The Racism-Misogyny Double-Whammy

Wouldn't surprise me if the class-act popularity of Michelle Obama got Ginni Thomas's goat. Got to keep those ni**er mammy washerwomen in their place.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell in The Nation:

Ginni Thomas's insistence that Hill apologize is an apt metaphor for the long history of blaming black women for social ills. After the Civil War black women were considered a potential public menace. Social reformers claimed that black women's sexual immorality was the cause of urban disruptions during the 1920s Great Migration. In the 1960s liberal policy-makers worried that black women were matriarchs who undermined family stability. And in the 1980s Ronald Reagan painted black women as welfare queens robbing the public coffers. In our current economic downturn, the explicit and implicit public denigration of African-American women is in vogue across the political spectrum and is supported from within black communities as much as it is imposed from the outside. Once again, black women find themselves blamed as one of the central causes of, rather than one of the primary victims of, American social and economic decline, and many are calling on black women to apologize for their own suffering.

In her new book Democracy Remixed, political scientist Cathy Cohen argues that race leaders, media voices and policy-makers eschew analysis of the structural inequalities—inadequate housing, poor nutrition, unequal schools, limited employment opportunities and racially biased policing—that cause racial inequality. Instead, they blame the sexual practices of young black women. Primed by the centuries-old assumption that black women are sexually lewd, this moral panic suggests that inequality should be addressed not by structural change but by enforcing limitations on black women's sexuality.

This impulse shows up in some surprising places. For example, it's a common theme among Democratic and Republican education reformers, who agree that children are suffering primarily because they are raised in single-parent households headed by poor women in urban areas. "Poor" and "urban" are code words for "black," and many reformers imply that black women are not spending enough hours reading to their kids; not paying enough attention to keep their kids out of trouble after school; and, most important, not providing them with financially stable fathers.

Even President Obama has argued that America's imperial hegemony is threatened by inadequate educational achievement. Beneath that anxiety is the implication that this shortcoming can be traced to failing black mothers and to their public employee counterparts—urban public school teachers, who are disproportionately women. Never mind the high cost of quality daycare, the lack of affordable housing, the challenge of balancing work and parenting, the poor prenatal care and childhood health and dental coverage—black women should be able to raise honor students through sheer force of will!

Not only that; they should apologize for having children at all. In lockstep with the implication that black women's parenting is undermining education, some African-American commentators have aggressively targeted black women with a new No Wedding, No Womb movement. Led by blogger Christelyn Karazin, people in this movement suggest that childbirth outside marriage is a primary cause of the social ills that afflict black communities. In their view, women should marry "strong" men who can provide financial security for themselves and their children. Through its title alone, No Wedding, No Womb explicitly encourages black women to barter their reproductive capacity in exchange for the trappings of patriarchy: a wedding for a womb. The movement shames black women who choose to exercise their reproductive freedom by bearing children they want even when the men in their lives and leaders in their communities disapprove. These women are made to feel they should apologize for choosing to be parents.

Read the whole thing.

And remember that in all ways, black women endure not only the double burden of racism and misogyny, but nastier forms of each than either black men or white women must endure.