Exploiting fear

In reply to my article on a series of 1930s Afro-American monster scares [ FT337:30-31], James Barnes objects to my description of the influence of racism on these social panics. Mr Barnes finds such an observation ‘politically correct’ [ FT348:72]. I strongly believe the contrary: it is historically correct. Before me others have pointed out how black superstition and folk fears were exploited by parts of the white populace in America as a terrible control mechanism. In this regard I especially like to mention the book Night Riders In Black Folk History by the late Gladys-Marie Fry, Professor Emerita of Folklore and English at the University of Maryland, published in 2001. Tellingly, in one of the 1930s black monster panics that I described, a white newspaperman jokingly confessed how he had started one of the monster rumours himself.

Racism was an integral part of pre-WWII America. Its influence on the nightmares of the black communities is as unfortunate as it is undeniable. Another important book is Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A Washington (2007). Washington presents the first full account of the large-scale medical experimentation on unwitting Afro-American subjects from the era of slavery to the present day. As I wrote before, in the light of this sordid history one may understand why Barney Hill’s reaction to the alleged UFO abduction was so markedly different from Betty’s.

Afro-Americans have their own rich folklore, urban legends and fascinating forteana. It is vibrant, strong, very much alive and in many ways different from the folklore of white Americans. That does not alter the fact that in the 19th and early 20th centuries white slave-owners and segregationists waged a constant psychological warfare by exploiting and nurturing black fears as part of a hideous control system for suppression. Another great book that treats this is I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture by Patricia Turner (1994).

As I explained, those 1930s monster sightings could grow from cursory misidentifications and vague yarns into full-blown panics only because the black populations were already living in a state of fear. These monster panics

occurred in the Southern States where virulent racism was the order of the day.

A few teenagers may indeed fantasise a monster just for the heck of it, as Mr Barnes says; but for such an imagined creature to coagulate into a monstrosity that terrifies an entire community, it needs to feed upon an already present, very real fear. In the 1930s monster panics I described the cause of that fear was the violent racism of a segregated America – a segregation that has never gone away but is, sadly, very much alive. In closing I cannot emphasise enough that many ghost, monster and phantom scares bubble up from social stress zones where misogyny, racism, inequality and ignorance flourish and thrive. Theo Paijmans The Hague, Netherlands