Souls on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver

Souls on Ice is a book written by Eldridge Cleaver. Eldridge Cleaver was an author/ activist in the mid 1900s. This was a book filled with essays written by Cleaver while he was incarcerated. Growing up in the civil rights era made it difficult for most African Americans to succeed. Because of this, Cleaver was constantly in trouble as a kid. He was in and out of detention centers before he was finally arrested and put in jail for rape. While in jail, Cleaver managed to write many essays about events that happened in his life prior to his arrest. Cleaver's came across to me as a philosophical and political style of writer. Which is extremely interesting because he was explaining his crimes in a way where he felt that he was not wrong for committing them. For example, He felt like there was no such thing as rape when discussing black women and black men. So he did not feel like he was raping the black women while forcing them to have sex with them because they were the same race. He brought up slavery a couple of times in this book to support his bizarre ideas. He felt that the female slaves were only raped by their white owners, but when it came to black men, it was not considered rape anymore it was simply sex. Cleavers reasoning for raping black women and white women were different. He took a political approach for defending his actions towards the white women. He felt that since the days of slavery, the white women and the black men never had connections. In other words, white women were rarely seen or touched by the black men during slavery. in one of the essays Cleaver states, "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 touch. Calling for a moratorium on student initiative, they were greeted instead by an encore of sit-ins, and retired to their ivory towers to contemplate the new phenomenon" (71). This quote was very interesting to me because as I think about the former slave stories and the way society was structured at that time, it makes Cleaver's point more valid. I do not think that makes it right for raping white women, but his reasoning behind doing what he did is understandable. During slavery, Slave owner wives were never violated or physically tortured by slaves or the owners. The white race ruled society during slavery and during the civil rights movement. The only difference is the fact that the blacks were slaves during slavery and free during the civil rights movement. There was still social inequalities and racial profiling going on during the mid 1900s. Cleaver used many of his actions to retaliate against the social prejudices happening during that time.