Visual imagery reduced all black women to icons of deviant sexuality

Evidence

Artistic imagery added compelling realism to such presumptions. Portraits in art galleries, pictures in books, photographs, and drawings constituted not a mirror of human heterogeneity, but an icon that generalized upon all black people. Their effect was to ascribe pathological uniformity onto black women as a group, such that every black woman regardless of her income, occupation, or education became the embodiment of deviance. The black woman came to symbolize, according to Sander Gilman, an “icon for black sexuality in general.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 874

Categorization

• XREF: Provides the representational pressure that Black Baptist women’s politics of respectability was a response to — key context for the book’s central concept. — connects to: European depictions marked Black women as sexual objects unworthy of love — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 365; Slave sexual exploitation affirmed Black women’s humanity while reducing it to sexuality — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 345; Negative images of black women persisted into the 20th century — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 197 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• European depictions marked Black women as sexual objects unworthy of love #corroborates (0.92) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 365
• Negative images of black women persisted into the 20th century #expands (0.80) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 197
• Black identity is reduced to a catalog of stereotyping colonial caricatures #expands (0.80)
• Slave sexual exploitation affirmed Black women’s humanity while reducing it to sexuality #qualifies (0.78) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 345
• Negative stereotypes block Black women from developing positive self-concepts #expands (0.78) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 246
• African Muslims were sexualized and demonized through ape imagery #exemplifies (0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 590
• The fantasy of Negro sexuality exceeds any actual sexual experience with them #complicates (0.74)