February 2022 - “Anger, Beauty, and Black Women"
A headline in the February 22nd edition of the Washington Post gave me a flicker of hope. It heralded Wanda Cooper-Jones, the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, for offering the world the “righteous, historic, beautiful, clarifying anger of a Black woman.” She spoke to the public after a federal jury declared that the three men who killed her son had done so because he was Black. My hope came because it’s one of the few times I’ve seen my newspaper of record describe the anger of a Black woman as beautiful.
Of course, as a white man, I must be particularly sensitive in trying to discuss such anger. White supremacy culture has generated many negative portrayals of Black women. White commentators have debased, objectified, commodified, and fetishized them. Such oppression seeks to control their words, presentation, and bodies.
Before the Civil War, enslavement, rape, and torture denied Black women opportunities to express their beauty. Instead, minstrel shows distorted and mocked them. White men in blackface and drag created degrading stereotypes, like the domineering “Sapphire character” whose masculine personality hurled contempt and rage against her own partners and children.
Since then, the racist trope of the “Angry Black Woman” has become so common that it has its own acronym: ABW. ABW recurs throughout our culture, from Gone with the Wind to The Jerry Springer Show. Its repetition makes it easy to bring the stereotype to our imagination, explains Savala Nolan, director of Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley School of Law. She writes, “The image is ready-made: one hand on her hip, one finger pointed in your face, head and neck swiveling. You can probably hear her Black English. She probably strikes you as intimidating. She's overly sensitive and mannish. She's easy to piss off and difficult to calm down. She's aggressive and irrational, too loud and too much.”
Most importantly, however, Nolan emphasizes that “She's also not real.” ABW is a cultural construction “meant to control and undermine Black women, to punish us when we express even slight and reasonable indignation, pain, or irritation (let alone rage).” It’s been used as a weapon countless times, including against Michelle Obama, Serena Williams, and Representative Maxine Waters. Waters was so demonized, in Trump’s words, for her “crazy rants,” that she had to cancel events due to death threats.
In the shadow of such ugly racism, the Washington Post article by Robin Givhan offered light. Ms. Cooper-Jones was appropriately and righteously furious about the murder of her son. She was frustrated by the Department of Justice’s initial hesitation to hold the murderers fully responsible. But, she also gave us something to praise and emulate. Ms. Cooper-Jones was, Givhan explained, “the unabashedly determined, stubborn and angry Black woman…who epitomized all that is beautiful and wondrous in that phrase. Despite the effort society has expended trying to transform that trope into something ugly and hateful, there is no greater salvation than to rest under the protective wing of someone who loves you fiercely and relentlessly, who is enraged by your pain and who will fight your battles when you no longer can."
White allies in the racial justice cause have much work to do, from ridding ourselves of ugly cultural stereotypes to demanding that our systems do better as well. This week Wanda Cooper-Jones spoke to her slain son: "I made a promise to you the day I laid you to rest. I told you I loved you and someday, somehow I would get you justice.” As we move forward, we must demand that our justice system ensure equal justice under law, not leaving it up to the heroic efforts of the mothers of victims.
FURTHER ACTION:
1) Share the article that began this blog post with your friends to help stir a dialogue about critiquing negative stereotypes about Black women: “The righteous, historic, beautiful, clarifying anger of a Black woman,” By Robin Givhan as take from the Washington Post.
2) Learn more about the perspectives of Black writers in Savala Nolan’s collection, Don't Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender and the Body (Simon & Schuster, July 2021). The New York Times praised the book for its “embrace of the heterogeneity of Black womanhood.” It added that the book was, “[v]ulnerable, but rarely veering into self-indulgence…it is a brutal, beautifully rendered narrative. A standout collection.” Nolan’s article, “What Society Gets Wrong About the 'Angry Black Woman' Stereotype” is available in Shape magazine.
3) Consider how you might support friends or colleagues burdened by having to navigate a world that sees them through the “angry Black woman” trope. Consider how their healing can be facilitated by our institutions. As Nolan explains, “I wish I could say there's an area of my life, or that of all the Black women I know, that remains unsullied by the ABW stereotype, but I can't. It shows up in work meetings even though I purposefully smile and measure my tone when offering feedback. It shows up in personal relationships when I try to address the emotional harm I'm experiencing. It shows up in response to my writing when I've been told my voice is too convicting or too aggrieved. …I, like many Black women, carefully monitor my expressions and body language to make sure I sound calm and reasonable, calibrating myself into a narrow register designed not to scare or offend people in power. It's exhausting. It's dehumanizing. It cuts into my sense of worth and wellbeing.”
4) Watch the new film, King Richard, with friends and discuss how Venus and Serena Williams were raised to be self-possessed yet forceful. How did Richard Williams prepare his girls for dealing with ugly, racist caricatures, like the one in an Australian newspaper which portrayed a caricature of Serena as a hulking, fat lipped, angry brute of a woman, stomping in rage alongside her competitor. Explore how Vice President Harris has had to deal with similar issues as I explain in my October 2020 Blog - On "Double Standards for Black Women.”