Karen Daniel

May 1, 2004

African American Women as a Double Minority

            Women of all races have a long history of discrimination and suppression from all aspects of society.  Even in the United States, they were denied the right to vote, and to this day, there has never been a female president.  They face the glass ceiling at work, and financial discrimination when attempting to obtain credit.  Women today seldom give much thought to what it would be like to be “owned” by your husband, or your father, until their country becomes involved in the political and social issues of a country like Iraq, at which time the issues come to light in a very personal way.  When the issue of discrimination against women is brought to the forefront, by things like war and social struggles, they realize how different their lives are than the lives of many women around the world, and in general are thankful that they do not face the same problems living in the United States.  As a group, American women are stronger for the struggles of the women who have gone before them.  However, what is the status of African American women?  They have not only had to face the struggle for equality as females, but for equality as a race and of a people.  On top of overcoming discrimination against women, they have had to overcome slavery and racism.  When you factor in race, African American women become a double minority, deeply enmeshed in a dual struggle for equality with both men and Caucasians.

African American authors have been addressing the issues of discrimination faced by all females since they began writing.  Some of the issues they write about cross all race boundaries.  Women, as a group, face issues such as rape, and being owned and controlled by the men in their lives.  In Maya Angelou’s, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya faces rape by her mother’s boyfriend (64-66).  She stops speaking, and feels like the rape is her fault.  In doing so, she not only loses her choice, but her voice as well, as addressed in Objective 1b. 

In Donald Goines’, Black Girl Lost, the main character, Sandra, is also sexually abused.  As a child, she is abused by her mother’s “friends”, and other men, then as a teenager, she is raped by two men.  She also has no choice or voice in the matter as one of her attackers “…jammed his hand over her mouth, then removed a dirty hankie from his pocket and stuck it down her throat” (77). 

In The Color Purple, Celie faces what is perhaps an even more traumatic situation as she is raped repeatedly by her father, after her mother’s death, and is then “given” to a much older man (Walker).  When she is raped, she is told that she has no choice, and is “gonna do what your mammy wouldn’t”, and then, when she cries out in pain, is told, “You better shut up and git used to it” (Walker 1).  Celie has children as the result of her rapes, and the trauma of childbirth causes her to lose the ability to carry children.  When she is later given away in marriage, against her will, her father makes societies position on the worth of women clear as he tells Mr._____, “She ugly.  He say.  But she ain’t no stranger to hard work.  And she clean.  And God done fixed her.  You can do everything just like you want to and she ain’t gonna make you feed it or clothe it” (8).  Celie certainly has no choice in the decisions made on her behalf, and it is apparent that her father feels he is God, as he is the one who “fixed” her. 

These books address issues of rape, incest, and involuntary marriage, and these are just a few of the many issues common to women worldwide.  However, on top of having the minority status of being a female, the characters in these books are also African American females, with issues and problems singular to their race.  Although all of these books were written, and set, in a period long after slavery had ended, the characters are still living in a world where their lives are affected by the problems of their ancestors, and their bondage. 

All three of these books are set in different parts of the United States, yet one of the things the characters have in common is a lack of family education.  Although both Goines and Angelou’s characters are attending school, and their educations are important to them, they have little to back them up.  They come from uneducated backgrounds, and in fact Sandra’s mother is so drunk and strung out that she does not care if Sandra attends school or not.  In Caged Bird, Maya has a lot of family support for her education, but little support from society.  While her grandmother and uncle, who are raising her, are not educated themselves, they recognize the importance of her receiving a high school diploma.  She is forced to study and get good grades, and is pushed to succeed more than most of her classmates.  However, even when she fights to do well in school, she is hindered by the attitudes of white America.  During a graduation ceremony at her school, a white politician is sent to speak on behalf of the graduating class.  As he speaks, he crushes the dreams of the children, talking about their athletic abilities, as opposed to the intellectual abilities of the White children at a neighboring school.  All of the athletic opportunities are for the boys, and all of the academic hopes are for the dominant culture’s children (149-152).  That leaves Maya, and countless other African American female children, with little hope for the future.  The girls’ double minority status was painfully apparent to all who were there.  Walker’s Celie does not get a chance at an education at all, and her only hope in life is to marry and take care of her husband’s children from a previous marriage.  Growing up in a poor farming community, reminiscent of the African American sharecropping communities of the post-slavery era, she will never get out.  Girls do not pursue an education in a society like that, and the men hold all of the power.  Between their female status, with it’s painfully low expectations and opportunities, and their African American status, with the history and lack of educational opportunities that come along with it, the characters in these books, and many others in similar situations, are not only suffering in the present from their double minority status, but it is effecting their futures as well.

Another issue the characters in these three books have in common is poverty.  In Black Girl Lost, Sandra is a child of the ghetto, and while not an economic situation exclusive to African Americans, they have a much higher chance of living a life of extreme poverty than the average citizen has.  The characters in the books I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Black Girl Lost, are also being raised primarily by their mothers and grandmothers.  If African Americans are one of the most common cultures of poverty, single-mother households are another.  To be African American, single, and female, is a triple handicap in our culture.  Households headed by African American women are almost doomed from the start, adding further to the double minority status of both the mothers and their children. 

For many years, women have been fighting for the same rights and respect that men possess.  According to the website Origins and Nature of Women’s Oppression:

Women, it was said, were physically and mentally inferior to men and therefore were ‘naturally’ or biologically the second sex.  While the subjugation of women has always had different consequences for women of distinct classes, all women, regardless of class were and are oppressed as part of the female sex.

It has been a long battle for women of all races.  They have had to fight for the right to vote, the right to choose a spouse, the right to own property, and the right to hold office.  African American women have had double the battle.  Not only have they been considered, along with all women, second-class citizens, unable to care for themselves, but have had to overcome the attitude that African Americans are animals, less than human. 

Regardless of their common bond of womanhood, White women’s experiences, and African American women’s experiences were worlds apart.  Carby notes that in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:

Jacobs recognized that plantation mistresses were subject to forms of patriarchal abuse and exploitation, but because they gave birth to the heirs of property they were also awarded a degree of patriarchal protection (54).

Even though all women shared in the common bond of abuse, by the males of society, White women were protected, while African American women were treated as chattel, to be bought, bred, and sold.  According to Smith, Jacobs tries to show these inequalities in her writings, compelling the reader to understand that her double minority status put almost insurmountable restrictions on her life, her movements, and her choices (212).  In addition, Foster expands this to say that; “Jacob’s text reinforces the images of slavery as fundamentally dehumanizing and oppressive and of slave women as particularly vulnerable to its depravities” (95).  During the time of slavery, African American women’s status as a double minority was especially rampant, as Jacob’s so obviously portrays in her narratives.  While all of the recorded slave narratives hold an important place in American minority literature, Jacob’s is perhaps the most compelling, as she illustrates the struggles that African American women faced when owned by White men.

            Discrimination against varying groups of people has a long and painful history in the United States.  Over the period of the country’s development, the groups discriminated against have changed periodically, but the prejudice seems to hang on and fester.  Probably the most discriminated against groups of citizens have been women and African Americans.  Women are still fighting discrimination, and as stated in Views of the Congressional Minority Favoring Women’s Suffrage, “The history of woman is, for the most part, a history of wrong and outrage.  Created the equal companion of man, she early became his slave, and still is in most parts of the world.”  Even in the United States, where women are portrayed as having the freedoms to choose for themselves, and to live their own lives, they still face prejudice, both subtle and overt.  They do not make the same amount of money as men, they are abused by their husbands and boyfriends on a disturbingly regular basis, and they are still often looked at as the weaker sex, both physically and intellectually.  This is especially true of African American women, as they face the double prejudices associated with womanhood and their racial heritage.  They are more often in abusive relationships, are historically the most economically disadvantaged group of citizens, and they face, on a daily basis, the prejudices of a society that can’t seem to let go of it’s racial prejudice against it’s African American citizens.  Their status as a double minority seems to merge into every aspect of their lives, and the literature created by African American women attempts to portray this in a poignant and emotionally wrenching way.  As you read their stories of rape, imprisonment, and abuse, you cannot help but feel compassion for their plight, and to feel grateful for the fact that it is not you.  You gain a new respect for them as a group, and the pride with which they refer to themselves as African American women. 

References

Angelou, Maya.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  New York, Random House, 1969.

Carby, Hazel.  Reconstructing Womanhood; The Emergence of the Afro- American Woman Novelist.  New York, Oxford Press, 1987.

Foster, Frances Smith.  Written By Herself; Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892.  Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993.

Goines, Donald.  Black Girl Lost.  Los Angeles, Holloway House Publishing Company, 1973.

Origin & Nature of Women’s Oppression.  1979.

http://www.geocities.com/youth4sa/fi-women.html

Smith, Valerie.  “Loopholes of Retreat.”  Reading Black, Reading Feminist. Comp.  and ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  New York, Penguin, 1990.

Views of the Congressional Minority Favoring Women’s Suffrage (1886). House Report No. 2289, 2004.  http://www2.worldbook.com/features/whm/html/whm029a.html.

Walker, Alice.  The Color Purple.  Orlando, Harcourt Harbrace, 1982.