Black Women and the Western Media Landscape
History of Media & The Enslaved Women
The United States is a nation-state whose media innovations created and disseminated distinct tropes that became the dominant representations in Western media. Unfortunately for Black women, US-led advancements in print, broadcast (radio/TV), film, and music videos were utilized to misrepresent them on a global scale. In our media-reliant world, we owe the discussion of Black women in media more than buzzwords like ‘Representation Matters.’ We must unpack the media’s role in Black women’s treatment in society.
While Europeans established racist representations of Black people before the establishment of colonies, In the US, the media played a critical role in defining and justifying the social order maintaining chattel slavery. Media apparatuses intentionally reinforced multiple caricatures to paint Black women as the bearers of ‘incurable immorality’[i] deserving of enslavement, Jim Crow laws, and abuse. Professor Dorothy Roberts writes, “American culture is replete with derogatory icons of black women – Jezebel, Mammy, Tragic Mulatto, and Jemima, Sapphire, Matriarch, and Welfare Queen.”[i]
The 1830s-1840s was a period of social change and industrialization. Slave revolts and abolition gained momentum while print media was nationalized. In this context, minstrel shows emerged, ushering in a culture of traveling musicals featuring caricatured, derogatory depictions of Black people performed by performers in Blackface. Blackface portrayals helped tropes like Uncle Tom enter the Western media lexicon. While all Black people were portrayed offensively, Black women’s misrepresentations had a gendered intersection. They were deemed subhuman, like Black men, but hypersexual and virtueless, in contrast to white women, and therefore worthy of sexual violence.
The United States needed a Jezebel caricature to sustain its enslaved population. When importing enslaved Africans was outlawed in 1808, increased value was placed on enslaved women as reproducers — they were expected to produce as many laboring bodies as possible. The Jezebel trope helped slave owners enact sexual terrorism on the enslaved without guilt. If Black women were portrayed as exoticized, hypersexual creatures who manipulated men into devious sexual behaviors — then enslaved women couldn’t be victims.
A Jezebel was needed to produce enslaved people, but the Mammy was needed to sustain Black women’s domestic labor after abolition. The Mammy trope portrayed Black women as the ideal house servants the nation needed during Reconstruction. A Mammy was an asexual, maternal ideal of Black women.[i] She devoutly raised her master’s children without regard for her own offspring or resentment about her subjugation. Her large stature (broad shoulder, large chest) was positioned in opposition to Western beauty standards because her purpose was to serve white families, not become part of them. She alleviated the burdens of childcare and housework from the lady of the house while never becoming a romantic competition for her.
Black Women On Screen
While Jezebel and Mammy tropes were represented in print media and literature, the development of broadcast media and film propagated misrepresentations that African Americans identified as intentional obstacles to their equal citizenship. Silent films like Birth of Nation (1915) carefully constructed imagery glorifying the Ku Klux Klan as heroes saving the Antebellum South from the ‘savagery’ of freed Blacks. These films were validated in mainstream media and even screened at the White House.
Within this emerging media, the Mammy became white audiences, and showrunners preferred depictions of Black women. Early generations of Black actresses had to navigate this media landscape. Actress Hattie McDaniels, famous for her Academy Award-winning role as ‘Mammy’ in Gone with the Wind (1939), faced a career engulfed by the Mammy. Her community criticized her for taking these demoralizing roles, yet she could not obtain non-stereotypical roles. Furthermore, McDaniels understood Mammy reflected many Black women’s experiences at the time. McDaniels’ struggles to escape Mammy are experiences Black Actresses like Viola Davis still reference today, “but there’s a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn’t ready to [tell the whole truth],” The Help, like so many other movies, was “created in the filter and the cesspool of systemic racism.”
Even when Black actresses finally get opportunities to portray Black motherhood, tropes emerge to discredit their mothering. Since the radio series Amos n’ Andy (1951), Black mothers were characterized as disgruntled, social climbing matriarchs—a Sapphire. In an era when most white women had not entered the workforce, Black women were not only laborers but often breadwinners. The Sapphire trope portrayed these contributions as domineering, self-serving, and emasculating. To the audience, a Sapphire destroyed the Black family’s social order and, therefore, was responsible for hardships in Black communities.
Life Imitates Art
Today, the misrepresentation of Black women in media continues to impact Black women’s social treatment. From childhood to motherhood, being dehumanized on-screen impacts how the world sees you. Misrepresentations help adultify Black girls within society. The Jezebel trope denies Black girls the accommodations and protection usually awarded to children in society. Psychological studies found Black women are treated in alignment with Jezebel stereotypes. Black women are objectified and implicitly dehumanized more than white women. Sociology research shows that black girls are perceived as needing less protection, support, nurturing, and comfort from adults. At the same time, they are perceived as knowing more about sex, adult topics, and being independent. Black girls feel the impacts of these perceptions in all levels of carceral public systems (school, child welfare, juvenile justice).
Black women face the impact of these tropes in the workplace as well. Studies show that people are hypersensitive to facial expressions from Black women, inaccurately assuming anger consistent with Sapphire tropes, also known as the Angry Black Woman. This bias impacts the assessments, evaluations, and promotions of Black women. Even in situations where Black women are not deemed angry, they may be asked to provide unpaid nurturing labor or support tasks inappropriate for their jobs in alignment with a Mammy archetype.
How Black Women Navigate Western Media
In many ways, today’s media landscape looks very different than the early 20th century. However, many of the conventions of how mainstream media interacts with Black storytelling still rely on tropes and bias. Black writers are now a part of the conversation but are still asked to cater to white audiences. Black writers describe the landscape as ’negotiated authenticity’ or Blackness deemed acceptable by white showrunners, studio executives, and viewers.
Responding to an industry that has harmed them and still requires their narratives to pass through gatekeepers. Black women showrunners, writers, and directors have helped establish an infrastructure to tell Black narratives authentically. Multifaceted creatives like Issa Rae have utilized social media and online community building to directly engage their storytelling with Black audiences. With her community’s digital endorsements and organizing (i.e., Black Twitter), she leveraged agency in mainstream media. She created HOORAE Media, a production company responsible for projects like Insecure, Black Lady Sketch Show, Rap Sh!t, and more.
Writer-directors like Quinta Brunson and Lena Waithe have similarly maneuvered online support and personal platforms to maneuver agency on traditional broadcast media and streaming platforms, which are rarely awarded to Black creatives. Their agency stands on the shoulders of preceding generations of actors, writers, and show-runners who navigated this landscape, making incremental progress throughout the 20th century. Black female writer-directors and show-runners like Mara Brock Akil, Shonda Rhymes, and Debbie Reynolds paved the way for the nuanced storytelling possible today.
Even with the increased representations we witness today, the agency of select Black women creatives is an outlier. The media landscape requires consistent perseverance from Black creators to transform a structurally biased industry. A 2017 study showed 90% of Hollywood show-runners and 86.3% of writers were white. Media is still very much controlled by white men, even though we know the presence of writers of color ensures more informed portrayals of racialized experiences and helps combat misrepresentations that directly impact Black women.
Conclusion
Ultimately, Black women’s introduction into the lexicon of Western media was malicious. It was not intended to mirror life. It wanted to distort it. The implications of these choices created lasting social conditions and barriers for Black women today. Despite that legacy, Black women have repurposed media as an instrument to exercise agency and transform the narrative of their community.
Like our work? Want to Support? Donate.
__________
[i] Roberts, D. (2000). Killing the black body. Vintage Books.
About the Author
Kathleen Anaza
Kathleen ‘Kat’ Anaza is a multi-genre storyteller, organizer, and entrepreneur whose works center on narratives and experiences of the Black Diaspora. She has been featured in Vogue Magazine, Lonely Planet, Viator, and more. Connect with her work at https://linktr.ee/Kat_Anaza.
View profile