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