One of the earliest academic works associated with the modern feminist movement that dealt with the subject of rape and race was Shulamith Firestone’s “The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.” Racism in general, so Firestone claims, is actually an extension of sexism. Enforcing the biblical view that “. . . the races are no more than the various parents and siblings of the Family of Man,” she develops a theory defining the white man as father, the white woman as wife and mother, and black people as the children. Altering Freud’s theory of the Oedipus Complex into racial terms, Firestone implies that black men harbor an uncontrollable desire for sexual relations with white women. They want to kill the father and sleep with the
