The following comes from an essay written by Diane Miller Somerville. The name of the essay is Rape, Race, And Castration In Slave Law In The Colonial And Early South found in the book The Devil’s Lane

The castration of slaves as a form of punishment emerged and continued not so much out of fears about black male sexual ardor but rather out of the slaves’ condition as property. In the colonial South, numerous crimes when committed by slaves or African Americans were considered capital. Since the colonial treasuries were required to compensate slaveowners for executed slave criminals, some colonies looked to dismemberment as a means not only of punishing slave offenders and deterring would-be slave criminals, but doing so at minimal cost. The punishment of castration was serious, yet spared the colonial government the costly burden of compensating slave masters for the loss of slave lives.

The essay later states that during the period of Reconstruction, the incidents of sexual mutilation of black men rose.

With the demise of slavery, however, and the enfranchisement of black men, whites began to conflate politics and sexuality and to associate newly won black political rights with black manhood.

How can any black man who is aware of the history of this country and its psychological and physical emasculation of black men make a such a bilious statement? If a white man had made those statements, both Rev. Jackson and Al Sharpton would be demanding the guy’s head on a pike. And I guarantee, there are hundreds if not thousands of white men who wish to do to Barack Obama exactly what Jesse Jackson stated he would like to do. Only, they say it around their coffee tables or huddled together during smoke breaks with their coworkers. They don’t say it on network television. They never marched with Martin Luther King or railed against the mistreatment of black people in this country or gave voice to the thousands of black men and women who were disenfranchised at the ballot box. They don’t care about any of that. But you do, Reverend Jackson. So, when you make the statement you made, the words sting a thousand times worse than when some nescient nobody with a hillbilly mentality speaks the same phrase.

Nothing hurts worse than being betrayed by one of your own. Barack Obama is fighting an uphill battle, and even those who have spent their lives trying to batter down the doors Obama is now walking through seem to be trying to impede his progress.