...In Soul on Ice, Cleaver tells of a crucial event that occurred after he posted an image of a white woman on the wall of his cell. In his absence, the white male guard entered his cell and "ripped my sugar from the wall" and had "torn her into pieces, and left the pieces floating in the commode." For Cleaver, it "was like seeing a dead body floating in a lake."
Feeling violated, Cleaver sought out the white guard who assassinated his "voluptuous bride" of the "forbidden tribe of women." On questioning the guard, Cleaver was told he could have a pin-up of any "colored woman" on his cell but not a "white woman." Cleaver confessed that he "was more embarrassed than shocked" by the guards response.
"The disturbing part of the whole incident was that a terrible feeling of guilt came over me as I realized that I had chosen the picture of the white girl over available pictures of black girls . . . So, I took hold of the question and began to inquire into my feelings. Was it true, did I really prefer white girls over blacks?"
Cleaver, then, began to poll his prison inmates to find out whether his own preference for white women was, more or less, unusual for men of color:
"One afternoon, when a large group of Negroes was on the prison yard shooting the breeze, I grabbed the floor and posed the question: which did they prefer, white women or black. Some said Japanese women were their favorite, other said Chinese, some said European women, others said Mexican-they all stated a preference, and generally freely admitted their dislike for black women."
But what did Cleaver really expect to find within a prison population of dysfunctional black men? After all, the love/hate conflict between black men and black women was nothing new even in the1960s. The tale of Shakespeare’s "Othello" had demonstrated how ancient and complex the relationship was between black men and white women. In effect, Cleaver’s self-revelation spoke more about himself than what went on or goes on between black men and women.
Only the prisoner named Butterfly spoke plainly of his hatred of white women. "It’s a sickness," he said. "All our lives we’ve had the white woman dangled before our eyes like a carrot on a stick before a donkey: look but don’t." Butterfly became a "Black Muslim" and was "chiefly responsible for teaching him [Cleaver the] Black Muslim philosophy."
For an entire year, Cleaver explored his attraction for white women. Then, in 1955, he heard that a young Negro in Mississippi "down from Chicago on a visit, was murdered, allegedly for flirting with a white woman. He had been shot, his head crushed from repeated blows with a blunt instrument, and his badly decomposed body was recovered from a river with a heavy weight on it."
The murdered Negro boy was Emmett Till. Two days after discovery the tragedy of young Emmett Till, Cleaver had a "nervous breakdown" and "began to look at America through new eyes." His attitude toward white women changed radically, he suggested.
"Somehow I arrived at the conclusion, that as a matter of principle, it was of paramount importance for me to have an antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white woman."
At this point in Cleaver’s life, things seemed to have become very mixed up. He turned his purported hatred of white women into a kind of "guerrilla" war. For when he was released from prison in 1957, Cleaver decided, he claimed, consciously to "become a rapist." He considered the sexual dominance of white women through rape a "political" act.
Rape was an insurrectional act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women . . . I felt that I was getting revenge.
Troubling, Cleaver did not however immediately seek his revenge on the white man by raping his woman. When released from prison, Cleaver did not proceed directly to execute his "insurrectionary act" against the white man and his property. He detoured:
"I started out practicing on black girls in the ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day. When I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically."
.....
http://www.nathanielturner.com/soulonice.htm
