White reformist women recycled Black-oversexed stereotypes even while opposing discrimination.

Evidence

Boas composed a preface for another popular book in 1911, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York, by NAACP co-founder and scholar Mary White Ovington. While pointing out some racial discrimination, she put a new statistical spin on the old racist stereotype of the oversexed, irresponsible Black woman. The higher the ratio of Black women to men, she said, made these “surplus women” prone to prostitution and prone to playing “havoc with their neighbors’ sons, even with their neighbors’ husbands.” Along the same lines, social-work forerunner Jane Addams alleged, in The Crisis, that Black mothers were less able than Italian mothers to control their girls’ sexual behavior. Ida B. Wells-Barnett could not let these attacks from White women go by unchecked. Black women, she wrote, had the “same love for husbands and children, the same ambitions for well-ordered families that white women have.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 796

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete case study for the reader’s testing of Kendi’s scheme: Ovington and Addams are otherwise-progressive reformers whose ‘statistical’ and maternalist arguments slide into assimilationist racism. Contrasts with Wells-Barnett’s refusal. — connects to: White women who did their own antiracist homework formed equal bonds with blacks — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 202; Post-emancipation white women worked harder to enforce racial superiority through degrading stereotypes — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 189
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘The Racism of the Well-Meaning’ — how even antiracist-adjacent white reformers like Ovington and Addams reproduced the oversexed-Black-woman stereotype.