Whipping the Black Body in Delaware.

This article centers public whippings in Delaware. Whereas there is an extensive literature on extra-legal corporal punishments (such as lynchings), comparatively less attention has been paid to public enactments of corporal punishments of African Americans that were authorized by law in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In focusing on the staging of whippings before assemblies of spectators, this article reveals how a theatre of punishment not only enabled a racially specific form of abuse but also normalized (and rendered mundane) societal witnessing of violence against people with brown skin. This study opens with a brief history of whipping in the state, beginning with its colonial roots and concluding in the mid-twentieth century. In emphasizing the long embrace of this uniquely and identifiably Delaware tradition, it spotlights how a myth of egalitarianism—the idea that everyone could be subject to the lash—enabled a public punishment that increasingly and almost exclusively was reserved for Black folk. Further, this article spotlights the scene of state sanctioned whippings—the display of partially undressed bodies, the dynamic between the flogged and flogger, and the reactions of majority white attendees who witnessed the spectacle—to reveal, as Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon have written, "how violence is specifically performed." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]