Consent: black

Among other things, the insolvency has to do with questions of scale. For instance, how does Stephens define a form of rape under the structures of racial slavery How does his account determine the mutual consent of the parties at hand Are we to conclude that blacks (whether enslaved or ftee ) were not in the British colonies or the antebellum United States or the New World more generally of their own ftee will that they were not enslaved or, later, barred ftom the institution of citizenship or systemically... 

In the previous chapter, we explored the assertion within multiracial discourse that consensual sexual relations between white male slaveholders and enslaved black females allowed genuine interracial intimacy to flourish under the regime of chattel slavery in the antebellum United States. We found the assertion to be not only unsupported on its own terms but also entirely misplaced given the questions at hand—an ethical evasion of the foreclosure of black female consent under the conditions of enslavement, as detailed by a number of noted black feminist scholars. Further, the peculiar historical demand for black female sexual consent in relations with white male slaveholders symbolizes for multiracial advocates a broader problem oipolitical consent from the captive community and its descendents for the project of multiracial democracy up to the present moment. The objective of the current chapter is to reveal the notion of healthy interracial relationships advanced within multiracial discourse as an ideological lure insofar as they are considered to be disconnected from supposedly unhealthy interracial liaisons and, beyond that, a real union of differently... 

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