The emotionally freighted images of black men are often crafted in white minds in childhood. Many are gained in family settings. In the past and in the present, some white parents have threatened disobedient children with fearful images of black bogeymen coming to get them. In an interview conducted by one of my graduate students, a retired clerical worker described her mother's method of discipline: "'The niggers would come in the night and steal us away and use us for their pleasure,' that's what my mother told us. What an awful thing to do, don't you think, frightening little children like that. . . . I think she must have done that to make us behave. It worked; she scared us to death. The first time I ever saw a colored person I just about had hysterics."
--Joe Feagin, Racist America, p. 159
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