Abstract
In those decades following the formal abolition of slavery, beliefs about the deviant and excessive sexuality of black people led to the myth of the black male rapist and to Jim Crow legislation and to lynching as the punishment for black men who supposedly raped white women. Sanctions against interracial marriage, as well as prohibitions on homosexuality, supported the ascendancy of whiteness and the unimpeded formation and multiplication of white families at the precise moment of the nation's reunification after the Civil War, westward expansion, the enfranchisement of former slaves, and the increased immigration of nonwhite peoples into the U.S. As did compulsory heterosexuality generally in the late-nineteenth century, the intact straight white family with which Light in August concludes is offered as a buffer to white masculinity and a safeguard against the increased presence of nonwhite peoples in the national polis who demanded-and now qualified for-civic equality.