Great White Anxiety over Interracial Romance

White men's chronic fear of black male sexual power made white male centered American society so anxious to see a white male pugilist defeat Jack Johnson to rescue the white race. In The Great White Hope, both the systematic efforts to find a great white hope who is able to take back the world heavyweight title from Johnson and the legal scheming to deprive him of his boxing license are centered on the issue of Johnson's interracial romance with his white wife. White law enforcement's judicial punishment of Johnson is a lynching in disguise and eventually leads his white wife to a suicide and him to a loss in a rigged boxing match. Contemporary American society's anxiety over and punishment of the first African American world heavyweight champion can be seen as a legal lynching in the sense that lynching is a postbellum manifestation of white men's fear of black masculinity.