The theory of peculiar affinity implies that Black people and White people in the 21st-century United States are connected by family, kinship, surnames, and genes. Peculiar affinity is profoundly implicated with racism in the United States. Peculiar affinity remained after the demise of slavery, but it transformed and adapted to the system of separate but equal. Peculiar Affinity: The World the Slave Owners and Their Female Slaves Made presents the discovery of a vital socioeconomic interconnection and interrelationship between White slave owners and enslaved Black women of the antebellum South during the second slave era of the 19th century, the domestic slave era. This interconnection and interrelationship consisted of a very strange dialectic of sex, which led to the reproduction of the bodies of the slave owners and their female slaves.

On a grand scale, and implemented on a consistent basis, this dialectic of sex transformed to a nexus of sex and reproduction of human bodies as commodities. The visual aspects appeared as a kind of veil that obscured actual family and kinship relations. In the antebellum South, the slave owner was the father, and the female slave and his wife were the mothers. The children from the slave owner’s female slave and the children from the slave owner’s wife were real and objective brothers and sisters with the same biological father.