Eugène Delacroix's “The Death of Sardanapalus” (1827), oil on canvas, captures the titillating theme of the harem narrative – so much bare white female flesh brutalized by dark male flesh.
In the Another-Country-Heard-From Department, Sweden was upset by President Donald J. Trump’s remarks at a campaign rally that implied the country had suffered an attack recently related to a refugee/immigration problem. (Gee, Australia, Mexico, Sweden – three countries down and only 193 left to go.)
"We've got to keep our country safe," he said. "You look at what's happening in Germany. You look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden.”
Despite the president’s problems with tenses, he was actually referring to a Fox News report Feb. 17 on an Ami Horowitz documentary that links refugees in Sweden to an increase in violent crimes – a correlation that has been debunked.
Yet ironically – or perhaps not so ironically – riots broke out in a predominantly immigrant neighborhood, Rinkeby, just north of Stockholm days after Trump’s comments.
That might suggest a vindication of the president’s remarks. Or perhaps it was nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. Might not the president’s comments have spurred the immigrants’ clash with police? Hate breeds hate.
The message in all this, both explicit and implicit, is one that goes back at least to Trump’s campaign remarks about Mexicans and that is this – the idea of dusky foreign men raping white women.
Rape is a horrific crime of power perpetrated against both genders in all cultures throughout history but mainly by men against women in times of peace and, most pointedly, in times of war – the ultimate game men play. I have no trouble with Trump speaking out against sexual violence, and I know that some of those who commit sexual violence are refugees and men of color. But then why doesn’t Trump denounce rape in all instances or is that too much for the lady-part grabbing commander-in-chief to do?
More likely, it’s because for Trump and his supporters, rape isn’t something terribly personal that happens to women. It’s an act of dishonor to white men, who have already been emasculated by the loss of jobs, some of them to immigrants. In their thinking, American men – white American men – have been screwed over twice. Women are merely the battlefield on which this game is played.
The demonization of the other – be he a foreigner or a person of color – is not new. It predates Homer’s “The Iliad,” in which Greek and Trojan (West and East) brutalize each other. It threads 18th- and 19th-century accounts of American Indians abducting white women and stories of black men disrespecting white women in the Jim Crow South. It spices up arts and entertainment, as in 19th century Orientalist harem paintings like Eugène Delacroix's “The Death of Sardanapalus” and those 1920s movies in which a swarthy Rudolph Valentino is a sheik who ravishes a milky Agnes Ayres or Vilma Bánky. And it’s been the undertow of the Barack Obama presidency that has gotten us to where we are now. (I often wonder if Obama would’ve been less hated by his detractors if he were the child of a white man and a black woman instead of the son of a white mother and a black father, and a foreign Muslim father at that.)
The demonization of the other is pervasive and deeply ingrained.
All the more reason to resist it.