Some characters have short shelf lives. Jeeves, the affable-looking butler associated with the Ask Jeeves search engine, will soon be given his walking papers. Trench Coat Guy, who for six years graced our television screens as the low-key spokesman for Sprint, recently got his pink slip. But the black bogeyman, a character who has figured in countless campaigns since the early days of the republic, continues to endure. Whereas Jeeves and Trench Coat Guy were successful symbols of prosperous brands, the black bogeyman is an anti-brand, a potent, menacing stand-in for everything some whites fear and despise in African-Americans.

So imposing is his shadow that he looms large even in discussions where he is not mentioned by name. Consider, for instance, last month’s uproar over comments by radio host and former Education Secretary William Bennett. While steering clear of an open call for genocide, Bennett offered a daring prescription for making our country a safer place: “If you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.” It would be an “impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do,” he added, but “your crime rate would go down.”

The implications were clear: In every black embryo lurks a black bogeyman, just waiting to grow up and become Willie Horton.

While much has been said about Bennett’s bizarre warbling, little comment has been made about the tradition to which it belongs. His hypothetical vision of a United States without black criminals has its roots in a dream of a country without any blacks at all. This particular neurosis is as much a part of our national tradition as baseball, racism and the rewarding of lustreless loyalists with important and powerful positions.

Bennett, doubtless a proud patriot, would likely find it pleasing to be mentioned in the same breath as George Washington. “For to be plain I wish to get quit of Negroes,” the general confessed in a letter to his cousin Lund in 1778, echoing the sentiments of many of his fellow Founders. Others, like Thomas Jefferson, went beyond wishing and actually proposed sending all blacks to Africa. Washington was commenting specifically on his slaves, whom he often felt were “ruined by idleness” and not worth the expense required to keep them healthy enough to work in his fields. But emancipated blacks, increasing in number throughout the republic, provoked similar responses. Wherever they travelled, the new freemen were dogged by stereotypes pegging them as lazy, dangerous and — surprise, surprise — prone to theft. In “Travels through the United States”, French visitor Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt observed that judges in Maryland “attribute the multiplicity of robberies to the free Negroes.” He heard “the same accusation preferred against them in all the states where slavery is permitted.” Winthrop Jordan, author of “White Over Black”, notes that in 1782, “free Negroes were being repetitiously characterised as lazy nuisances, harbourers of runaways, and notorious thieves.”

From this mischaracterization arose the notion of the black bogeyman, waiting in the darkness to pounce on unsuspecting whites. Writing in 1837, Hosea Easton reported that white children in the North were “warned to behave or ‘the old (racial expletive) will carry you off.”’

Over time, Americans turned to science to explain blacks’ alleged propensity to crime. In “Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain”, an article published in the American Journal of Anatomy in 1906, Robert Bennett Bean suggested that blacks’ menacing tendencies likely derived from their lack of such “higher” mental faculties as “self-control, willpower, ethical and aesthetic senses and reason.”

When sending blacks back to Africa proved unfeasable, Josiah Nott, another scientist, told his fellow whites not to worry. He predicted that free blacks, forced to fend for themselves, would soon die out.

Rebecca Latimer Felton, an Atlanta politician who despised blacks, was unwilling to wait so long. In a speech similar to Bennett’s modern-day theorising, Felton offered her own proposal for reducing the crime rate. “If it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from drunken, ravening human beasts,” she suggested in 1897, “then I say lynch, a thousand a week if necessary.”

Writing in 1970, Ralph Ellison observed that “the fantasy of an America free of blacks is at least as old as the dream of creating a truly democratic society.” Ditto for the black bogeyman, who continues to haunt us through the centuries.