ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses cases involving sex between white men and enslaved Black women in the antebellum U.S. South, in which the question of coercion or consent was at issue, even indirectly. It shows that despite jurists' efforts to characterize Black women as always already consenting, evidence of white men's coercion and Black women's claims on the law are all over the records of trials in Southern courts. Reading those records alongside other sources of Black women's experience, such as the autobiography of a formerly enslaved woman, highlights the challenge the question of consent posed for the U.S. legal system. Colonial and enslaving regimes used legal regulation of intimacy to impose dominant racial ideologies – not only by prohibiting some forms of interracialized sex but also by allowing others to occur without sanction. Yet legal arenas were also spaces of contestation, where even enslaved women used the tools available to them to challenge white supremacist control over their bodies.
