Summary Of Discrimination Against Black Women

American Civil Rights activist Malcolm X once said “The most disrespected woman in America, is the black woman. The most un-protected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America, is the black woman.”(1). While focusing on critical issues relative to his geographical scope, Malcolm X’S quote is not only limited to the United States, but ripples universally. In Kimberle Crenshaw’s Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, she argues how Black women are constantly disadvantaged because of the lack of intersectionality through two perspectives—the first being the erasure of their struggles through the practice of a single-axis framework, and the second being the practice of marginalization within feminist theory and anti-racist activism. Using Crenshaw’s arguments, in this essay I will
Black women are often seen in roles which conflict with the expectation of women, thus creating burdened assumptions which question the femininity or womanliness of their being. A notable distortion associated with black women is the sapphire caricature which portrays black women as “rude, loud, malicious, stubborn, and overbearing.”(1) Also known as ‘This Angry Black Woman ‘stereotype, these traits contradict the common ‘acceptable’ behaviours of a woman which include being passive and submissive. Crenshaw mentions this phenomenon by further explaining the repercussions exclusive to only black women. She states that because black women are put in a unique position similar to the centre of a Venn-diagram, this makes them susceptible to the backlash of both groups, but also notably includes bias’s of black women affirming that “their assumption of these roles is sometimes interpreted within the Black community as either Black women’s failure to live up to such