At the Intersection of Race and Gender Hatred

Following Emancipation and Reconstruction, the institution of slavery transitioned

to the forced labor contract system, racist Black Codes, the rise of the KKK, and the
gradual construction of a new Jim Crow South. Throughout it all, black women
struggled to maintain their right to be. Like their sisters across the globe and across
history, they carried out their three-quarters of the worlds work, both paid and
unpaid; they served their families, their menfolk, and still found time to help
establish schools, aid associations, and fought alongside their men for equality.

Frances Ellen Watkins-Harper, founder of the National Association of Colored

Women, was typical for the black women activists of her day, especially those who
had been born free and were educated: she was a feminist abolitionist, advocating
equally for the full rights of women and blacks. Like other black feminists, she was
well aware of the central role of black women, and in 1878, she wrote:

An acquaintance of mine, who lives in South Carolina, and has been engaged in
missionary work, reports that, in supporting the family, women are the mainstay;
that two-thirds of the truck gardening is done by them in South Carolina; that in
the city they are more industrious than the men.When the men lose their work
through their political affiliations, the women stand by them, and say, Stand by
your principles.13

Black women also created one of the most important progressive movements in
this nations history: the Black Womens Club Movement that began in the 1890s
and continued into the 20th century. The Black Womens Club Movement was
responsible for establishing political, educational, and economic aid networks and
programs across the country, and provided the foundation for the formation of a
number of groups which arose from the activism of these women, including the
Urban League and the NAACP. But, as legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, wrote, this
movement has been written out of our history: Sadly, Black club womens
remarkable achievements have been left out of the official history of the womens
movement in the United States, and their vision of child welfare has been omitted
from the development of the public child welfare system.14

The erasure of black women from our nations history has erased their crucial role
in rebuilding families, rebuilding the race, rebuilding the South, and rebuilding the
nations economy. It has translated to the loss of brilliant ideas and social policies
that would have changed our nation for the better, instead of the venal morass of
exploitation politics we find ourselves in. Just erasing one part of that historythe
work of the Black Womens Club Movementhas resulted in a national child
welfare policy that is punitive and divorced from the whole community and
culture.15

Instead, mainstream History teaches us that, following the end of slavery, black
women withdrew from labor, a myth that further helped to erase black women not
just from the collective history, but from any legitimate participation in the civic
and historic life of our country.

The elimination of their legitimacy and lives as independent human beings also
erased the existence of their anger that rose when they found themselves
betrayed by the men theyd fought alongside to achieve equality, dignity, and
legitimacy for the entire race. In particular, the decision to exclude women from
the expansion of voting rights was a blow to these activists.

One such woman was Sojourner Truth who was outraged that black women would
be pushed back into chattel subordination and dispossessed of the same rights as
men. She refused to go along with having to give up her rights as a woman in order
to gain rights for black men alone. In 1867, in a speech to the Convention of the
American Equal Rights Association in New York City, she warned:

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about
the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women
theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just
as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing [womens suffrage
movement] going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will
take a great while to get it going again.16

But this was the choice that was essentially created and offered by the opponents
of enfranchising either blacks or women, and it was a deliberate divide-and-
conquer tactic: divide and dramatically weaken the black people, and divide and
dramatically weaken the alliance between the suffragists and the abolitionists.

This was a particularly vicious (and ultimately quite successful) tactic since most
suffragists were also abolitionists. Moreover, by pitting race against gender, with
women on the disadvantaged side, womens suffragists were made to look as if
they were disregarding the importance of race in order to focus solely on gender.
In fact, it was those who eliminated black women from black suffrage who turned
it into a gender issue.

Sadly, many white feminists took the bait, with result that the womens suffrage
movement became completely racialized, with white racist suffragists turning
against black women and black suffragists left with an impossible choice: support
your race or support your gender, but not both.

Following Reconstruction, the racist stereotype created by the white slaveowners

of the wildly sexualized black woman was only reinforced by this division, and the
division reinforced the stereotype. Since black women, according to the myth,
were too debased by their primitive sexual desires, they were incapable of
understanding politics, much less capable of being independent, autonomous
citizens in their own right. As historian Paula Giddings wrote in her book When and
Where I Enter, Society failed to see them as a distinct political and social
force.17 Instead, black women were seen as wardswards of white men and
black men, wards of the state, property of all.

Anna Julia Cooper was one of the activists directly confronting the dehumanizing
stereotypes of black women. A brilliant black feminist, scholar, and abolitionist, she
devoted much of her activism to elevating the black woman. From education to
political activism, Cooper advocated for the full participation of black women in all
aspects of public life. In her opinion, it was also a matter of race survival: the
regeneration, the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and starting
point of its progress upward, must be the black woman.18

Cooper rejected the notion that black men (or men of any race) were the primary
human and women the subspecies. She also rejected the claim by Martin R. Delany
(the father of black nationalism and one of the important, pioneering black
political leaders of Reconstruction) that when he entered the council of kings the
black race entered with him. Cooper wrote in 1892, no man can represent the
race. Whatever the attainments of the individual may behe can never be
regarded as identical with or representative of the whole.19

Yet, the more active black women became in the public sphere, the more repulsive
and degrading the propaganda and public vilification became, both in terms of her
supposed racially-derived licentiousness and in comparison to white women. As
Paula Giddings described:

At a time when their White peers were riding the wave of moral superiority that
sanctioned their activism, Black women were seen as immoral scourges. Despite
their achievements, they did not have the benefit of a discriminating judgment
concerning their worth as women.Assumed to have low and animalistic urges
that cast them outside the pale of the movement for moral reform, Black women
were seen as having all the inferior qualities of White women without any of their
virtues. Allegations like those in the popular periodical The Independent typified
the prevailing attitudes toward Black women. Like White women, one writer said,
Black women had the brains of a child, the passions of a woman, but unlike
Whites, Black women were steeped in centuries of ignorance and savagery, and
wrapped about with immoral vices.20

Despite the onslaught of dehumanizing propaganda, and despite the failure of

black men to defend or support them, black women continued organizing and in
1892, three activists Victoria Earle Matthews, Susan McKinney Steward, and
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffininitiated the Black Womens Club Movement, one of
the most important social reform movements in U.S. history. As Ruffin explained,
the purpose of organizing black womens social aid and advocacy clubs across the
country was not for race work alone, but for work along the lines that make for
womens progress.21

Nevertheless, by the dawn of the 20th century, the degrading stereotype that
branded black women of all classes permeated mainstream American culture. In
1902, another commentator for The Independent wrote, I sometimes hear of a
virtuous Negro woman, but the idea is absolutely inconceivable to me.I cannot
imagine such a creature as a virtuous Negro woman. And Gertrude Steins
novel, Three Lives, published in 1909, included the character of Rose, who had the
simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people.22

Worse, the very assault and horrific exploitation directed at black women became
the rationale for perpetuating her dehumanization: The Northern liberal Slater
Fund, a foundation that gave money to welfare projects for blacks, stated:

The negro women of the South are subject to temptationswhich come to them
from the days of their race enslavement.To meet such temptations the negro
woman can only offer the resistance of a low moral standard, an inheritance from
the system of slavery, made still lower from a lifelong residence in a one-room
cabin.23

The invisibility of black women as legitimate representatives of the race is evident

in how we understand and acknowledge the dehumanizing institution and
extraordinary violence of slavery. The horrors of slavery are nearly always depicted
through the violence perpetrated against black men. It is as if black women were
somehow spared the worst of the violence. In fact, black women were not spared
the violence borne of racial hatred; they also endured the additional violence
reserved for females.

Feminist scholar Gerda Lerner, in Black Women in White America, describes

numerous incidents of lynching, riots, and other racial assaults against blacks, and
in nearly every case, the violence included the additional assault of rape against
the women; black women werent just lynched and murdered alongside black men
(though lynching was primarily a crime against black men), they were also gang-
raped before being murdered.24

This special hatred for females is evident in some of the slave narratives. Frank Bell
was the sole slave of a brutal man, Johnson Bell, a violent alcoholic who sometimes
kept me in chains. When Frank was seventeen, he married a young woman
while Master [was] on a drunk spell. His new bride came to live with him.

Master he run her off, and I slips off at night to see her, but he finds it out. He
takes a big, long knife and cuts her head plumb off, and ties a great, heavy weight
to her and makes me throw her in the river. Then he puts me in chains and every
night he come give me a whippin for a long time.25

Mary Reynolds described what happened to her Aunt Cheney, who already had
borne four children from the rapes of her owner, Dr. Kilpatrick:

Aunt Cheney was just out of bed with a sucklin baby one time, and she ran away.
Some say that was another baby of Masters breedin.Solomon gets the n-r
hounds and takes her trail. They get near her and she grabs a limb and tries to
hoist herself in a tree, but them dogs grab her and pull her down. The men hollers
them onto her, and the dogs tore her naked and ate the breast plumb off her
body. She got well and lived to be an old woman, but another woman has to suck
her baby, and she aint got no sign of breasts no more.26
As for her own experience, Mary related what happened when she and another
slave were hired out to work for some ornery white trash name of Kidd. The
other slave finally ran away, and convinced that she was complicit in the escape,
Kidd went after her.

Kiddtied my wrists together and stripped me. He hanged me by the wrists from a
limb on a tree and spraddled my legs round the trunk and tied my feet together.
Then he beat me. He beats me worser than I ever been beat before, and I faints
dead away.

When she was brought back home, her owner, Dr. Kilpatrick, looks me over good
and says Ill get well, but Im ruined for breedin chillen.27

Ben Simpson, along with his mother and sister, were handed over to the son of
their original owner whod died. The son was a murderer and a fugitive and took
them on a forced march from Norcross, Georgia, to Texas. All the slaves were
chained together around their necks and the chains fastened to horses for the
entire march to Texas; when it began snowing, they werent allowed to wrap their
bare feet.

Mother, she give out on the way, about the line of Texas. Her feet got raw and
bleeding and her legs swole plumb out of shape. Then Master he just take out he
gun and shot her, and whilst she lay dying he kicks her two, three times and say,
Damn a n-r what cant stand nothing.

As for his sister, Emma, she was the only woman: Emma was wife of all seven
Negro slaves. He sold her when shes about fifteen, just before her baby was born.
I never seen her since.28

Under patriarchy, the shame of rape has always rested on women, and men have
always been able to rape with impunity; the industry of rape during slavery was no
exception.

In this country, it wasnt until the 1990s that women began openly talking about
the violence perpetrated on them, and even with that monumental change,
women who break the silence are still more often than not branded as liars and
sluts. Unlike any other crime of violence, it is the womens actions, her past, and
reputation that are put on trial, not the rapists.
Imagine what it must have been like for a black woman to speak about the
violence done to her routinely and regularly.

Puritan taboos around sex in our culture contributed to the silencing of black
women; one never talked about such things. Nevertheless, despite the stigma, the
threats of violence, and the ongoing degradation, black women did speak up, even
though too few bothered to listen.

Historian Paula Giddings wrote about the 19th century black feminist activist
Fannie Barrier Williams who was one of the few to listen and to publicly condemn
the pervasive violence against black women, a campaign of demonization and
sexual assaults that did not end when slavery was abolished. After Emancipation,
as Giddings wrote, Sexual exploitation was so rampant that it compelled
thousands of women to leave the South, or to urge their daughters to do so,29 and
Fannie Barrier Williams wrote:

It is a significant and shameful fact that I am constantly in receipt of letters from

the still unprotected women in the South, begging me to find employment for their
daughtersto save them from going into the homes of the South as servants as
there is nothing to save them from dishonor and degradation.30

One of the worst legacies of slaverys rape industry was the myth of the
promiscuous black woman, a lasting stereotype that continues to stigmatize and
endanger black women and girls everywhere. Men of all races view black women,
far more than other women, as wanting it andbecause of the legacy of slavery
and sexual objectificationas being his rightful property.

Black women make up 7% of the population of the U.S., yet account for 18.8% of
reported rapes by an intimate.31 But even this high number is lower than what
really happens because what really happens is that when a black woman is raped
by a black man, the pressure to remain silent is extraordinarily intensefar more
so than for women of nearly any other race in this country. The equally damaging
myth of the violent black man, who is naturally prone to rape, keeps black
women silent for the good of the race, particularly since, like women everywhere,
they are the secondary, subordinate, and more expendable members of their race.

Filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmonss 2006 film, NO! The Rape

Documentary, explores these issues and the untenable position that black women
occupy in this country. As gender studies scholar Charlotte Pierce-Baker points out,
being under constant siege of racism places African American women in a
double-bindin which theyhave to choose between fighting against either
racism or sexism.32

Another important consideration that is uppermost on the minds of any black

womanlong before the murder of Trayvon Martinis the consequences of
calling the police to report the crime or seek protection. For example, in the
documentary (and the films study guide), the Reverend Reanae McNeal described
what happened after her enraged boyfriend became violent, held her captive in
her room, and raped her. She did not consider calling the police to be an option
since they were known for their frequent harassment of Black men.33

There is finally the reality faced by too many women of color who do make the
painful decision to report the assault: Their reports are dumped by the police
because theyre assumed to be lying. The reality is that there is a wide-spread
belief in this country that black women cant be raped.34

As a result, if she reports that she was raped by a black man, its seen as a private
matter between her and her boyfriend (who shes probably just getting back at for
cheating on her); worse, its seen as a spat between some prostitute and her
pimp. If she says she was raped by a white man, shes even less believable; unless
the white man confesses to his crime, shes assumed to be far less credible (and
probably just getting back at a john for not paying her what she wanted). Either
way, she runs the risk of being arrested for filing a false police report.

The mythology of the sexualized, promiscuous, and chattelized black womanthe

racist and misogynist legacy of racismpersists to a degree that is astonishing and
that must be navigated daily by black women in America.