Note on Kong, Fay Wray

How did white stereotypes of black sexual assault hide the truth of white violence against black women?

"What rose up out of collective [white] needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism--a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American. (There exists, of course, a European Africanism with a counterpart in colonial literature). --Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (p. 38)

This image of Fay Wray and King Kong is from the 1933 Hollywood classic. I read this film as another allegory about the anxiety of whiteness, especially related to campaigns of lynching and castration carried out against African Americans. The film King Kong thus belongs to the tradition of Birth of a Nation (click for video clip), which first put on the silver screen blackface images of African American men attacking virginal blondes in traumatic violation of imaginary national and race identities. When the airplanes arrive to shoot down Kong and save the white goddess, we can hardly forget the ride of the Klansmen who come to the rescue of the white South in Griffith's film. Yet the sympathy of the film for Kong arguably opens up an opportunity for critiquing racism (see Cynthia Erb, Tracking King Kong).

African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux had answered Griffith in his 1919 Within Our Gates, whose climax graphically depicts the attempted rape of a black woman by a white man while the woman's family is being lynched for a crime they did not commit. Micheaux deconstructs the classic narrative lie behind the ideology of white sexual fear of blackness, exposing its origins in the attempt to cover up the white planation owner's systematic rape of enslaved African women. See the online essay by Gerald R. Butters, "From Homestead to Lynch Mob: Portrayals of Black Masculinity in Oscar Micheaux's Within Our Gates."

King Kong gives stark representation to white fears of the "primitive," and so echoes much modernist literature, such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. (This fear, of course, built on a similar tradition of representing American Indians as rapacious violators of white womanhood, as in Vanderlyn's 1804 painting of "The Death of Jane McCrea"). These modernist texts resonate with the outpouring of "scientific racism" and white paranoia in the period from the late 19th century through World War II and the Holocaust (recall how Fitzgerald satirizes Tom Buchanan's Anglo-Saxon fear of "the rise of the colored" nations, a phrase borrowed from an actual book of the 1921, Lothrop Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy). Fay Wray's depiction as the embodiment of vulnerable white womanhood perpetuates a very long aesthetic tradition well analyzed by Richard Dyer in White, which keenly details how the lighting of white women in religious and cinematic framings works to create racial imaginaries. King Kong himself, of course, is descended from hundreds of texts and images in which Europeans and Americans depict peoples of African descent as gorillas, chimpanzees, monkeys, and apes (a topic treated well by Winthrop Jordan in his ground breaking study White Over Black and given immemorial albeit unconscious expression in Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Contemporary reappearances of these ideological images might best be sampled in the material surrounding the O. J. Simpson murder trial (see Birth of a Nation 'Hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case ed. Toni Morrison, and Linda Williams's Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson).

How did the racial ideology of white supremacy inform the construction and circulation of these images?

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