Abstract
White supremacist ideology in the United States depends on creating and maintaining a nonhuman status for Black and other darker-skinned peoples. We may think of White supremacists as long gone, merely a dark part of the American past, but the fundamental belief of this ideology, that non-Whites are lesser breeds, still exerts a strong influence on how we think of ourselves and each other and the decisions we make as a society. One way to trace the continuing impact of the slaveholding White supremacist ideology is to see how its racial and sexual stereotypes affect our public-policy decisions. This ideology includes stereotypical images of Black womanhood: we are all familiar with the Mammy who loves her White master’s children as though they were her own, the Black Matriarch who rules her home and her neighborhood yet cannot keep a husband and thus cannot raise her children right, and the Welfare Queen who lives in luxury thanks to the hard work of the taxpayer. The negativity of these images, particularly those of the Black Matriarch and the Welfare Queen, allows us to assume the worst about Black women (and all Black folk). We then go on to develop welfare policies based on these imaginary characters’ personal failings—policies that affect not only poor people of all colors, but all of us. In forming these policies, we rarely question the justice of the structures in which we all exist and the economic, moral, political, and social impact these structures have on our lives.
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Notes
See Dorie J. Gilbert and Ednita M. Wright, eds., African American Women Living with AIDS: Critical Responses for the New Millennium (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003)
Quinn M. Gentry, Black Women’s Risk for HIV: Rough Living (New York: Haworth, 2007)
Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Re-production, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998)
Elizabeth A. Howell, Paul Hebert, Samprit Chatterjee, Lawrence C. Kleinman, and Mark R. Chassin, “Black/White Differences in Very Low Birth Weight Neonatal Mortality Rates Among New York City Hospitals,” Pediatrics (2008) 121(3) 407–415
Jennifer C. Nash, Black Women and Rape: A Review of the Literature (Waltham, MA: Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, Brandeis University, 2009), http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/slavery/slav-us/slav-us-articles/Nash2009-6-12.pdf (accessed August 3, 2009)
Elizabeth Kennedy, Victim Race and Rape (Waltham, MA: Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, Brandeis University, 2003), http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/slavery/slav-us/slav-us-articles/slav-us-art-kennedy-full.pdf (accessed June 20, 2009).
Robin Good, “The Blues: Breaking the Psychological Chains of Controlling Images,” in Dismantling White Privilege: Pedagogy, Politics, and Whiteness, ed. Nelson M. Rodriquez and Leila E. Villaverde (New York: Peter Lang, 2000) 112.
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990) 73f.
Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1982) 201f, notes: The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the ante-bellum era, and to embellish it with nostalgia in the post-bellum period. In the primary records from before the Civil War, hard evidence for her existence simply does not appear.
Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage, 1976) 443.
Patricia A. Turner, Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies: Black Images and Their Influence on Culture (New York: Anchor, 1994) 44. Turner writes, “At no time during the pre-Civil War era did more than 25 percent of the white Southern population own slaves … most slave owners possessed ten or fewer slaves, the majority of whom—men and women—were consigned to field labor. Like the field hands, those black bondswomen who worked indoors were unlikely to be overweight because their foodstuffs were severely rationed. They were more likely to be light than dark because household jobs were frequently assigned to mixed-race women. They were unlikely to be old because nineteenth-century black women just did not live very long; fewer than 10 percent of black women lived beyond their fiftieth birthday.”
Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965).
Moynihan misappropriated E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States. The 1948 abridged edition of Frazier’s work, which is the most widely available, paints a much more complex and rich description of the Black family and the roles of Black men and women in it. Moynihan did not include this material. It is important to note that the 1939 unabridged edition of Frazier’s work contains more material than the 1948 edition. In short, Moynihan did a highly selective and suspect reading of Black life.
E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro American Family (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1908).
See Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault: on Afro-American Women (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991) 58.
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “They Have Careers! Women, Class, and Families in the Sociology of E. Franklin Frazier [or “Re-Reading” Frazier’s Sociology of Women Through the Black Bourgeoisie]” (unpublished manuscript) 7. See also Frazier, The Negro in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1949).
Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class (New York: Free, 1957) 221; Gilkes, “They Have Careers!” 7.
Moynihan, Negro Family; Patricia Bell Scott, “Debunking Sapphire: Toward a NonRacist and Non-Sexist Social Science,” in All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women’ Studies, eds. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist, 1982) 87.
Walter Mears, “‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” New York Times, February 15, 1976.
Cheryl Thurber, “The Development of the Mammy Image and Mythology,” in Southern Women: Histories and Identities, ed. Virginia Bernhard, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Theda Purdue (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992) 88.
See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960) 724. Ethicist Joan Martin notes that Calvin’s rigid social class structure became problematic for the later development of a notion of the work ethic because the contemporary social order is more complex and fluid than Calvin could have imagined. Joan M. Martin, More Than Chains and Toil: A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000) 124.
Joan M. Martin, More Than Chains and Toil: A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000) 124.
In an interesting twist, in a speech he made at Columbia University in September 2000, billionaire Warren Buffett pointed out the inequities of wealth: “I hear friends talk about the debilitating effects of food stamps and the self-perpetuating nature of welfare and how terrible that is. These same people are leaving tons of money to their kids, whose main achievement in life had been to emerge from the right womb. And when they emerge from the womb, instead of a welfare officer, they have a trust fund officer. Instead of food stamps, they get dividends and interest.” Beth J. Harpaz, “Billionaire Buffett Takes a Swipe at Rich Kids Living Off Trust Funds,” Associated Press, September 27, 2000.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958).
Katie Geneva Cannon, “Remembering What We Never Knew,” The Journal of Women and Religion 16 (1998) 167–177.
Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000) 67–72.
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© 2010 Bernadette J. Brooten
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Townes, E.M. (2010). From Mammy to Welfare Queen: Images of Black Women in Public-Policy Formation. In: Brooten, B.J. (eds) Beyond Slavery. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113893_4
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