Black Women in White America
By: Ashlee Miller
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Black women have always been stereotyped in the media and in the real world, as well as being treated differently from black men. Black women are one of the most oppressed groups, especially in America, because we are the combination of two things that society hates: women and black people.
One group at the top of the hating on black women bandwagon is our own men. For ages black men have favored white women over black women because it gave them an out, and black women are left in the dust wondering what they did wrong. A video went viral a couple of years back of a group of black men throwing a black woman into a dumpster as a joke and ironically they were all wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts. They were also saying “ugly bit*h damn you ugly” . Many found that ironic, because they were so quick to defend themselves and the fact that there needs to be change but they are also a part of the problem.
To really explain the female African American experience we have to go back to when slavery was still a thing in America. During slavery, black women were treated as breeders, satisfiers of white men's lusts, and workers. They were property. Sexual exploitation shaped their lives during and after the period of slavery. Black women were conditioned and brainwashed into being submissive and just tolerating the abuse that they endured. Black women endured unnecessary abusive relationships due to the limited numbers of eligible black males, and the past negative experiences of their ancestors. And even then still African- American women remained a stabilizing force for their families, their communities, and society. No matter how much abuse we get we still have to be on the strong side and never actually feel vulnerable because that just is not how we were “made” to be.
100,000 black women go missing every year but their cases never make the big headlines like they do when a white woman goes missing, and it is the same thing for indigenous women. In 2020, of the 268,884 girls and women who were reported missing, 90,333, or nearly 34% of them, were Black, according to the National Crime Information Center. Meanwhile, Black girls and women account for only about 15% of the U.S. female population, according to census data. In contrast, white girls and women — which includes those who identify as Hispanic — made up 59% of the missing, while accounting for 75% of the overall female population. The media call this “missing white girl syndrome” and it got popular because of the Gabby Petito Case that made national news. I believe this is unfair because young black women would just vanish without a trace and law enforcement would not do anything about it, when they should be putting as much effort as they put in the Gabby Petito case into the countless black and indigenous women when they go missing. I am not saying what happened to Gabby Petito is right and she didn't deserve to be found, we just want to get the same treatment that white people get on a daily basis.
Black women have been the backbone and the punching bag for this society for nearly 400 years and they always just took what they threw at them because they had to. If black women were not so strong no one would ever take them seriously and they would always just be another angry ghetto black women, but we always rise above because there is no one stronger than a black woman.
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