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The relationship between race and sexuality has long been described in the literature of Americans, both black and white, and was, in fact, the subject of the first work of fiction written by a black author, William Wells Brown's novel Clotel: Or The President's Daughter . Interracial love and sexual attraction are treated in other important works of black fiction, such as Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars , James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man , Jean Toomer's Cane , Richard Wright's Native Son , and Sarah E. Wright's This Child's Gonna Live .
With the development of the psychologically self-conscious age of post-World War II America came of course more penetrating approaches to the subject of race and sexuality—new and intense efforts not simply to describe the socio-historical facts of sexual attraction between members of different races, notably between blacks and whites, but to explain and interpret the actual working out of the manifestations of this attraction, through fantasies, dreams, and other vicarious as well as actual sexual experiences. Especially helpful have been such studies as Calvin Hernton's Sex and Racism in America , Laurence Baughman's Southern Rape Complex , William Grier and Price Cobbs' Black Rage , Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice , and Beth Day's Sexual Life Between Blacks and Whites .
Perhaps the finest interpretation of one facet of this relationship, the sexual stimulation and subsequent gratification which can be achieved through racial brutality is, however, found in James Baldwin's short story “Going to Meet the Man.” Baldwin immediately establishes the problem to be resolved—white male impotence—as the story opens:
What's the matter?” she asked.
“I don't know,” he said, trying to laugh, “I guess I'm
tired.”
Page 351“You've been working too hard,” she said. “I keep telling you.”
“Well, goddammit, woman,” he said, “it's not my fault!” He tried again; he wretchedly failed again. Then he just lay there, silen