African American Womanhood

African American women are stereotyped as the “Jezebel” archetype. African American women’s historical background causes the

Life for African Americans has never been truly easy, especially during slavery and Reconstruction. In the United States, African Americans have always been placed into situations where they have had to fight for their citizenship and to be equal to whites. Through slavery and Reconstruction, whites would constantly perform several different types of violent acts to belittle and control both black men and women. These acts of violence included verbal harassment, beatings, rapes, and sometimes, even murders. Thus, all of this structured the political, social, and economic citizenship of African Americans.

African American culture has grown tremendously and has become more popular among all of the races. Not only has it become popular but it has also stirred up a lot of controversy. One aspect of African American culture that has become popular and is very controversial is Black women wearing their hair natural. Black women are really starting to embrace their natural hair and love the skin they are in but there are also a lot of people in society tearing them down. A lot of Black women and men have very curly natural hair and when the women do not feel like managing their hair they wear protective styles like braids or faux locks. Because of these styles, African Americans have been denied jobs and opportunities to prosper in society (Williams, 2015). It is offensive to tell Blacks how to wear their hair and that it is not acceptable. It is basically like telling her that she is unacceptable. There has been a great flow in the popularity of natural hair. In the early 1900’s since Black women were teased for their natural hair, straightened hair had become widely favored in the African-American community, but it lost its popularity to the Afro, which was seen as a symbol of black pride during the 1960s. Later on, Black women and even men returned to using chemical straightening treatments known as relaxers that loosened their naturally curly hair. Experts say that this method was often used as a means of meeting the white standard of beauty. The number of women using relaxers

The Civil War overall affected African American women in many ways. While they were forced some wanted to take advance of the opportunity to do something to gain their freedom decided to join the war. However they would serve as spies and nurses and some other tasks. Many women’s took the new role at home after their husbands, brothers, and fathers responded to the call of the military of the United States. A lot of enslaved women began the transition to freedom, beginning new lives during the terrors caused by the war. When the war’s end, the overwhelming death of approximately 620,000 soldiers had left numerous women in devastated, ,heath broken ,and compared to previous age of time where it was dominated once again one of the most bloody

The over sexualized perceptions of black women began with the inadequate observations and studies done by biased white males. Black women were believed to have exaggerated sex organs and uncontrollable sexuality (58). This stereotype was locked in during slavery while African American women were subject to abuse from

“The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”- Malcolm X. Black women have been stripped of their humanity for so long in popular culture that society can’t even see the truth that lies in front of them. Black women can’t express their anger, or they’re just another angry black woman stereotype. Yes, black women are angry, they are fed up with white women flaunting around their culture like it's a fashion trend, black women are tired of having to work twice as hard just to gain respect in the workplace, and most importantly they are tired of being hypersexualized. Through music videos, black women are hyper-sexualized, which maintains the sexual glorification of a black female body, while also strengthening the abhorrent stereotype of the Jezebel, which is linked back to times of slavery. The Jezebel stereotype was the slavers justification for raping and assaulting black women. Black women were depicted as sexually promiscuous and “whores” by nature. This image generated the belief that black women couldn’t be victims of rape because they lust for sexual relations. The hypersexualization of black women is a danger to black women and girls. Black women can still be seen in a Jezebel like an image in hip-hop/pop music videos. Their hardly accoutred bodies are often adorned on expensive cars or caressed by male rappers.

* One of the most standout images of black women in white slavery America was of a woman who ran entirely off of her sex drive, a Jezebel. A jezebel was considered to be the complete opposite of a proper white woman. She was thought to have little to none religious affiliation. A jezebel took no instances to cover her body, and showed no signs of prudery. The idea that black women were over-sexualized first

Throughout many decades, African American women have been able to set their own standards of beauty. Lonnae Parker, a writer for The Washington Post, states in her article Black women heavier and happier with their bodies than white women, poll finds, that “Freed from that high-powered media gaze, generations of black women have fashioned their own definitions of beauty with major assists from literature, music, and help from their friends” (Parker, 2012). The importance of this quote is that they were getting help from their culture, the music and literature is essentially the culture that helped them to define their own standards of beauty. By being isolated

African American women have been an oppressed group since slavery times and are still being oppressed in one of the simplest ways: through stereotypes. Though there are several stereotypes of African American women we will only focus on three of them, which have transcended through time and taken on new names, the mammy, the jezebel, and the matriarch. All three of these stereotypes have an origin in slavery times and were used to justify mistreatment of African Americans (Collins 2000). In fact, portraying African American women as jezebels, mammies and matriarchs helps to justify the continued oppression of black women in the United States (Collins 2000). These controlling images are designed to make racism, sexism, and poverty appear as a normal part of an African American woman’s life (Collins 2000).

You can't pick you get a chance to pick your family but you can pick your friends. Joining an organization that selects individuals with substance, great leadership skills and wanting to join something bigger than themselves. We wanted a Sisterhood were

Women make up half of the United states population according to the US census bureau, however women have been historically underrepresented in the business environment (7. US census). If women could overcome the challenges that seem to affect them in business they could become an integral part of the future workforce as it grows in many women based industries. What challenges could be holding women back from their full potential in the business world? The first part of my research question to be addressed that would allow an adequate understanding of the subject would be to find the challenges that specifically women as a gender group may face in business, I believe this will help to understand what effects they have on the challenges that African American Women(AAW) face. Although women owned business have been steadily increasing rapidly in growth in the US economy there are certain challenges that specifically African American women have been found to have to face that may hinder them from reaching the same potential afforded their male counterparts. In a journal writing written by the international labor organization(ILO) they focused on these challenges that women business owners face and some of these specific questions were addressed. (8 I.L.O)

With society changing who African American woman are on the outside has created internalized oppression on the inside. Nevertheless, causing African American woman to hate their selves and believing they are ugly, because they don’t possess the image in which society has set as norm. An American America women wants “ to be completely dedicated to their culture without considering other cultures values or beliefs;” “to be who they are and to be proud of it”; “to wear garments, living life, and having dread locks; to wear dreads and froes and be natural.” (Cokely, 2002) She has to wake up every day and be who society tells her is acceptable. Society therefore is sending out messages of false hope to the African American women in corporate America. Research has shown that African America that have endorse these stereotyped roles have lower self-esteem them women who resist the stigma.(cite) With society marginalization African American women it as a result keeps the white man in charge of who gets to work in what part of the company. Therefore, as I would say robbing them of their energy and creativity in corporate America.

When sixteenth and seventeenth century explorers returned to Europe from their journeys to Africa, they constructed and disseminated degrading stereotypes of African women based on the observations they had made abroad. Basing their perceptions of women off of European women’s bodies, these explorers noticed and commented on how African women’s bodies differed in many aspects—these disparities then became justifications for the differential treatment between these two groups of women. Because these African American women didn’t conform to the basic norms of womanhood that the explorers were accustomed to, they were quick to categorize them as strange, animalistic and hypersexual; their bodily forms, attire and skin color called attention

The legacy of sexing the savage is reproduced in contemporary sexual and gender politics in the Black community. Today’s African Americans walks between the world of privilege and disenfranchisement formulated by race, class, gender, and violence. The Black popular culture is preoccupied; they do not realize they are social and political subordinates in their own community. The obsession with white people to signify power is a false sense of privilege (James, 1999, & Fanon 1952). Psychiatrist Franz Fanon (1952) claims rejecting your blackness does not make you whiter, less animalistic or more human, he states, “what we are striving for is the liberate the black man from the arsenal of complexes that germinated in a colonial situation.” The debate in black sexual gender politics is challenged by visual culture of contemporary black women. Misogynistic entertainment in music videos, movies and television shows exploits the black body as stereotyped ghetto bitches and hos (Crenshaw 1997, James 1999, Collins 2005). Early European men wrote narratives on the sexual animalist Black women and today white writers do the same stereotyped racism and sexual obsessions giving first impression of blacks in movies and television shows. Joy James (1999) elaborates on how the twentieth century racial-sexual ideologies recycled into pornographic icons and prostitution, which marketed to symbolize black female sexuality. Black females bodies are exploitable and insignificant, mere backdrops

One cultural remnant of slavery within our society is the social idea that black bodies are hyper sexual. This can be seen in many forms throughout the media, including sexual images of black women in rap videos or the image of the black male as rapist construction. In both of these examples, their sexuality is perverted and presented as being overly aggressive and sexual, existing outside of the normalized engagement. This idea of black women being hyper sexual stems from black women being reduced to the racial caricature of the Jezebel, and this has its construction rooted in slavery, while the caricature was meant to justify the repeated rape of black women by their slave owners. For the black man, hyper masculinity in mainstream media and