ABSTRACT
Wells reconstructs Wells-Barnett's sexual politics to portray her as blinded by race-paranoia and cowed by racist violence into irrational denials concerning black males' assaults of white females. For each womanist/black feminist, Wells-Barnett exemplifies the race woman misled by black identity politics into reactionary sexual politics. In the following varied portraits of Wells-Barnett-as radical activist, paranoid race woman, and antiwhite counterfeministher sexual politics becomes the touchstone for debates about venality, black feminist intellectualism, and radicalism regarding the intersections of race, sex, and violence. Other black feminists give starkly different readings of the antilynching crusader's sexual politics. "Split Affinities" severs contemporary black feminism from Wells-Barnett's analyses and black women's historical antiracist radicalism; it simplifies the complex relationships between the antilynching crusader and white as well as black female leaders. Historical revisionism and historicism based in selective and skewed information concerning Wells-Barnett's sexual politics elide or distort the praxis of past radicals in order to shape perceptions and depictions of present-day race politics.
