Black women's stereotypes
- Monique Prado
- 22 de jun. de 2021
- 4 min de leitura
As a society we need to make sense of subjective things. However, as we are fruits of the environment, the way in which we see, hear, speak and feel goes beyond the state of nature, since coexistence in society is a dynamic phenomenon that we keep building.
Human beings usually manipulate this state of nature to establish a structure of domination, hierarchy and power. Masculinity, Womanhood and Race, for example, create archetypes that throughout whitecentric history were built to preserve the image of this power structure, even though this alienation produces the oppression of other groups.
One of the dimensions of this oppression is the idea that black women are naturally strong, which generates a lack of affection and care for these women who are stereotyped at different levels, prevented from reaching their full subjectivity.
Grada Kilomba reports in his book “Memories of Plantation” “the myth of the strong black woman” that has been used by whiteness to reaffirm stereotypes, imprisoning these women in a representation that obstructs the manifestation of deep wounds opened by racism.
For the author, this stereotype of "super woman" denies recognition of the true experiences of black femininity, so that everyday racism stifles pain and emotions, triggering psychological damage. These women are not taught the keys to ask for help, whether psychological or practical, and many of these women go through their suffering in silence.
According to the study “Depression symptoms and hypothyroidism in a population-based study of middle-aged Brazilian women”, symptoms of depression were seen more in black women (52.8%) than white women (42.3%).
Another stereotype is that of the “angry black woman”, a fanciful figure that reiterates the violence provoked by racism because it symbolically muffles the voices of these women causing silencing, as explained by Grada Kilomba when addressing the iron mask used in the colonial period that was placed in the mouth of these women.
They do not allow them to feel anger, fear, weakness and express their desires, without being fitted into these two extremes: superhuman or subhuman. This duality sometimes allocates the black woman's body to work, sometimes to pleasure with superficial ideas that move between the “hand laborer” and the “domestic” or the “hot woman”.
At the International Symposium on Sex Education that took place in 2015, the pedagogue Kleiton Linhares explained that these are racist representations that are in the social imagination, but that camouflage the historical construction of the bodies of these black women who were abused in all dimensions at the slavery time. Likewise, nowadays these stereotypes are reconfigured to produce social control of these bodies, as if the black woman were always at the someone's service or whiteness could “domesticate”, “exotify” and “objectify” them.
The misrepresentation of black women's bodies nullifies the fact that they are the ones responsible for experiencing the world any way they want. Even the construction of gender does not tolerate black women's weakness. As philosopher Sueli Carneiro would say “When we talk about the myth of female fragility, which historically justified the paternalistic protection of men over women, which women are we talking about? We black women are part of a contingent of women, probably the majority, who never recognized this myth in themselves, because we were never treated as fragile.”
Consequently, the affective for black women is compromised, as they are not even seen as producers of meaning. Unfortunately, it is common for these black women to access only crumbs of affection or none at all. These affective gaps make many black women renounce love, as their affective background is marked by negligence, abandonment and rejection, being pushed into forced celibacy.
To end the logic of affective drops for black women it is essential to shake the social structure, since the Eurocentric fairy tale is not interested for them. Unlike, we saw that these hegemonic narratives create subordination of these bodies even with a backdrop of violence and deep conflicts.
If these women are the opposite narrative of the social order, maybe we need to take more advantage of the bell hooks lessons in their essay “Living to love” and focus on our inner growth aiming to distance ourselves from the toxic parameters of love invented by the whiteness that will never reach the black bodies when we talk about affection and unconditional love, especially because structural racism is capable of causing the death of our population in every way.
Black women are 53.6% of victims of maternal mortality, 65.9% of victims of obstetric violence and 68.8% of women killed by aggression. In 2013, there was a drop of 9.8% in the total number of femicide among white women, while that for black women increased by 54.2%, according to the Instituto Patrícia Galvão carried out in 2016.
Nurturing love among black people is to elevate it to the status of “resistance and political act”, since black love strains patriarchy, capitalism and racism, as these structures make black bodies sick. “It's important for us who are going through a process of decolonization, to see how other black people respond when they feel our affection and love”, argues hooks.
As Élida Aquino would say, we don't need to be strong all the time and we don't need take in your sholders our struggles to the point that they suffocate us, kill us or take us of ourselves. Also, Nina Simone taught us "you've got to learn to leave the table when love's no longer being served".
Comentários