'Black rapist' myth enforced by Canadian politicians & social groups (31 май 1868 г. – 31 дек 1911 г.)

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"In 1868, just over three decades after the abolition of slavery, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald evoked both the 'Black rapist' myth and the threat of lynch mobs to justify keeping rape a capital offence. He justified the need for the death penalty because of the 'frequency of rape committed by Negroes,' whom he argued were 'very prone to felonious assaults on white women; if the sentence and imprisonment were not very severe, there would be a great dread of people taking the law onto their own hands' (Backhouse 2005: 115; Walker 2010). While enormously politically effective, this trope was based on fears that were not substantiated by reality. In examining one hundred years of court records in Ontario, legal historian Barrington Walker found the incidences of Black men raping white women to be statistically insignificant (Walker 2010: 116). Yet, this reality did not affect popular opinion; Black men were widely portrayed as 'oversexed and hence as probably rapists' (Valverde 2008: 180). The safety of white women was widely invoked as a reason to exclude Black men from settlement within civil society. An influential women's group, the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, petitioned to the federal government in 1911 for Black men to be excluded from Canadian society: 'We do not wish that the fair name of Western Canada should be sullied with the shadow of lynch law, but we have no guarantee that our women will be safer in their scattered homesteads than women in other countries with a Negro population (Palmer 1938: 36 in Valverde 2008: 180)."

Source: Robyn Maynard. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (2017). Page 41.

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