The Delectable Negro

The Delectable Negro explores the homoeroticism of literal and metaphorical acts of human cannibalism coincident with slavery in the United States. Woodard writes that the consumption of Black men by white male enslavers was a "natural by-product of their physical, emotional, and spiritual hunger" for the Black man. Woodard argues that homoeroticism was also part of how Black Americans experienced their own consumption and not a unidirectional phenomenon, as it "emanated from black men toward white men and toward each other."

The book approaches the concept of consumption literally with documented cases of cannibalism and figuratively as a spiritual and societal phenomenon. Woodard defines consumption as a spectrum of practices, including sexual modes of consumption,  rituals, institutionalized hunger, and soul harvesting.  Woodard argues that cultural aspects of the plantations were "based in parasitism and a dynamic of human consumption," building on Patterson’s notion of slavery as a parasitic institution in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Woodard identifies practices such as the systemic starvation of enslaved people as parasitic relationships that use Black bodies to fuel the construction of whiteness.