Toni Cade Bambara’s Black Female Champions Essay

From 1865 to 1900 African Americans, despite being presumed free; blacks quickly realized they were only free from was the whippings, break-ups from their families, and sexual exploitation. (Experience History 457) African Americans were still force to live with the hostility of whites. It has taken blacks a long time to be freed from the hatred, and discrimination of white southerners, and after decades’ racism among whites still exist today.

This paper discusses the experiences of African American Women under slavery during the Slave Trade, their exploitation, the secrecy, the variety of tasks and positions of slave women, slave and ex-slave narratives, and significant contributions to history. Also, this paper presents the hardships African American women faced and the challenges they overcame to become equal with men in today’s society. Slavery was a destructive experience for African Americans especially women. Black women suffered doubly during the slave era.

n 1619 a Dutch ship brought 20 slaves to America and it took nearly 240 years for slavery to end in 1865. In the absence of rights or freedom, my ancestors were put to work growing anything from cotton to tobacco. For centuries, my people fought for equality. Although we are “free” the fight has still remain. As a black women raised in America, I was hit with some harsh realities at a very young age.

While the majority of black women accounts are lost to history due to anti-literacy laws, we do have a good idea of what their lives were, through slave narratives and other records. The life of a female slave in pre-civil war America was characterized by sexual assault, physical and mental abuse along with harsh treatment both in the fields and inside the master’s house. Female slaves were treated as property with no regards to their

In the United States, there has been many cases of Racial injustice. From the beginning of the start of the United States of America it was the injustice to the Native Americans being captured and used for slave labor while their bison be slaughtered for sportsmanship. But this paper is on the specific race of the African Americans. There are many races that have been racially profiled and ostracized by the English people. But the treatment that African Americans have endured even till this day is disheartening. African Americans have gone through enslavement during the early 1600’s to the mid 1800’s. Then the African Americans were obstructed by the Jim Crow laws creating the ‘Separate but Equal” propaganda during the late 1800’s into the 1960’s. After the abolishment of the Jim Crow Laws, people were considered equal until the recent actions of many police officers using deadly force on African American youths in the early 2000’s.

Ever since the period of slavery, Black women have described the different forms of multiple oppressions they face of race, class, and gender with terms like “interlocking oppressions,” “simultaneous oppressions,” “double jeopardy,” “triple jeopardy” and so on.

Many writers are influenced by the life they live and the world around them, and Miltona Mirkin Cade is no different. Miltona Mirkin Cade was influenced by the black community and women’s organizations. (www.fembio.org)

Women’s issues during slavery and even into the Reconstruction Era were not held as top priorities within the social structure of life during those times. The main political and social issues were within the male spectrum, and therefore left women’s rights and values in second place, behind men. Within the nineteenth century, there were four specific characteristics that society deemed should be associated with a woman; piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. However, this was not the case when it came to black women. They were not able to exemplify the expected worldview of womanhood due to their circumstances.

In history, women have always struggled to gain equality, respect, and the same rights as men. Women had had to endure years of sexism and struggle to get to where we are today. The struggle was even more difficult for women of color because not only were they dealing with issues of sexism, but also racism. Many movements have helped black women during the past centuries to overcome sexism, racism, and adversities that were set against them. History tells us that movements such as the Feminist Movement helped empower all women, but this fact is not totally true. In this paper, I will discuss feminism, the movements, and its "minimal" affects on black women.

During the 19th century, black women faced a plethora of hardships culminating from hundreds of years of oppression and denigration while simultaneously fighting for equal rights with all other women. One of the biggest obstacles that was necessary to overcome was one of the most common ideologies of the West, the Cult of True Womanhood. This Victorian ideal of womanhood defined women within a domestic sphere and required them to be subservient to their husbands (Broude). These women gave up much more than their rights outside of the home, they were taken advantage of physically, mentally and sexually. The majority of women during this time did not meet this standard of true womanhood and never could hope to. This ideal and the common stereotypes of the time were questioned by an African-American woman named Sojourner Truth.

In Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson,” she encourages Sylvia to look society in the eye and change what is expected of her. She exposes the inequality present within the United States’s society through the perspective of young African American children. Often, many are unwilling to acknowledge that they are a victim of poverty, leaving them in a state of ignorance, that will not promote any change. The story revolves around Sylvia, a young black girl, who finally has her eyes opened to her disadvantaged economic status. Real learning often occurs after a state of discomfort and confusion. Bambara takes Sylvia through a journey enlightening her through an uncomfortable juxtaposition of Harlem and Manhattan, her and her friends, and who she actually is and who she wants to be.

Patricia Hill Collins addresses the issue of how focussing on the naming of particular struggle can become a “political distraction” from gendered racist and sexist oppression that Black Women face (Alexander-Floyd & Simien 2006) Collins contends that womanism “exaggerates out group differences and minimises in group variation by assembling a stable and homogenous racial group identity” (Alexander-Floyd & Simien 2006) potentially, this comes with the ubiquitous essentialisation of Black Women struggles, which denies varied experience of Black Women who align with various social-culture heritages.

In my opinion, I agree with everything that Bambara has to offer in her reading, she’s on point with her topics and acknowledges all the issues with the separation between the sexes. I think Bambara realize to how people view women and what she roles they are supposed to represent. Bambara knows women are truly capable of, however it’s not what society see in women. With how society view women as inferior to men, especially in the races of black women to men. I understand and acknowledge it myself, Bambara acknowledges that we as people live in a life that women “black women to be more specific” are targeted more and limited to few opportunities and only restricted a life at taking care of their family. Or in many cases limited to taking care

This historical study will define the reinvention of gender identity for gender diversity that was living in black communities in British North America. The major challenge for women was the gender stereotype of the submissive domestic servant, which often kept them imprisoned as black males escaped to freedom. Women in black communities often had to remain in slavery or servitude not only to white master, but they had to serve their black male counterparts in the home. However, these black women reinvented gender roles by traveling, learning wilderness skills, and other behaviors that were often attributed to men. However, in all-black

Within the texts of Toni Cade Bambara and James Baldwin, the connection between the history and the politics of African American literature is explicit. Both writers employ the use of a shared history to establish literature that forms solidarity. However, Bambara opts for a more optimistic outlook of the black woman in America. Through the short stories The Johnson Girls and My Man Bovanne, Bambara explores the camaraderie of women and the sexist nature of the newly formed Black Power movement. Whereas in Baldwin’s Previous Condition the protagonist, Peter, is consumed by epistemological pain and suffering. Thus, Baldwin’s short story remains a stagnant narrative as it reiterates the established discourse of the difficultly of being a black