist theology of the South taught white men that sexual desire was evil and part of a bestial nature. The Black Rapist was “a monster created from the repressed sexual desires of whites” (67).
Two symbols shaped attitudes to interracial sex: the Black Rapist and the White Virgin. Sexual prowess and a rapacious appetite define the Black Rapist. An individual African American man was typically used to personify this abstract symbol. This “Black Rapist” stands in for the anxiety held by white men “that the secret desire of every black male was to ravish every white female” (67). The White Virgin is a Southern Belle and stands in as a personification of the entire white South. Her virginity was symbolic—she was often someone’s wife or mother.
The social order and morality of the white South embodied in the White Virgin were threatened by the perceived insatiable sexual desires of the Black Rapist. McLaurin’s grandfather and his friends use metaphors of violation—associated with rape—to describe the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. For a young McLaurin, “sexual images of the Black Rapist and the Southern Belle immediately leaped to mind” (68). This narrative links the maintenance of sexual segregation to the autonomy of the South.
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