In the past, I think American white men had a variety of reasons that both made them actually want to attack black men, and justify it to themselves. To say that race and racial differences were behind this is stating the obvious, but I believe there is more to racial hatred than most people think. Bias or prejudice is a complicated and sometimes mysterious thing, and what sets off an actual attack is not the same as a simple feeling of superiority.

For white men to have literally attacked black men, a great deal of fear had to be in play. The reality is that the white males of this country were largely from European descent and saw themselves, even in early days, as far more civilized, or “human”, than African Americans. Now, this would create an automatic feeling of superiority in the white men, and we know that existed to a large extent. Violence, however, is something else, and I think it is likely that white men felt threatened by what they perceived to be a greater animal strength in black men. As the whites held enormously biased views of the African Americans and saw them as little more than savages, so too did they then assume the black men had physical abilities expected of primitive people. Those abilities were useful if the black men did as they were told, but the whites had to assert, in numbers, a greater strength to keep them in line. In this case, prejudice fed on itself, and a motive for attack was based on demeaning racist views.

Also, that same “primitive” quality white men attributed to black men had to create in the whites a severe fear of being emasculated, or being sexually replaced. If you view a man as more savage than yourself, you are giving him as well a greater sexual potency, and he becomes a threat to your role as a man. To the white men feeling this way, a beating down of black men was a direct and logical means of stripping them of dangerous sexual power. As with the more general idea that black men were simply more physically powerful, fear took hold, and fear motivated attack.