Labor statistics showed non-White women earned the lowest wages of any group

Evidence

Beal provided Black feminists with one of their main ideological manifestoes, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” a 1969 position paper that circulated further the next year when it appeared in Toni Cade Bambara’s one-of-a-kind anthology, The Black Woman. “Since the advent of black power, Black men are maintaining that they have been castrated by society but that black women somehow escaped this persecution,” Beal pointed out. Actually, “the black woman in America can justly be described as a ‘slave of a slave’”—a victim of the double jeopardy of racial and gender discrimination. Beal cited labor statistics showing that non-White females accrued lower wages than White females, Black men, and White men—statistics that undermined the Frazier-Moynihan thesis that Black men were the most oppressed, a sensational thesis that had mobilized activists to defend the Black man. Beal’s thesis of Black women having it the worst was no less effective in mobilizing activists to defend the Black woman. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1027

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth verifying the actual wage statistics Beal cited and whether the double-jeopardy prioritization framework opened the later intersectionality debate.
• DEFINE: Introduces ‘double jeopardy’ as a specific analytical term for stacked racial and gender discrimination.