Why the “Black Men Have Bigger Penises” Myth Won’t Die
It’s a myth with a sinister past steeped in racism
*The following contains graphic violence.
On October 19, 1934, Claude Neal, a twenty-three-year-old Black farmhand, was arrested for the murder and rape of Lola Cannady, a nineteen-year-old white woman. Her body was found mutilated in a wooded hillside near her home in Marianna, Florida.
According to NAACP investigator Howard A. Kester, Neal began dating Cannidy two years before her murder. Supposedly, when Cannady broke off their relationship, Neal raped and strangled her.
Other rumors claimed that Cannady was raped and murdered by a white neighbor.
We will never know the truth because Neal wasn’t given a fair trial. No, scratch that. Neal wasn’t given any trial.
When the town residents discovered the murder, they gathered outside the courthouse, demanding vigilante justice. Neal was moved to an Alabama jail for his safety, but six white men broke into the prison, kidnapped Neal, and returned him to Jackson County.
Shortly after, an angry mob of several thousand people gathered outside the Cannidy farm to observe and participate in Neal’s lynching. Nervous about containing the crowd, the six men took Neal into a more secluded area of the woods and lynched him.
But before they killed Neal, they tortured him.
First, they cut off his penis and testicles and forced Neal to eat them while making him declare how much he liked eating his genitals. Then, they amputated his fingers and toes as “souvenirs” of their gruesome act. One industrious showman even made postcards of Neal’s body hanging from an oak tree and sold them for 50 cents.
These sickening details are difficult to read today. Still, if we were to examine some of the most gruesome “spectacle lynchings” throughout history, we would find they shared one commonality — castration.
These castrations were in response to a common fear that Black men were desperate to have sex with white women. For example, in 1944, Gunnar Myrdal formulated “The Rank Order of Discrimination,” where he polled white Southerners and asked them to rank Black men’s most coveted desires.
They ranked intermarriage and sexual intercourse with white women as the leading desire.
Let’s stop and think about that twisted logic.
In the 1940s, white southerners believed Black men cared more about having sex with white women than they did about social and legal equality, desegregation, and economic advancements.
Historians today describe this mayhem as the “Big Black Scare.” Unfortunately, nothing was more terrifying than a Black man’s penis.
Today, we associate a well-endowed man with more potent masculinity, but such was not the case throughout history. In the nineteenth century, scientists used penis dimensions to justify race science or race realism — a pseudoscience with roots in eugenics.
Like the “gay gene” or “female brain,” proponents of race realism claimed that race is linked to biological traits that dictate personality, intelligence, and social behavior, ultimately influencing socioeconomic status. Or, to put a finer point on it, Urban Dictionary’s definition doesn’t mince words.
“Race realism: A term used by idiots to justify racial generalizations against nonwhites by using out-of-context statistics and pseudoscientific studies.”
Yep. That sums it up.
One of the tenets of race realism was that Black men have larger penises, which caused them to lose control over their libidos. In other words, a large penis was a “savage” penis.
This myth partly evolved out of phrenology — a nineteenth-century belief that the size and shape of your skull indicated your personality and mental abilities.
For example, if you had a protruding bump above your ear, it was believed you were more likely to be aggressive or less intelligent. And since women had smaller skulls, they also had smaller brains and were consequently as smart as a lapdog. (There is no correlation between brain size and intelligence. Einstein’s brain was smaller than average.)
But humans can make all sorts of ridiculous leaps to feed their biases. If your skull size could make you a simpleton, then a large penis must turn you into a sex-crazed lunatic. Or so it was believed.
One of the leading scientists behind this anatomical junk science was J. Philippe Rushton. He claimed there was a negative correlation between race and penis size, in which the larger the penis, the less intelligent the man. According to Rushton’s 1985 (yes, that recent) Differential K Theory, Black men supposedly had the biggest members but the smallest brains, while Asian men had smaller packages but larger brains. White men had a “Goldilocks” balance — just right in both departments.
(Note: It should surprise no one that Mr. Rushton was a white male.)
These myths partially endure due to earlier studies that relied on men to self-report their penis size — a total waste of research dollars.
Other studies were flawed because they relied on measurements of only erect lengths. Since some men are “growers” and others are “showers,” comparing stretched penis lengths to flaccid and erect lengths is more accurate.
But even when stretching a bunch of penises, there is scant evidence to support race impacting penis size. A more accurate (albeit small) study was conducted in Brazil involving 627 men aged 18–86. This time, they let the researchers do the penis stretching and measuring.
They found men who self-identified as Black had an average penis length of 16.5 cm (6.50 inches), while self-identified White subjects had an average penis length of 15.6 cm (6.22 inches). Less than a third of an inch is not statistically significant, especially when the data is pulled from one country.
But Google “Do Black men have bigger penises?” and you will find a smorgasbord of flawed research and odd pseudoscience. Of course, it’s all a load of big-dick energy nonsense, but these myths continue to have legs.
Often, science and history intertwine. To debunk these myths, we must pull them up by their historical roots and remember the murdered Black men who suffered due to faulty science.
“There will always be Rushtons in science, and we must always be prepared to root them out.” — David Takayoshi Suzuki
Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books on history, science, art, and why humans do the things we do.
Coming soon! For free content, subscribe to my Substack — Conversations with Carlyn.
I think you are right. It was a common practice, as executions at that time in that part of America were a community event thing like football games now. And I don't recall any lyrics in the song about a Black man being forced to eat his own dick and nuts. No one would have wanted a song like that.
But if any folksinger of that time would have written a tune about the case, Dylan would. "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", "The Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "Hurricane" show he was very sympathetic towards Blacks who were treated in an unfair fashion.
Here is a recent review of penile length studies for those who are interested.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0092623X.2020.1787279
Another interesting tidbit is that most people overestimate the average size which leads many men to be unsatisfied with that they're packing.