on:
The root [of the violence] is rage. It is the rage, almost literally the howl, of a man who is being castrated. . . . There is probably no greater (no more misleading) body of sexual myths in the world today than those which have proliferated around the figure of the American Negro. This means that he is penalized for the guilty imagination of the white people who invest him with their hates and longings, and is the principal target of their sexual paranoia (Baldwin 273).
Of course, it does not help the situation of Dave and his lack of self-identity and self-respect, whether sexual-based or not, that the blacks who witness his confession of shooting the mule accidentally laugh heartily at his humiliation.
We might question whether Dave even on a subconscious level "wanted" to shoot the mule as a symbol of his oppression. After all,
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