Rape Culture, Racism, and The Post-Bellum American South Rape, in the South, has a long and troubled history. This trouble involves both its reality, and the accusation of rape. As civil-rights activist Ida B. Wells points out in 1895, the third set of reasons for lynching and oppression was retaliation for supposed rape by black men towards white women. As she argues, "The Southern white man" assumes that any interracial activity at all is rape on the part of the black man--though one might add cynically that interactions between white men and black women are almost never viewed as rape, even when they quite consciously are--and punishes him for it. They defended themselves based on sexist constructions of gender which gave them an excuse to brutalize minorities in the name of protecting womanhood. Meanwhile, the South and the slavery system was rampant with sex that was, at best, problematic: and more bluntly by modern definitions rape. Ruth Thompson-Miller and Joe
