The irony of achievement for Black women: notes on Black women and the culture of disrespect

Today, demeaning, degrading and objectifying Black women are undeniably profitable American pastimes. From the cross-dressing male "mammy" a la Eddie Murphy's turn in the $50 million Hollywood vehicle Norbit to Don Imus' "nappy-headed hos" to Rush Limbaugh's reference to the accuser in the Duke lacrosse rape case as a "ho" to the "we don't love them hos" ethos of much of commercial hip-hop, a culture of disrespect, with Black women on the receiving end, packaged as entertainment, permeates popular culture.

There are iPod commercials that allude to strip-club culture, featuring an abundantly rumped Black woman holding onto a pole on a public bus. And then there is the Quentin Tarantino ode to alpha females in the second film of the double-feature Grindhouse, where the lone Black female character is the only one to utter ad nauseam an expletive that describes a female dog, entertainers--from crude, curmudgeonly radio shock jocks to grill-wearing, pimped-out rap artists--believing they are entitled to a free pass because they are "merely performing their craft."

Although most Americans associate this culture of disrespect with hip-hop, ironically the roots of such characterizations can be traced to our nation's beginnings. In 1781, a mere five years after penning the Declaration of Independence, founding father Thomas Jefferson turned to writing about his beloved home state of Virginia. In between pages on flora and fauna in "Notes on the State of Virginia," Jefferson delivered a prophecy about race-based slavery in the United States.

"It was a great political and moral evil," Jefferson wrote of slavery and that he "tremble[d] for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever ... Deeprooted prejudices entertained by whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained ... will divide us into parties ... end[ing] in the extermination of the one or the other races."

Of Blacks in general, he said, "Whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, [they] are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind."

And of Black women, he suggested that they were more "ardent" and preferred "uniformly" by the male "Oranootan" over females of "his own species." That there were no orangutans to be found in Virginia to substantiate such an observation was of little consequence to Thomas Jefferson.

A deeply complicated and conflicted man, Jefferson, as is widely acknowledged, had a prolonged, intimate relationship with the young slave girl Sally Hemmings. With "Notes on the State of Virginia," our nation's third president sealed an odious racial-sexual contract within our national fabric regarding Black women.

And Jefferson's paradox has had an enduring legacy in the United States. Against this unequivocal founding doctrine, Black women have been continuously struggling, both in the courts of law and public opinion, in our very own communities, and mostly recently on America's airwaves.

From slave narratives like Harriet Jambs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to post-emancipation writings such as Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South, Black women have been steadfast in decrying attacks on their character and morality. When the president of the Missouri Press Association wrote an open letter addressed to an Englishwoman attempting to cast aspersions on the credibility of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, he made plain that Black women "had no sense of virtue" and "character." In response, the Black women's club movement organized in July 1895 to defend their name.

Despite our strides in every area of American life--nearly 2 million college-educated Black women out-earning our White and Latina counterparts; one in four of us occupying managerial or professional positions--the profits to be had at our expense are far greater than the costs of caricaturing our personhood.

Our own complicity in our objectification demands scrutiny as well. It may very well sadly be that while in the past we vociferously rejected being called the "B-word," we now gleefully and publicly greet, dismiss, and dis' one another with the expletive. Consumer culture seduces us into selling ourselves short in the marketplace of ideas and desire. The range of our successes and the diversity of our lives and career paths have been congealed in the mainstream media into video vixens, thanks to Karrine Steffans' best-selling Confessions alva Video Vixen, or shake dancers given the frenzy surrounding the Duke rape case and hip-hop culture's collaboration with the adult entertainment industry.

That sexism and misogyny appear to be working overtime in America to box us into these very narrow depictions of Black womanhood are part and parcel of the Jeffersonian contract. Hip-hop culture is certainly waist deep in the muck of this gender chauvinism. BLACK male feelings of displacement in a perceived topsy-turvy, female-dominated world, increased competition from women and girls in every facet of American life contribute to Black-male-on-Black-female-gender drive-bys. And Black women's seeming resiliency, despite America's continuing race and gender biases, our strengths are flung back at us and condensed into cliches such as "emasculating superwomen," or better still--that "b****."