Racist bodily and spatial stereotypes made black women accountable for the race’s fate

Evidence

While issues of purity, order, and cleanliness figured prominently in the discourse of respectability, such issues called attention to perceptions of an inextricable connection between the physical bodies of black women and black-inhabited physical space. Racist representations of black women as unclean, disease-carrying, and promiscuous conjoined with representations of black households as dirty, pathological, and disorderly. In response, the discourse of respectability tended to hold black women primarily accountable for the rise or fall of the black family, and by extension for the rise or fall of the entire race. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 921

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Post-emancipation white women worked harder to enforce racial superiority through degrading stereotypes — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 189; Black women experienced race through gender and gender through race simultaneously — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 559; Black women experienced sexist oppression distinct from racism — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 47 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Respectability discourse loaded black women with responsibility for the whole race #expands (0.92)
• Devaluation of black women was a deliberate method of social control #expands (0.82) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 191
• Black mothers’ self-sacrifice was recast as negative stereotype #exemplifies (0.82)
• Black women experienced sexist oppression distinct from racism #complicates (0.80) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 47
• Self-hatred among Black women was blamed for Black men preferring White women #exemplifies (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1016
• Racialized interactions carry histories and stereotypes that shape their meaning #qualifies (0.78)
• Analogizing racism and sexism erases the specific experience of women of color #qualifies (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1472
• Treating race as a form of ethnicity enables blaming the victim. #qualifies (0.74) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 702