African American Gender Inequality

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Discrimination can be based on race, gender, or any number of other factors, but often times discrimination is based on both race and gender, and examining the two separately is difficult. Race and gender are “intersectional and mutually constitutive” as well as “interacting and inseparable” (Ferber [2007] 2016: 393). When African Americans face discrimination it is not only about their race, but about their gender as well. Stereotypes African Americans face are usually specific to their gender as well as their race, but both male and female African Americans experience the same structural inequality. Though the representation and stereotypes of male and female African Americans varies widely between the genders, both promote the structural …show more content…
Cottom demonstrates this representation by describing her experiences with the countless white men and women who have approached her with sexual propositions, assuming ownership over her body because she is a black woman (Cottom [2013] 2016: 390). She goes on to describe the use of black, female bodies as sexual objects in popular culture, citing Miley Cyrus’s “appropriation of black dance” and exploitation of black dancers during a show where Cyrus used “the desirability of black female bodies as a wink-wink joke” (Cottom [2013] 2016: 390-391). The promiscuous black woman stereotype is used to make black women “unrapable” and used to “justify scores of rapes” (Ferber [2007] 2016: …show more content…
During slavery, the rape of black women by white men was “commonplace” (Wriggins [1983] 2016: 428). And in more recent history and today, the myth of the black women’s promiscuity has been “used to excuse white men’s sexual abuse of Black women” (Wriggins [1983] 2016: 429). The legal system has proven that often times it believes “Black women [cannot] be the victims of statutory rape” due to their stereotypes (Wriggins [1983] 2016: 429). In addition, “judges generally impose harsher sentences for rape when the victim is white than when the victim in Black” (Wriggins [1983] 2016: 429- 430). The issue of rape and race also negatively affects black men, but in a different way. Historically, accusations against black men for raping a white women resulted in lynching, and today “charges of rape committed by Black men against white women are still surrounded by sensationalism and public pressure for prosecution” (Wriggins [1983] 2016: 427). “From slavery to the present day, the legal system has treated the rape of white women by black men with more harshness than any other kind of rape” (Wriggins [1983] 2016:
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