For Black working-class Southern girls, intelligence meant a forced teaching career

Evidence

In the apartheid South, black girls from working-class backgrounds had three career choices. We could marry. We could work as maids. We could become school teachers. And since, according to the sexist thinking of the time, men did not really desire “smart” women, it was assumed that signs of intelligence sealed one’s fate. From grade school on, I was destined to become a teacher. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 9

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the theme of constrained Black intellectual labor in the Jim Crow South as in Michelle Alexander or W.E.B. Du Bois’s discussion of the talented tenth’s vocational limits. — connects to: Career options available to black working-class Southern girls were marriage, maid work, or teaching — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 9