The Angry Black woman: A Myth

The Angry Black woman: A Myth
So I was just over running through the posts on the various boards and came across a post that read as follows:
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I have been watching many of the reality shows and have realized many of the black women on the shows have anger issues. Now is this a truth or is this just the way they are portrayed? Please, I do not want this post to have any racial connotations at all. I truly want to understand and am asking out of compassion for all woman and our issues no matter what color.
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My first thought was that you don't ask a question about "Black" women, excluding all others and then qualify that by saying that you don't want it to have racial connotations, it absolutely does. However, the question remains and casting agents are looking for it...does the 'angry black woman' exist?

My first response is you damn right she does. As does they angry lesbian of any race, the angry white woman, the angry Jewish woman, the angry Italian woman and shall we not forget the Fiesty Hispanic woman. She exists because women are multi-faceted and entitled to their feelings, whether it be anger or joy or anything in between.

Is every Black woman more angry than any other woman? No, I don't think so. Do we, as Black women have cultural differences that people from other ethnicities mistake for constant anger? Without a doubt.

A few years ago there was a series of books called "Why Black men tend to shout". The premise was that cultural differences make Black men seem stereotypically more angry than any other, but in reality each person is quite individual and while speaking louder, being aware of racism and therefore sensitive to it and having it more identifiable to those that experience it more often is something that makes others believe that Blacks are just angry.

Are Gay people more sensitive to hearing slights that others perceive as just being inquisitive? If someone approaches a Lesbian or Gay man and says something like "Which one of you is the woman", it's something that has been discussed in their community. Joked about and sometimes the focus of anger at ignorance, and for this reason it doesn't come across as an honest question. It comes across as something that an ignorant, less tolerant person might say. It happens when people assume that Native Americans and the Irish are all drunks. That isn't a fact. Certainly not every Indian or Irishperson drinks at all. But people fall prey to stereotypes.

Black women, in my opinion, are the same as every other woman. We all have had our crosses to bear. We have shared most of those facing the oppression of ourselves and our sisters. The difference with Black women is that we have had to fight other stereotypes, prejudices and all out falsehoods more often for much longer than some of our peers in this country.

I believe the stereotype of the Angry Black woman came as a result of slavery. We don't commonly read about African women having a notorious anger streak. It's only in this country and others that have our same history that we find this belief. It begs the question: Where did it come from and who benefits from it?

When we ask that question, we have to go back to the origins of our country. We have to go back to a time when the wife of a plantation owner risked sharing her husband with a slave. She risked the value of her children being equated with the children of slaves and her husband. Distance had to be placed....and stereotypes ensued.

Back then, the African American woman was considered to be evil. No other word for it. A slave woman that practiced her own religion or exhibited any form of self preservation or risked her life to save her family would be labeled to keep her 'in her place' in respect to other women. Thus, a woman that went ballistic as her children were being ripped from her arms and sold to another family or whomever was the angry Black woman. Her emotions were not considered to be normal because by definition ( legal definition in this country and others) she was not even human. So how could whatever she was doing be considered normal?

Had White women of the time faced the same fears of having their families torn apart, we would have seen that women, regardless of ethinicity respond the same way when attacked or in fear of the safety of their young. I am certain that they would have been kicking and screaming to keep their family together. Then it could have been 'normal' and not just a behavior limited to Black women, the slave woman.

If we try to imagine how a woman might feel in the days and weeks after her child ( ren) were sold on an auction block out of her arms, we can imagine that she was resentful. We can assume this because we know that that African American women are the same as any other woman and that they are, indeed, human. Perhaps she was cruel to the mistress of the home, thinking that another mother would understand her pain and try to have prevented it. Perhaps she acted out in various ways to express her anger, holding back just enough to stay alive.

Now, fast forward 120 years. Aren't her children still at risk? There is a well known saying in the Black community that when a young man turns 18, he has two choices in life; jail or the military. While the opportunity has leveled out, the means to get that opportunity have not found complete and absolute equality among races.

We know that minorities are still the majority residents of impoverished neighborhoods. We know that the schools in these areas are sub par, for the most part with less access to technology, outdated materials and yes, even prejudice in the schools.

Now, there are hundreds of thousands of teachers that work in these schools because they want to see all children have opportunity and they truly want to see all of them succeed, but we cannot forget that prejudice exists everywhere and in all. For that reason, we also have to consider that some teachers and other figures of authority do not want all people to be considered equal. Even those that do would shake at the prospect of their son or daughter coming home with a mate of another race. It wasn't that long ago that these matings were illegal in this country, only 3 years before my birth.

There are also still natural predators. Oh, I know some might scoff at the mere mention of racism in the police force, but statistics are against them. National polls show that racial profiling is not on the decline. Young Blacks get a record number of non-moving violations compared to their white peers. What this means is that they are being stopped by the police until a crime is discovered, not because one has occured.

For this reason, every Black mother I have ever met has to give her children an additional set of rules, this on top of what every mother teaches their child. These rules are how to behave when stopped by a police officer to avoid being mistaken for someone else or killed. This is when a Black mother must teach her child to work hard, as every mother does, but the disclaimer is that she tells her children they must work twice as hard, for twice as long to get half as far, as this is still the society they live in. She makes sure they know that they will live under a microscope. The things they do wrong will be attached to their entire race.

This is exemplified by looking at the worst of the worst in our society, murderers. When Jeffrey Dahmer was convicted of cannibalism, murder, kidnapping, sodomy, rape and a host of other crimes, never was he linked to ALL White men. Never did people shy away from ALL white men because of this one man's actions. On the flip side, when a Black person commits a crime, it is seen as a reflection on the ENTIRE population of Blacks.

When someone crosses the street when they see a Black teenager approaching, they aren't doing so because they fear THAT individual, but because they fear the stereotype linked to that entire group of people.

Another comparison can be seen in the Mother killers, which have been overwhelming White. Susan Smith and Andrea Yates were never seen a a reflection of all White mothers. They were seen as anomalies, crazies that were a departure from the norm. On a smaller scale, one looks at Omarosa from Survivor and Coral from Real World and they are free to link their behavior to all Black women and label them the "Angry Black Woman.

While Black women do on a large scale carry what I consider to be a heavy load with the responsibility for their children and themselves, White women carry the same load. The only difference is the fear from prejudice. Any woman with any shred of tact and decency does not go off on a stranger for no reason. There is no study to say that any one ethnic group of women does this more than another. With reality tv, we have to understand that this is for entertainment and is exploitive to all women to label them this way.

Omarosa was not cast just because she was qualified for the show, but also because she was a Black woman and also because she had a propensity towards exhibited confrontation. Many of these reality tv shows use the Myers Briggs test and other psychological evaluation to cast their shows. In doing this, it is easy to find polar opposites and place them together in circumstances that are bound to erupt. It is purposeful and it is targeted and it is something that all of us should say NO! to.

When we see a tv show that depicts a stereotypical Gay man exhibiting all of the negative and false behaviors linked to them through ignorance, we have to ask ourselves if that is truly that person or if the Executive Producer is trying to spark up their ratings. We have to ask ourselves if we would respond the same way in that circumstance. We have to ask ourselves if we are being manipulated into believing false stereotypes and sometimes, we have to turn off the television and stop supporting the exploitation of our fellow man/woman.


Just another long thought from Dyna....