GOING BEYOND DIDDY: The White Origins of American Sexual Violence and Their Enduring Influence on Masculinity and American Male Behavior

INTRODUCTION

This essay is not a defense of Sean “Diddy” Combs, nor any person who has caused harm through sexual or physical violence. My position against such acts is absolute. What follows is not an attempt to justify or diminish individual responsibility. Rather, it is an effort to widen our analytical frame and examine the broader historical, legal, and psychological context in which American sexual violence exists. To speak honestly about the allegations raised in Sean Combs: The Reckoning, we must examine the social and legal architecture that predates him by centuries.

DIAGNOSING THE ROOT: WHITE PREDATION AND SEXUAL SOVEREIGNTY

The argument I made in Chapter Three of Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness: White Psychopathology, Collective Psychosis, and Trauma in America, is foundational: Black American male behavior—particularly in its harmful expressions—cannot be understood outside the white sociopolitical order that defined and policed Black existence. Black people were socialized within a framework created entirely by white men—one shaped by white psychopathy, white legal authority, white cultural norms, and white patriarchal dominance. The behavioral systems available to Black men were the systems modeled by white men. The abuses committed by Black men today cannot be divorced from the white behaviors that structured the society in which all men were embedded.

What we refer to today as the “baby daddy” phenomenon—often pathologized and projected onto Black men—was in fact modeled by white men for centuries. White men routinely married white women while simultaneously fathering children with enslaved Black girls and women through rape, coercion, and sexual terror. They created multi-racial children whom they refused to acknowledge as kin (enacted by a Virginia colonial legislature as early as 1662), treated as property, and sold for profit. This is not a marginal historical detail; it is a defining structure of American family formation.

Harriet Jacobs, in her 1861 narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (as highlighted by scholars such as Dr. Koritha Mitchell), describes the normalized practice of white men impregnating enslaved Black women, and the silence and complicity surrounding it:

“My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences. Southern women often marry a man knowing he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave- trader’s hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight.”

Jacobs also described the way white men weaponized the forced separation of enslaved families to punish Black women who resisted sexual assault:

“Sometimes, when my master found that I still refused to accept what he call his kind offers, he would threaten to sell my child. ‘Perhaps that will humble you,’ said he. Humble me! Was I not already in the dust? But his threat lacerated my heart. I knew the law gave him power to fulfill it; for slaveholders have been cunning enough to enact that ‘the child shall follow the condition of the mother,’ not of father; thus taking care that licentiousness shall not interfere with advance.”

This two-century-long regime—white men fathering Black children and discarding them—created patterns of paternal absence that the nation later blamed on Black men. The stereotype of the irresponsible Black father is not a Black-originated pathology; it is the cultural shadow of white male sexual predation and legal authority. White men literally constructed the template: father children out of wedlock, refuse responsibility, deny paternity, and allow the law to protect the exploiters rather than the exploited.

This historical reality is essential to understanding modern narratives surrounding Black masculinity, sexuality, and fatherhood—and is indispensable to any honest analysis of contemporary sexual violence.

THE LEGAL ARCHITECTURE OF WHITE MALE SEXUAL ENTITLEMENT

American sexual norms did not begin in 1776. They descend directly from English common law, which in 1275 established the legal marriage age for girls at twelve. Under this system, known as the Westminster Law, rape—then “ravishment”—was viewed as a crime against the man who owned the woman, not a crime against the woman herself. This belief was neither incidental nor cultural; it was codified. It was the legal expression of a worldview that positioned girls and women as sexual property.

When English settlers brought this legal system to North America, they also brought the sexual expectations encoded within it. After the United States was formed, every state adopted the twelve-year-old marriage standard. During the nineteenth century, some states lowered the age further. Delaware permitted the marriage of girls as young as seven. And throughout the country, sex with a girl over the age of ten was frequently not considered rape.

What is often ignored is that these structures endure in modern form. From 2000 to 2018, at least 297,033 minors were married in the United States. Eighty-six percent were girls, as young as 10. More than 60,000 of these marriages occurred under conditions that otherwise constitute statutory rape. Child marriage remains legal in thirty-seven states. The worldview embedded in the 1275 law—that girls exist for sexual access—remains embedded in American legal culture.

HOW SLAVERY REPRODUCED WHITE SEXUAL LOGICS THROUGH BLACK BODIES

The system of slavery not only exploited Black labor; it reconfigured sexuality itself.

Enslaved African men and boys were coerced into sexual violence as a mechanism of reproductive control. Slave-breeding operations required Black men to rape Black women and girls under threat of torture, sale, or death. Testimonies from the WPA Slave Narratives and analyses in Gregory Smithers’ Slave Breeding reveal the brutality of this practice. Women were rewarded for “breeding quickly.” Enslaved men were told to select the “most prolific,” meaning the youngest and most fertile girls. White slaveholders watched. They directed the assaults. They sometimes participated.

As one enslaved woman from Louisiana described:

“Master would make the men go in to the girls he wanted them to breed with. Sometimes he stood right there. Sometimes he took his turn too.”

SEXUAL VIOLENCE CODIFIED IN LAW

American courts did not merely tolerate this violence; they affirmed it. In 1855, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in the Celia case that an enslaved Black teenager had no right to resist the advances of Robert Newsom, who routinely raped her. When she killed him in self-defense, the court held that because she was his property, he was entitled to sexual access and she had no legal right to defend her body.

In 1859, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in George v. State:

“The crime of rape does not exist in this State between African slaves… their intercourse is promiscuous, and the violation of a female slave by a male slave would be a mere assault and battery.”

In 1899, the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in Dorsey v. State that Black men were inherently predisposed to rape white women, and that their Blackness could override exculpatory evidence.

In 1918, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in Dallas v. State that Black women could not be raped because they were believed to be immoral by default.

In 1953, the Alabama Court of Appeals in McQuirter v. State held that juries could assume a Black man intended rape simply because the alleged victim was a white woman. Scholars Margaret Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins concluded that the ruling affirmed the white belief that Black men always desired white women, and that white women would never willingly consent to Black men.

These rulings did not emerge from nowhere. They reflect an entire psycho-legal worldview in which white men were sovereign sexual authorities—judges, juries, executioners—and Black people were denied sexual personhood. White men could not be rapists. Black women, girls, men, and boys could not be victims.

WHITE SEXUAL ENTITLEMENT AND LEGALIZED RAPE IN THE MODERN ERA

These ideologies remain alive in the modern judicial system, where white male offenders routinely receive leniency. Brock Turner (2016), convicted of raping an unconscious woman, served three months because, according to Judge Persky, prison would have a “severe impact” on him. Jacob Walter Anderson (2018), charged with multiple counts of sexual assault, received probation and a $400 fine. Christopher Belter (2021) admitted to raping teenage girls; the judge said incarceration was “inappropriate” after prayerful consideration. Robert Richards IV (2009), heir to the du Pont fortune, who admitted to sexually assaulting his three-year-old daughter, avoided prison because the judge stated he “would not fare well behind bars.”

High-profile white men continue to wield sexual impunity. Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was overturned in 2024. Josh Duggar, who admitted to molesting his sisters, initially received only a warning. A conservative South Carolina judge once sympathetic to Dylann Roof’s family was charged with possession of child sexual abuse material. GOP lawmaker R.J. May III pleaded guilty to distributing child sexual abuse content.

This is not personal aberration. This is systemic continuity.

Virginia Giuffre raped by ‘well-known Prime Minister,’ US version of posthumous memoir claims

RACIALIZED SENTENCING AND SEXUAL CRIMINALIZATION

According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, Black men receive sentences 13.4 percent longer than white men for identical offenses. Hispanic men receive 11.2 percent longer sentences. Even when both groups are sentenced to prison, Black men receive terms 4.7 percent longer. White offenders are significantly more likely to receive probation.

Federal sexual offense data shows that white individuals comprise a majority of those convicted in sexual abuse and child exploitation cases. Seventy-four percent of convicted child pornography producers are white. Yet Black and Hispanic offenders receive harsher penalties, revealing a deeply racialized pattern of punishment. Courts continue to protect white men from the consequences of sexual harm, while pathologizing Black male sexuality as inherently dangerous.

Consider Donald Trump’s infamous 2005 Access Hollywood admission:

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can grab ’em by the pussy.”

During his 2022 deposition in the E. Jean Carroll case, Trump doubled down, telling attorney Roberta Kaplan that men “have been doing this for a million years.” He was not speaking personally—he was articulating a cultural truth he believes to be universal and justified. And where did he learn that?

HYPERSEXUALIZATION OF BOYS: A CULTURAL INHERITANCE

The hypersexualization of boys is another American pathology that cannot be separated from this legacy. Boys are sexualized early—romanticized, pressured, assaulted, and instructed to view sexual conquest as a marker of masculinity. I was molested repeatedly from the ages of five to seventeen by older individuals. By eleven or twelve, adult men suggested I should have already lost my virginity.

This process is not rooted in African tradition. In precolonial Ghanaian and Malian societies, marriage and sexual readiness were based on maturity, community norms, and consent—not coercion, not predation. Hypersexualization in America is a product of European sexual pathology, a manifestation of what Dr. Bobby Wright described as white psychopathy—a system in which Europeans “ignore the concepts of right and wrong” and exhibit profound callousness and disregard for the rights of others.

(Sean Combs: The Reckoning)

The Netflix documentary on Sean Combs provides an important moment for collective reflection. But we must resist the urge to analyze Black male behavior in isolation. Black men did not invent sexual violence in America; they were born into a sexual order created and dominated by white men. When we examine cases like Combs’, we must situate them within the historical systems of coercion, entitlement, and predation that structured American masculinity.

CONCLUSION: TOWARD A DEEPER RECKONING

If we are going to have an honest conversation about the abuses documented in this docuseries, we must also interrogate:

• What historical forces shaped American masculinity?

• Who defined male entitlement to women’s and girls’ bodies?

• What legacies of white patriarchal law do all men—Black, white, and otherwise—inherit today?

• How do we confront the fact that Black men were coerced into reenacting white sexual violence under slavery, and how did those traumas echo forward?

• How do we break cycles of hyper-sexualization, coercion, and silence in our communities?

• How do we build a future in which none of this—past or present—is normalized?

  
  

If these questions challenge you, unsettle you, or push you to rethink what you thought you knew about gendered violence, race, or American culture, I invite you to go deeper with me.

This op-ed draws from the research in my book, Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness: White Psychopathology, Collective Psychosis, and Trauma in America, and in my forthcoming work, The Psychopathy of Whiteness.

Please also feel free to access and take the Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness 10-part online course series located under the 'Courses' tab on my website.

We must commit ourselves to understanding these issues not only through outrage, but through context—and to healing the wounds these systems continue to reproduce.