Battling for Control:

Exploiting Black Bodies in the U.S. from 1900 to 1945

Since the arrival of Africans to the Americas in the fifteen hundreds, Black identity has been defined by the Black body. Western society created a relationship with Black people in which the Black body was a source of labor, curiosity, and sexual pleasure. In the early twentieth century, Black people attempted to resist the linear oppression imposed upon them by western societies. Blacks turned to alternative forms of resistance that either emphasized or negated the ability of the Black body to be exploited physically or sexually. In the subsequent pages, I will argue that the decreasing commodification of the Black body between the colonial age and the pre-World War II era has made it less vulnerable to traditional forms of exploitation; yet that the solution for Blacks to regain control of their bodies was more complex. This paper follows chronologically establishing the basis of the Black body in colonial America and transitioning through the first four decades of the twentieth century. Beginning in the early twentieth century, rural African Americans from the American south flooded northern cities in search of greater opportunities. The influx cultivated predominantly African American cultural enclaves within major industrial cities. These cultural enclaves were not without economic despair and social exclusion. In response to the substandard living conditions fueled by high unemployment and racial discrimination, African American youth in cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, and Detroit created countercultures to negotiate these social woes and challenge the White mainstream that often excluded them. African American countercultures both challenged social norms found in mainstream culture and simultaneously aspired to imitate these exact same cultures. This counterculture constructed power relations from the dominant White culture and the social context of the inner-city Black ghettos. The inhabitants of the youth Black ghetto subcultures understood power relations as the intersection of race, class, and gender and executed this power through the assertion of his sexuality over others. Founded as early as the colonial age, Western notions of capitalism have commodified the bodies of the Black Diaspora and simultaneously sexualized them in the process. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade first dehumanized the Black body by assigning monetary value to the Diaspora’s physiological composition and sexual fertility. The Black female’s body has been a site of external control by mostly White men and women.