Historically, and even up to today, many black women are treated unfairly due to bias and stereotype.
1. Black women are at or near the bottom of every statistical totem pole (Health, Money and Earnings, Wealth).
2. Damaging archetypes for black women are: mammy (gone with the wind), sapphire (Angry black woman), jezebel (highly sexualized) and the matriarch (women-headed households) We've overcome with Ms. Maggie Lena Walker, first African American bank owned by a female in 1903, Mellody Hobson - President of Ariel Investments, Michelle Obama, Oprah, Ava DuVernay and more.
3. HEALTH Historically, black slaves were experimented on extensively by Dr. James Sims, known as the father of modern gynecology. He performed painful surgeries with no anaesthesia on 17 and 18 year old slaves. He also performed experiments on slave children, using a shoemaker's tool to pry their bones apart and loosen their skulls. He felt blacks were less intelligent than white people. A 2016 Univ. of Virginia study found that a substantial number of white laypeople and medical students and residents hold false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites and demonstrates that these beliefs predict racial bias in pain perception and treatment recommendation accuracy. It also provides the first evidence that racial bias in pain perception is associated with racial bias in pain treatment recommendations. Taken together, this work provides evidence that false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites continue to shape the way we perceive and treat black people—they are associated with racial disparities in pain assessment and treatment recommendations. Today, black women rate the highest in heart disease, stroke, diabetes, breast cancer, cervical cancer, uterine fibroids, infant mortality and more.
4. SUFFRAGE: The role of black women in the suffragist movement was overlooked, and not recorded in history books. We're approaching the 100-year anniversary in August - and black women are looking for inclusivity. A hundred years ago, the white suffragists posited that the disenfranchisement of black women was a race problem, not a gender problem, and was beyond their writ. When the ticker tape parade occured, black women in the south were being systematically kept from voting. One account mentions that a woman was given a blank piece of paper and was told to answer the questions before she got her voting card.
5. WEALTH: Black women earn 61 cents to the dollar compared to white men. White women, 79%. Oder single black college women with a college degree, average $11,000 in wealth, compared to $384,000 in wealth for white men. Lower wages lead to credit card dependencies and high trade lines, and higher DTIs and higher interest rates when houses are purchased. It also takes longer for a black female to build wealth through homeownership because, property values do not appreciate in black neighborhoods as they do in white neighborhoods.
6. BLACK HAIR: What if it were against the law to wear your hair in a ponytail? Black women are discriminated in the workplace for their natural hair. Now states are passing laws to allow natural hairstyles to be worn, of which California was the first. Currently, it is legal to discriminate against a person in the workplace or in schools because of their natural or protective hairstyle in all states except for California, New York, and New Jersey. Hair discrimination remains a source of racial injustice with serious economic consequences for Black people.
