Myths and the Christian Maintenance of Cultural Hegemony

It's a challenge to call upon a time in history when Christianity was not the norm in the Western world. Once Christians became a colonizing European majority, the self-imbedded message they carried to distant lands espoused an evangelical tang in the procuring of individuals and ethnic groups at large to convert. Upon conversion, Christians new and old have willingly indicated their submission to an organized hegemonic power structure. Made up of men entirely, the hierarchy of the christian faith has largely been inaccessible to women until the more modern era.

In Crystal Feimster's book Southern Horrors, she highlights the concepts of black and white masculinity and black and white femininity at the time of the antebellum south through the height of the primarily southern lynching epidemic. Through her expose, we are able to better understand the formation of character stereotypes and national myths created for each intersectional group. Such myths not only extend to the present day to shape how we especially view black female sexuality and black men as predatory. Additionally, the creation of these myths was done through a lens of white male supremacy and vehemently enforced through a patriarchal system, namely, Christianity. It is through the lens of Christianity that white men, especially southern men, justified the character assassination that would then "justify" the lynching of hundreds of black men and women and many (though fewer in number significantly) white women as well on the basis of moral superiority.

Is the Christian faith responsible for the crisis of white masculinity? Not entirely, but the careful crafting of mythological predators of the black race is part of a rhetoric designed specifically to target black and white women and black men as, to varying extents, the "other". Certain qualities were portrayed as indicative of lower moral character in direct juxtaposition to white males. As the keepers and holders of the finest in Christian morality, the socialized world was forced to fall in line after white men in a spectrum of intersectional power relations that simultaneously chokes white women into passivity and named black masculinity as their oppressor. The rhetoric of Christian ethics did not allow the ability for women and black men to name their oppressors. Instead, as Feimster illustrates, women were pitted against each other as competitors for the affections and attentions of white men within plantation life and after the Civil War. While white women felt black women were stealing their men's affections, in fact they were silenced victims of unwanted advances. Christian men then justified these advances to each other and to their white women by portraying deviancy, theft, and unpredictability within the construct of the black female as "Jezebel". From these false constructs rose fear of the character of black women, inciting a sense of need to punish and publicly shame black women into continued submission.

White masculinity is therefore a construct of hegemonic power over the named otherness of black folks and white women. Modeled after Christianity in placing moral and political power solely in the hands of white men (until Rebecca Felton was seated briefly in the senate), white men seized and maintained sociopolitical rule over all others through two main methods, which our two heroines divided and conquered. Felton saw the power to protect and provide for (white) women through accessing the white male sphere of congressional politics. Ida B. Wells identified an avenue of resistance and self re-definition by seizing the white male controlled media and local newspapers, which acted as an agent in the creation of national myths surrounding the character of lynching victims. White southern men's moral, "Christian"-flavored grip over the two major avenues of defining the nature of public discourse were, over time, infiltrated. However, it was many years later that lynching ceased and was federally banned and the grips of white supremacy over the fate of white women and black people was somewhat loosened. By coming to voice, Felton and Wells were able to break through the Christian "roles" the patriarchy had decided was best in favor of self-definition and social change.

Today, self-definition is more accessible to marginalized groups, and black women have more access to the capitalist firms and institutions that define people within our popular culture. Unfortunately, it's only a few generations later and we have not been able to see a complete divorce from old, harmful stereotypes. Look to the profiling in the criminal justice system, hypersexualization and exotification of black female bodies, and discrimination in cinematic and televised representation to see that although we've come far, we have a long way to go.