Last week an Oklahoma City police officer was found guilty of sexually assaulting 13 Black women while he was on the job. The officer was finally brought to tears when the jury recommended 263 years in prison. Outside the courtroom, supporters of the women, as the New York Times put it, “updated an evocative phrase by emphasizing ‘Black women matter’.” Nevertheless, the all-White jury – yes, ALL, in a county that is 20% Black – acquitted the officer on 18 counts due to the questioning of the credibility of some of this rapist’s victims.
This case reflects a deep, racist history from the colonial era to the U.S. founding. For example, Thomas Jefferson made clear the value of slave women as wealth. In regards to how he valued his Black female slaves, he wrote, “I consider the labor of a breeding woman as no object” – that is, what her work or labor produced was not all that important. Then Jefferson goes on to state what he did find important: “that a child raised every 2 years of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man.” A prominent author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson clearly saw how economically valuable slaves and their offspring were to White property expansion.
Black women during the colonial era through much of the 20th century were cast by White dominant narratives as promiscuous and inviting rape, when in fact it is the legacy of White male slave owners who raped Black women with impunity. And, of course, such violations of Black women would never have had a day in court, especially with a White jury – which in the Oklahoma City case is a noteworthy shift in an all-White jury convicting a White police officer of any crime against people of color at all, let alone against Black women.
Into the 20th century we find President Woodrow Wilson praising the Ku Klux Klan, a historical lesson that became publicly debated last month in protests at Princeton University where Wilson had served as president. Wilson was enthusiastic about his old college buddy Thomas Dixon having his 1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan made into the 1915 silent film The Birth of a Nation. Basically the book and movie as works of fiction presented freed male slaves as criminals who preyed on White women. This narrative contrasts with the actual historical actions of White males, especially those associated with the planter class, who raped and impregnated Black women and murdered Black males as if it had never happened.
Quoted in The Birth of a Nation is President Wilson who rationalized that KKK “began to attempt by intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by the ballot or by any ordered course of public action.” Projected in this film was the president’s quote that “white men were roused by the mere instinct of self-preservation…until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.” Wilson arranged for The Birth of a Nation to be the first film shown in the White House. In that film the KKK marches proudly past the White House.
At the height of the mid-1960s “War on Poverty,” Daniel Moynihan, as a U.S. Labor Department employee – and eventual Harvard professor, member of Congress, and U.S. ambassador – penned The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. According to Moynihan, the problem of poverty for millions of African Americans was not White racism that led to discrimination in housing and jobs – but Black women! Using a disease metaphor, Moynihan contended that a cultural feature, a “family pathology,” was a primary cause of intergenerational poverty. The identified source of the continuing culture of poverty was the Black female as head of household because “a matriarchal structure…seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male.”
The trope of the Black female parent as a cause of social problems would later become prominent in President Reagan’s 1980s racializing discourse of mythic welfare queens. By our current decade this skewed narrative would expand into a “cultural commonsense created by rightwing race-baiting: lazy nonwhites abuse welfare, while hardworking whites pay for it,” according to Ian Haney López in his brilliant book Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class.
Meanwhile, the incarceration rate of Black women has been rising significantly during the past 20 years. Women are currently incarcerated at a rate of 1 out of every 56 women, but for Black women chances of incarceration are 1 in 19 in their lifetime, a ratio nearly 3 times that of white women. Added to all of this, incarceration is where women experience higher rates of sexual violence than men.
Law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw and her colleagues note that historically “Black female narratives were rendered partial, unrecognizable, something apart from the standard claims of race discrimination or gender discrimination” – a critically important point in calling continued attention to “Black Women Matter.”