FOUNDED BY PIMPS AND PEDOPHILES: THE UNITED STATES’ SEXUAL CONSTITUTION OF POWER - BY DANTE D. KING

From the halls of Congress to the sweltering cabins of antebellum slave plantations, the United States of America has always been a nation that institutionalized and eroticized violence. This country was not founded by noble men of Enlightenment ideals—it was founded by pimps and pedophiles: white men who trafficked in Black flesh, raped with impunity, and created entire economies out of forced reproduction. What we live under today is not a democracy but a sexual theocracy, where white patriarchal power governs consent, desire, and the very legitimacy of a woman’s “no.”

Consent Has Always Been a Lie

It is no accident that women in the U.S.—particularly Black, Indigenous, and poor women—have never been able to fully own their bodies. That’s not a flaw of the system; it is the system. From the earliest days of colonization, white settler men constructed marriage, consent, and sexual relations not around mutual respect or autonomy but around conquest, ownership, and inheritance. Legal scholar and Africana phenomenologist Dr. Tommy J. Curry reminds us that rape in the U.S. is not an aberration but an inherited legal tradition. This nation was born not just out of genocide but out of a systemic sexual predation woven into the very laws that structure “freedom.”

Take the Statute of Westminster 1275, imported from English common law. One of its infamous clauses criminalized “ravishment of women”—but only in the context of property damage. A raped woman was a damaged asset, not a victim with bodily autonomy. This logic carried across the Atlantic and mutated into American slavery, where enslaved Black women and girls were denied even the legal category of “woman.” They were breeders, tools of capital reproduction, often raped by men who would later call themselves Founding Fathers.

From Thomas Jefferson raping 14-year-old Sally Hemings to the breeding camps of the American South—where young Black girls were forced to reproduce “future property”—the U.S. was built on the backs and wombs of violated women and children. Rape was not just common; it was state-sponsored.

The Legalization of Rape

The jurisprudence of this nation reflects its sexual crimes. The 1859 Mississippi Supreme Court ruling in George v. State explicitly stated:

“A slave is not a person but a thing… and the carnal knowledge of a slave girl, under ten years of age, is not rape.”

Let that sit: the legal system did not consider a child rapeable. If she was enslaved, she was property, not a person. No consent required. No crime committed. That ruling not only codified white male impunity—it erased the sexual autonomy of generations of Black girls.

Nearly 60 years later, nothing had changed. In Dallas v. State (1918), the Florida Supreme Court ruled:

“The carnal knowledge of a lewd female child is not rape if she gives consent.”

The child was 12 years old.

Here we see the double bind: Black girls and poor white girls were too degraded to be victims and too available to say no. And all of this was not the work of fringe figures or isolated judges—this was the Supreme Law of Southern states and, through silence and complicity, the moral compass of the nation.

The Plantation as America’s First Sex Market

Plantations were not just centers of cotton, sugar, or tobacco production—they were America’s first rape economies. Enslavers made fortunes by systematically breeding Black women and girls. Sexual violence was calculated, organized, and often encouraged through tax incentives and inheritance laws. A child born of rape was not a scandal but a bonus: one more body added to the balance sheet.

As Dr. Joy DeGruy and Dr. Patricia Newton have shown, the intergenerational trauma born in those breeding camps lives on in the bodies and psyches of Black women today. But even more terrifying is that this system of sexual commodification never ended. It simply evolved.

Today, we don’t have plantations—we have prisons, ICE detention centers, foster care systems, and sex trafficking pipelines disproportionately filled with Black, brown, and Indigenous girls. The pimps now wear suits. The predators run campaigns.

Donald Trump: The Cultural Heir to the White Rapist Regime

It is no accident that Donald J. Trump, a man credibly accused of sexual assault by at least 26 women, including a case involving a 13-year-old girl, became the President of the United States—and may be again. Nor is it surprising that his most fervent base of supporters is white evangelicals and conservative white women, who continue to offer him unwavering loyalty despite mounting evidence of his sexual predation.

The Trump phenomenon is not an aberration—it is a reassertion of the original American sexual order: white male domination over all others, especially women and girls.

From his infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” tape to his public defense of known sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Trump has normalized the language, behavior, and attitude of the settler-colonial rapist. His policies—banning abortion, slashing protections for assault survivors, stacking the courts with anti-woman judges—are not about morality; they’re about maintaining the centuries-old sexual order.

Let’s be clear: Trump is not a new danger. He is the most visible descendant of a political culture that has always protected the rapist, blamed the victim, and called it “freedom.”

Cultural Permission and the Erotics of Power

What we are witnessing today in America is the continuation of a cultural permission structure that tells white men: you can take what you want, and the law will catch up later to justify it.

This permission is not just legal—it’s theological, cinematic, economic. It is embedded in Hollywood, which built its empire off underaged actresses and casting couches. It is in the family court systems that question whether a raped teen “invited” it by the way she dressed. It is in Christian purity culture, which often conditions girls to accept male domination as a divine order. And it is deeply embedded in every law written by men who saw women not as citizens, but as vessels.

This is why no meaningful definition of “consent” has ever come from this nation’s legal traditions. Consent in America is not about mutual desire; it is about who has power and who doesn’t. And under the architecture built by white patriarchs, women—especially Black women—have never been granted the power to set the terms of engagement. Their no’s have never mattered. Their yes’s have never been their own.

The Silence of White Women

White women, too, are implicated. While often victims of patriarchal violence, they have historically aligned with their men rather than with other women across race. They stood by during slavery, during lynchings, during the rape trials of Black men falsely accused of touching white girls. They stand by now as Trump mocks assault victims and stacks the judiciary with predators. Too many have chosen the proximity of white power over the solidarity of sisterhood.

As Catrice M. Jackson writes in Weapons of Whiteness, white women’s tears have often lubricated the machinery of white supremacy. They cry when they are afraid, but they are deadly silent when the violence is done in their name.

Toward a Reckoning

We must tell the truth: America is not a moral nation. It is a rape regime masquerading as a republic. The laws that govern our bodies were written by men who raped with impunity, enslaved with delight, and married children to secure land and labor. The Supreme Court has always been complicit. The Constitution is not neutral. And every failure to confront this past ensures its repetition in the present.

We do not need criminal reform—we need cultural rupture. We must dismantle the sexual theology of American power and begin again with those most harmed at the center of the conversation. We must teach our children the real history: that the father of this nation was also a sexual terrorist. That the plantation was a pedophile’s paradise. That consent cannot exist in a country that denies full personhood to half its people.

Until that truth is fully reckoned with, no woman is truly free. And every law remains just another echo of Westminster 1275.

End.