Slave Excerpts

Sexual Abuse in Slavery

A "mixed" family of white and black slaves

I researched into the sexual abuse of slaves and the master-slave relationship on the National Humanities Center: Slaveholder's Sexual Abuse of Slaves page. I was just expecting rape of black females to be the full extent, however, I realized just how truly horrific the full extent of sexual depravity was and how it was fully accepted by society. Not only would white male masters rape their black female slaves, they would then sell the offspring of these relations into trafficking. This caused me to beg the question: Did they not care at all for their children, even though the mother was black? I began to read more about this and realized while some had absolutely no innate parental feelings, others viewed selling the children as caring because it removed them from the targeting of the white wife. This made more sense because I expected all the wives to care, however, some willingly married unbothered by this and viewed the mixed offspring as simply more money. Another thing that greatly surprised me was that slave masters would force two of their strong slaves into marriage so they would produce strong offspring that the masters could sell. It did not matter if either partner was already married or in a relationship, and this happened to girls as young as 12. With all this new knowledge, I still wonder how did white plantation wives stomach their husbands raping other women? Also, I think its important to question if the white plantation wives were more involved with all the slave sexual abuse than we think, and that maybe it was not all just their husbands.