Lauren R. Chunn

Call to Re-confiscate the Black Female Image

The perception of the Black woman as hypersexual has been relentlessly projected by mainstream white media images and continues to have direct implications for African-American women’s political disenfranchisement, permissive sexual violence against their bodies, as well as an indirect mandate of economic dependence on either credit or federal welfare systems. The reclamation of Black female sexuality, as something that is self-defined and not media imposed, will be the first measure in ensuring that African-American women free themselves from the confines of the sexual deviance ascribed to them by oppositional social forces.

Although the disenfranchisement of Black women is constitutionally forbidden, the political manipulation of blacks and voting infringement still occurs. “Racial consensus has political effects in that the African-American voting behavior demonstrates a commitment to racial solidarity,” (Hill-Collins 47); this indicates that Blacks typically tend to vote in accordance with race as opposed to an individual interest. Due to this, the attempted severance of Black independent thought can take the form of manipulating identity politics, for instance a candidate for Governor who chooses an African-American Lieutenant Governor solely in an effort to sway the black vote to that political ticket. More disturbingly, African-American women are characterized as the most likely to be politically inactive, (Stephenson 157). This is a direct a result of the media images Black women see of themselves. These hyper-sexualized images often construct the perception that Black women have of their social role in America. Though there are black women in politics, unless one has a vested interest in affairs of the state or frequents C-Span, these are not the popular images of women that the many blacks see. Thus the vast majority of black female images stem from commonly assessable music videos with women who would most likely be found on a stripper’s pole than at the voting polls. The black women in these videos are ones that are effecting how young women view themselves. The media is continually constructing the self-image of Black women, a self-image that neglects political activism and encourages sexual promiscuity.

This implicit sexual promiscuity promoted by the media has profound social implications, as well. The degradation of the black female image has been a direct result of the innate human need to have an exclusionary group. The exclusion of a group was

necessary attribute to America’s progression because “racial difference [was] used to justify the

growing belief in the superiority of white civilization and the inferiority of so-called primitive

peoples necessary for colonialism,” (Hill-Collins 28). The classification system of binary

categories enables society to define its members in relation to each other and not as individuals.

The binary system does not have a place for ambiguity, so all things must be absolute. This

system makes oppositional divisions necessary for classification, meaning that if White women

occupy the pure, pristine, and virginal beauty, than Black women must represent something

tainted, ugly, and hypersexual. This system allows for the social isolation of the black female,

which is why her rape is permissible to white men, and why, despite her womanhood, Black

women’s rights were of no consequence to the white feminists fighting for liberation in the

1960’s. Her classification as “other” permits sexual violence, and that violence manifests in more

ways than physical rape. The explicit advertising campaigns that deduce the Black female body

into just breast and buttocks constitute sexual violence also.