28 Days of Black Liberation 2025 series
The fantasy of the hypermasculine, sexually potent Black man is a cornerstone of Amerikkkan whiteness, laid by the long history of lynching in this backward country. After being hanged, the victim’s genitals swell — an erection, often called “angel lust.” The eroticized corpse of the Black man has been the object of much obsession and insecurity for white men, and a necessary instrument for our bourgeois enemies to recruit poor whites into defending racial capitalism.
Little had changed from then to Attica. Forced nudity, rectal examinations, and commands to penetrate fellow inmates, all under the duress of being beaten by the same baton used to violate them, were unsurprising tactics to prisoners in Attica and other New York prisons. Pictures and videos of this abuse were circulated by the press and enjoyed by the public, and privately enjoyed by prison guards who could take home personal copies, echoing the hoots and grins of the lynch mob.
“We are MEN,” the Attica revolutionaries proclaimed. Liberal academic feminists hear these proclamations of masculinity as patriarchal chauvinism, and would have us condemn their struggle. While there is a real struggle against patriarchy internal to the Black-led revolutionary movement, the manhood expressed by the Attica comrades was not the same manhood as that of the White Man; in fact, it was articulated against the White Man. Prison guards, often working-class white men, find in the subjugation of Black masculinity a solace from their exploitation by capitalists. But emerging from decolonial struggle is the New Man, Fanon tells us, and thus the Attica Rebellion, in casting off this objectification, posed an existential threat to white men both individually and as a whole, triggering the prison system’s inhuman violence in retaliation.
