Call Me by My Right Name: the Politics of African American Women and Girls Negotiating Citizenship and Identity

MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School

CERTIFICATE FOR APPROVING THE DISSERTATION We hereby approve the Dissertation of Monique Gabrielle Cherry-McDaniel Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

------Director Dr. Denise Taliaferro Baszile

------Reader Dr. Lisa Weems

------Reader Dr. Sally Lloyd

------Graduate School Representative Dr. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis

ABSTRACT

CALL ME BY MY RIGHT NAME: THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN AND GIRLS NEGOTIATING CITIZENSHIP AND IDENTITY

by Monique Gabrielle Cherry-McDaniel

African American women and girls have struggled to define themselves independent of a public curriculum, supported by education, politics, social commentary and community, that continues to define us in relationship to work, sex and motherhood. This study will select current manifestations of controlling images, and, in the tradition of Critical Race Feminism, historicize and speak back to the ideologies that support such derogatory images of African American womanhood. This study will provide a discussion of the multiple discourses of citizenship and public curriculum, and then connect them to the histories and heritages which have constructed differentiated citizenship in America, and has created the public curriculum which legitimates it. This study will serve as the foundation for the larger work of creating a curriculum for African American women and girls to use to support our efforts to strategize and act in ways to garner fuller forms of citizenship and identity within an American socio-historical context.

CALL ME BY MY RIGHT NAME: THE POLITICS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN AND GIRLS NEGOTIATING CITIZENSHIP AND IDENTITY

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Educational Leadership

Monique Gabrielle Cherry-McDaniel Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2012

Dissertation Director: Dr. Denise Taliaferro-Baszile

TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication:………………………………………………………………………..iv Acknowledgements:………………………………………………………………v Preface:……………………………………………………………………………vi Chapter One: The State of African American Women in America:………………1 Chapter Two: The Influence of Public Curriculum and Citizenship: …………….14 Chapter Three: Methodology and Method:………………………………………..37 Chapter Four: Text Analysis:……………………………………………………….48 Chapter Five: Discussion: ………………………………………………………….84 References:………………………………………………………………………….94

iii

Dedication I would like to dedicate the completion of this project to my mother, Lurlene Annette Moore, and to the women and girls in my life, who have shown me the unwavering courage it takes to live with dignity in spite of ….

I would also like to dedicate the completion of this project to the best husband in the world! I thank you Marcus, for allowing me the time and space to realize this accomplishment. I thank you for the slack you picked up, and for motivating me, even in my stubbornness, to keep writing, and keep moving. I cannot wait to live the rest of our lives. We have so much more work to do and so much more life to experience. I’m ready if you are!

Acknowledgements I am so thankful that I have a God that favors me and saw fit to pour into me the gifts and the talents that I will need to do His will in this life. I am thankful that when I did not know any better and when I wondered how I wound up here, he sent awesome people, events, and inspiration to remind me that He foreknew me, and His promises and plans for my life are far better than I could ever imagine. I am thankful for my birth parents, may they rest in peace. I thank Lurlene Annette Moore, my mother, for providing a shining example of what real compassion and empathy looks like. I am thankful for the times that you took me to work with you, and for the times you demanded that I learn how to love people at their best and their worst. I know that you are proud of me, and I am proud of you. I thank Michael Glenn Cherry, my father, for showing me that I have a right to question the world, and to endeavor to make it better. I am thankful for the times that you held my hand and listened to me, and I am thankful that you showed me that there are things we cannot compromise if we are to be the best people we can be. I am thankful for my sisters, who have been in my corner all of my life, and who have given so much of themselves so that I can reach my dreams. Tiffany, I thank you for being a mother figure and for instilling in me a love for reading and culture. Melitta, I thank you for expanding my worldview, even if it was on the Colonial Gardens bus to the Village. You showed me that I could accomplish more than what I saw in front of me. Elisa, I thank you for being a firecracker, and I thank you for the luxury of your humor and your ride or die support since we were little girls. I am thankful for my mother-in-law, Toni Campbell. I am thankful for the way you encouraged me, motivated me, prayed for me, and really mothered me through this process and in my maturing into who I am now. I am thankful for my pastors, Pastor Glendon and Tina Jones, for the example of leadership, love, and humility you have been to Marcus and me this past two years. You have, through words and action, encouraged me so much. I am thankful for my advisor and mentor, Dr. Denise Taliaferro-Baszile. You are so many things to so many people already, but you have really been a wonderful advisor. You have been all at once patient and motivating. I appreciate all of the professional

advice you have given me, and for the fact that you did not forget my humanness and my need to be present in life beyond this process. I am thankful for my mentor, Dr. Lisa Weems. You really pushed me to a new level of confidence in my work and my thoughts. I am thankful that you trusted me with the projects we’ve worked on together. I am thankful for my entire dissertation committee, Dr. Taliaferro Baszile, Dr. Lisa Weems, Dr. Sally Lloyd, and Dr. Gwendolyn Etter-Lewis for the time, effort and expertise each of you lent to the completion of this project. Each of you has been a consummate example of the type of professional I hope to be to those who will seek the same mentorship, encouragement, and guidance that I sought from you. I thank my Church of Judah family, The Cherry family the Moore family, the McDaniel family, the Corbitt family, Ms. Angel Archer-Harris, Dr. Lara Chatman, Mrs. Amy Fisher-Young, Mrs. Lauren Isaac, Dr. Ray Terrell, Ms. Gail Rose, Dr. Joanna Hill- Thornton, Ms. Alicia Rutledge, Ms. Autumn Hicks, Ms. Tyra Simmons, Ms. Marnitka Coleman, Ms. Kasia and Ms. Yesenia Gibbs, and many others for the endorsement, support, prayers, encouragement, friendship, meals, motivation and much more that you have lent to this process.

Preface How this Journey Began… There are many times in a woman’s life when she is told and/or reminded of who she is. Depending on who she is and what she is, those times can be affirming or denigrating. As I sit in a secluded study room in the library, I am thinking about the times when I have been reminded that I live in a body marked female, black and young, and the hurt and trauma that often accompanied the times when I have been reminded of my positionality. I remember when I was sixteen years old. I lived in a small town with my three sisters. Our parents were both ill, and because they could not work, we were without health insurance. Due to the stress of having two terminally ill parents, my own body was beginning to break down. I was having recurring tonsil infections, and after two rounds of antibiotics I obtained illegally from one of the oncology nurses on my mother’s hospital floor, I decided to seek medical attention at a clinic. When I walked in, alone, and approached the receptionist, she looked at me with a knowing, and silently pushed the standard forms my way. I completed them as best I could, and patiently waited for a doctor to see me. When I was finally seen, hours later, I began explaining to the doctor that my tonsils were swollen, and visibly infected. She listened to me between scribbles onto a chart. When I was finished, she, looked up and asked, with a sterile, objective and unapologetic air, “When was the last time you performed oral sex, and with how many partners?”. I was dumb-founded, and offended, but not fast enough to offer the response she deserved. There was nothing on the forms I completed that inquired about my sexual history, and neither had she or anyone else in the clinic! Why would she assume that I was sexually active, that I performed oral sex, and that I had done so with multiple partners? What about me warranted those questions? I left that appointment confused, I knew something was wrong, but, at sixteen years old, I did not have the words to name it. Today, I still find myself struggling to name what happened to me that day in the clinic, and what has happened to me countless times since then, when a doctor, teacher, neighbor, politician, store clerk, or even friend assumes who and what I am, and what my interests should be. It is complicated; I cannot adequately call it racism, sexism,

classism, or any other ism, as doing so disregards the symbolic and material implications of the intersections of race, gender, class and other markers of difference. However, while I am still working through naming this thing that continues to make many of my interactions with the public humiliating, denigrating, and strained, I am empowered to know that there are many women who are doing or who have done the same work. I have gone from completely identifying with “Nicole” in Rebecca Carroll’s Sugar in the Raw (1994) , who said, “I can’t be looked at as any worse in society than I already am – black and female is pretty high on the list of things not to be” (95), to embracing the community work of achieving the radical subjectivity that bell hooks talks about, which is also echoed in Audre Lorde’s evocation that if we do not define ourselves then we will forever be defined by others whose interests are antithetical to ours. As I begin this study, I feel that it is imperative that I acknowledge my subjectivity as the launching pad for the project. The road to defining myself for myself begins with acknowledging the physical, emotional, and psychological pain that comes with navigating through a society that is symbolically and materially hostile to my body. My subjectivity, my experiences and my knowledge, are the filters I use in order to interpret and make meaning of the data that I collect (Schram, 2003). Essentially, my subjectivity is the root of the work that I will do to contribute to a body of literature and to the activist project of African American women defining ourselves in the face of what society says about who African American women are. I am choosing to use the term African American women as opposed to black women for this study. Although the term black women can be used to describe women of the African Diaspora, and even though one of the women I am studying, Diallo, is an African immigrant, I am choosing to use African American because the term demonstrates the complicatedness of the space that female descendants of the legacy of American Chattel slavery face in this country. We experience and understand two worlds – an indealistic world in which we can access the fullest citizenship associated with being an American, and the realistic world in which our Africanness, read otherness, precludes our ability to access the former. There is a body of literature that exists concerning how African American women experience citizenship as a result of how others think and feel about us. Many scholars have written about how African American women navigate cultural space (Hill Collins,

2000, 2004; hooks, 1992; Jordan-Zachary, 2009, Lorde, 1982, 1984), legal and legislative space (Shende, 1997; Hill Collins, 2010; West, 1999), and other spaces that affect our material circumstances (West-Stevens, 2002; Carroll, 1994; Glenn Paul, 2003; Evans- Winters, 2005; Cahn, 2007; Ibura Salaam, 2002). However, continuing this work into the present, and taking the time to bridge the gap between the past understandings of African American womanhood with contemporary understandings is an area of study that still needs work. This is especially so at a time when our society is becoming increasingly digital, and information via media outlets more easily accessible than in any other time in history. Thus, the purpose of this project is to provide a genealogy of commonly used controlling images of African American women and girls, particularly the mammy, jezebel, bad black mother, and black lady, as they are reproduced in multiple areas of the public curriculum. The genealogy will be linked to social and political movements in order to trace the emergence, evolution and exploitation of these images and the effect these images have had on the treatment of African American women. Secondly, this project will analyze contemporary images of African American womanhood, particularly media images which have emerged in what many social and cultural commentators have began calling a post-racial America. In analyzing these contemporary images, I will argue that there is a reemergence of commonly used controlling images of African American womanhood, and I will detail the ways that the public curriculum concerning African American women has been influenced by it. Ultimately, I hope the knowledge produced from this project will then be used to begin to craft a curriculum that can be used to support African American women and girls in the project of education for liberation. In this case, education for liberation begins with further equipping African American women and girls with additional language to describe the images that are used to construct our public image. It ends with equipping ourselves with the additional knowledge and strategies to continue to resist these disparaging images in an increasing digital information age.

Chapter Overview Chapter one discusses the state of affairs for African American women and girls. It specifically discusses our material circumstances as it relates to violence against women, health disparities, employment disparities and discrimination in the criminal justice system. Through this chapter, I suggest that African American women and girls experience a second class citizenship as it relates to the protections and privileges of citizenship detailed in the founding documents of this country. Chapter two discusses the concepts of public curriculum and citizenship. Through this chapter, I argue that the public curriculum is rooted in histories and heritages of early America, and I suggest that the public curriculum of raced and class gender informs the types of citizenships that citizens take up in their interactions with institutions and with each other. Chapter three discusses the theoretical framework for the study. In this chapter I detail the tenets of Critical Race Feminism as it relates to this study. I also reiterate Hall’s and Siapera’s work as it relates to media’s influence on the public curriculum, and connect their work to my use of network analysis. Finally, I provide a rationale for the study as well as for my choice in texts/events. Chapter four is an analysis of the three chosen texts, the pro-life billboard, the Diallo case, and the viral video Swipe Yo’ EBT. In this chapter, I argue that each of these texts are modern-day examples of controlling images of African American womanhood. I detail the historical roots of the controlling images being rearticulated through these images/events, and I detail the material circumstances that are negated or justified as a result of these images. Finally, in chapter five, I detail sound suggestions for the work African American women and girls must do to achieve a radical subjectivity. I specifically suggest that African American women and girls work intentionally and systematically to heal from the trauma of a hostile public curriculum of African American womanhood, that African American women and girls work to create a counter-curriculum for the purpose of class consciousness, and that African American women work to provide effective mentorship for African American girls.

Chapter One Problem At this particular moment in history, African American women and girls are an especially targeted group. In America and abroad, African American women and girls, through a combination of race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and physical location, are victims of increased sexual, physical, and psychological violence (Ibura Salaam, 2002). We are also victims of government sanctioned surveillance and regulation (Shende, 1997), increased and sometimes detrimental disciplining and silencing (Morris, 2007), and an image crippling exploitation and oversexualization in hip-hop and popular media (Hill-Collins, 2004; Sharpley-Whiting, 2007). This seemingly relentless dehumanization and diminished access to citizenship has histories and roots in colonization, American chattel slavery and the understandings of what it means to be a citizen. This is particularly true in America, and certainly across lines of race and gender. The material results are astounding. African American women are adversely affected by sexual violence (Hill Collins, 2004; West, 1999; Ibura-Salaam, 2002; Powers, 2008; Norment, 2002), domestic violence (West, 1999; Jasinski Williams, 1998; Leone, et.al, 2004), inadequate health care (Knox, 2009; Roger et. al., 2011; Wilson 2009), unfair treatment in the justice system (Sudbury, 2005; Sokolof, 2005; Covington & Bloom, 2003), economic exploitation and educational disenfranchisement at disproportionate rates compared to other sections of the American public (Cohen, 2002; England et. al, 2004).

Violence Against African American Women In America, one way to ascertain a particular group of people’s access to full citizenship is to investigate the level of protection they receive against violence to their bodies or property. When one investigates the violence that African American women have to endure, as a result of our raced, gendered, and often classed bodies, it is clear that we do not have access to the fullest understanding of citizenship, especially as it is outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment, or even in the basic understanding of what it

means to live in a policed society. Rape statistics and domestic violence statistics for African American women are the most telling. Forty percent of African American women report having had coercive contact of a sexual nature by the age of eighteen (Norment, 2002; Powers, 2008). 18.8 percent of all African American women report being raped in their lifetime, which is compared to 17.7 percent of white women (RAINN, 2009). However, according to the United States Bureau of Justice (Hart & Renninson, 2003), for every one rape reported by an African American woman, fifteen go unreported. These dire stats have much to do with the fact that African American women are seen as unrapeable beings, with sexual desires and proclivities that put us at deserved risk for sexual assault (Young, 2002, Brown, 1996). Moreover, the reason that prevention and prosecution against sexual assault of African American women has not been as robust as it has for white women is the belief that African American women are so exposed to violence within our communities that sexual violence is not considered especially problematic, and that African American women are strong enough to deal with the trauma of sexual assault alone (West, 1999). Domestic violence shares similar statistics. Domestic violence, also referred to as intimate partner violence, is a major issue for all women in our nation. In fact, it is often referred to as an unreported epidemic. One third of all female murder victims in the United States were killed by a boyfriend or husband, and one third of these victims are African American (Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American Community, 2008). African American women suffer deadly violence from family members at much higher rates than other groups of women, and are two times more likely to experience severe domestic violence than white women (Benson et. al., 2004; Renninson & Welchans, 2000). Researchers conclude that some of the reasons why African American women are at greater risk for domestic violence are unemployment or underemployment, poor schools, and the high density of liquor stores in African American communities (Miles-Doan, 1998; Jasinski & Williams, 1998, IDVAAC). African American women are more likely to remain in domestically violent relationships for similar reasons. Victims report not having the economic freedom to leave abusive partners, having distrust of a racially discriminatory criminal justice system in prosecuting attackers, and a general lack of support, through shelters, and other emergency services (Tiefenthaler

et.al., 2005; Litton Fox et.al., 2002; Few, 2005; Leone et.al., 2004;). Moreover, African American women are perceived as less feminine than our white counterparts, and are often thought to be able to care for ourselves in the face of extremely violent attacks (West, 1999). Health Disparities for African American Women In addition to African American women fighting against life threatening assaults, we are also fighting for adequate healthcare. According to multiple studies, African American women are affected disproportionately by heart disease, HIV and AIDS, breast cancer, and ovarian cancer. While African American women have fewer incidents of ovarian cancer than white women, we are more likely to die within the first five years of diagnosis (McGuire et.al, 2002; Terplan et.al., 2009). Little research has been done to understand the increased risk African American women have with ovarian cancer, and African American women are underrepresented in clinical trials for ovarian cancer treatments (Terplan et.al., 2009). Moreover, a recent study found that African American women and women who are covered under Medicaid are less likely to receive the necessary surgical procedures to treat ovarian cancer than white women and women who are covered under private insurance (National Cancer Institute, 2007). The statistics for breast cancer are no better. African American women develop breast cancer much younger than any other groups of women, and are more likely than any other group of women to die from it (Hirschman et.al, 2007). We are over sixty percent more likely than white women to die (Frisby, 2006). Research has shown that the tumors African American women develop are more aggressive and, because they are hormone negative, they do not respond to current treatment options (Wilson, 2009). One of the main issues that African American women face is the fact that screening recommendations, and thus insurance coverage trends, reflect the breast cancer trends in white women. The national standard is for women to begin screening for breast cancer at age fifty (Knox, 2009; Aubrey, 2009). African American women need to begin screening earlier, as we are disproportionately affected as younger ages (BreastCancer.org, 2011; American Cancer Society, 2011), but, because access to screenings is curbed by insurance companies and information outlets, African American women are screened less often, and are often diagnosed in later stages.

African American women suffer more from heart disease than any other population in the nation. Over forty percent of African American women suffer from heart disease compared to just over thirty percent for white women. African American women are eighty-five percent more likely to be treated for a heart related emergency than white women and are thirty-five percent more likely to die of heart disease than white women (Women’s Heart Foundation, 2007; The National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease, 2012; American Heart Association, 2011). While heart disease is the number one killer of women in the Unites States, HIV/AIDS is especially deadly to African American women. In fact, it is the number one killer of African American women aged 25-34. More than any other disease, HIV/AIDS uncovers how susceptible African American women are to the matrix of dominaton (Dworkin, 2005). Of all new HIV/AIDS infections, twenty five percent of them are women. Two out of three of those cases are African American women (Dworkin, 2005). One of the major risk factors for being infected with the virus is poverty, and one in four African American women are living in poverty. This socio-economic status (Sikkema, 2005) limits the level and quality of education attained, our susceptibility to economic exploitation, and our lack of access to quality preventive and tertiary healthcare – all other risk factors for an early death from HIV/AIDS. Other risk factors that specifically relate to African American women are a history of sexual assault (see previous section), and previous or current sexually transmitted disease (Fullilove, 1990; Lichtenstein, 2000; Beard, 2005). Statistics show that African Americans are more likely to contract chlamydia, syphilis, and gonorrhea than any other group (Beard, 2005). Finally, because African Americans are more likely to have sexual encounters with one another, the risks are higher (Center for Disease Control, 2011). For African American women, the risks are even more problematic. Over eighty percent of the HIV/AIDS infections amongst African American women are from heterosexual sexual encounters (Okigbo et. al., 2002), with other African American men, thirty percent of whom will have gone through the penal system, and are at high risks of infection (Whitehead, 1997). Employment Disparities for African American Women Just as some health disparities are a testament to the unique position we as African American women find ourselves in, so too are employment disparities. In a 2004

study done by England, Garcia-Beaulieu, and Ross, it was found that while African American women maintained steady work through the latter part of the twentieth century, the number of African American women working has fallen below the number of white women who work. In the past, women worked primarily out of a societal disadvantage. They were not privileged enough to have a husband who made enough to care for the family. Today, working outside of the home for women is a sign of societal advantage, as women working outside of the home positively correlates with a combination of being able to afford childcare, having the education to make working lucrative, and having other working adults in the household (Cohen, 2002). Since African American women are more likely to be single parents and under-educated, it is less feasible and lucrative to work outside of the home.

The Justice System and African American Women Being underemployed or even unemployed affects African American women economically, and is also known to negatively impact our experiences with the criminal justice system. African American women are twelve percent of the American population but fifty percent of the population of incarcerated women (Bush-Baskette, 2010). According to two studies done by the Sentencing Project (1995, 2007) and to statistics provided by the Department of Justice (Harrison & Beck, 2005), African American women are four times more likely to be incarcerated than white women. In fact, between 1986 and 1991 the numbers of incarcerated African American women increased eight fold, and is said to be the result of an increase in the incarceration of both African Americans, and women (Mauer & Hueling, 1995). The new rise in the number of incarcerated African American women is due to harsh sentences for drug offenses (Sudbury, 2005; Sokoloff, 2005) and the continued deterioration of urban areas. Some researchers would also argue that it is due the epidemic of underemployment in the African American community, with African American women making over forty cents less per dollar than white men (Covington & Bloom, 2003). More researchers argue that the explosion in the population of incarcerated women is not solely due to new convictions, but due to harsher sentencing

overall, that does not take into account the nature of the roles that women play in criminal activity. For instance, women commit far fewer violent crimes, are more likely to be minimally involved in the crimes they have committed, and are less likely to re-offend than men. However, because the criminal justice system has been built with the male offender in mind, women often find themselves at a disadvantage. This is particularly so for women of color, who are more likely to be single parents, more likely to be convicted of a drug offense, and less likely to have access to treatment and rehabilitation programs to support them in efforts not to re-offend (Wright, 2008).

Conclusion It is clear that African American women experience a very different life from other groups of people in America. One could even argue that African American women experience second class citizenship compared to others in American society. What is the cause of such dire material circumstances for African American women? Could it be the result of a symbolic framework in which African American women are understood? Do African American women experience so many health disparities because our lives are thought to be less valued and more expendable than the lives of white men? Do African American women experience more violent and sexual assaults because we are not understood as feminine enough or worthy enough as to deserve respect and need protection? Do African American women have less access to adequate education or adequate employment opportunities because we are thought of as only capable of filling service positions in which we care for others at the expense of our own physical, emotional and mental well-being? Do African American women experience such unfair treatment from the criminal justice system because our dual oppressions deem us irrational as women and inherently criminal as African American? If this symbolic framework does exist, from where is it created and in what ways can it be transformed to garner for African American women a fuller form of citizenship and a more acceptable material circumstance in which to navigate our lives? I will argue that there is a symbolic framework that exists and that it does influence the ways that the larger society interacts with and acts upon African American

women. It is a kind of public curriculum, created out of age-old myths about African American women that have been so embedded in the interactions the larger society has with African American women, as to create real circumstances that seem to prove the myths to be true. These myths are neatly packaged in images of African American womanhood, which have existed in America since there was a need to create a gendered and raced hierarchy of humanity. For African American women and girls, the public curriculum has deemed us slaves in relationship to masters, whores in relationship to ladies, objects in relationship to subjects, and, in order to maintain these binaries, the images and narratives of old are recycled in present day cultural mediums. It is absolutely necessary for African American women to understand, articulate and strategize against the ways that this public curriculum, rife with multiple controlling images, is being used today in order to influence the citizenship(s) we experience. However, that work is easier said than done, and especially when there have been very few formidable efforts to deconstruct the public curriculum that so defames African American women, or create a counter-curriculum that speaks back to the disparagement present in the public curriculum. Burrell (2010) argues that “even today, we have woefully inadequate countermeasures, no permanent cultural mechanisms to undo what a 400-year marketing campaign has achieved [against the reputation of African Americans]” (xiii). This seems to suggest that African American women and our allies need to create a counter-narrative, an offense, which will do two things; deconstruct and disprove the existing public curriculum of African American womanhood, and replace it with a more complete, and dynamic narrative of African American womanhood. The work begins with attacking the current public curriculum. This attack must be launched from an understanding that “though the hypersexual images of black […] women were created centuries ago […], once images are established, they change very slowly if at all. They become part of our collective culture, the DNA of even viler images” (Burrell, 2010, pg. 52). More importantly, this attack must include public declarations of the ways in which these controlling images of African American womanhood influence the material lives that African American women and other women of color lead, and must be properly historicized to do so. The jezebel image must be connected to its influence on the institutionalized racism, classism and sexism in the

justice system and in health care. The mammy image must be connected to its influence on the raced, gendered and classed exploitation in the economy and work force. The bad black mother and the matriarch image must be connected to the justification of the unfair persecution of black and browns mothers, and the neglect and hypocrisy the larger society shows to black and brown children in the welfare system, education system, and the justice system. Lastly, this offense must be mounted with African American women’s knowledge and narratives. In order to create such an offense, there needs to be an intentional and aggressive effort to create spaces and opportunities for African American women and girls, and our allies, to study the work and lives of African American women. The first step in this endeavor would be to create a curriculum for African American women and girls, replete with past and present representations of controlling images, which are historicized, and contextualized in ways that reveal the themes, and underlying purposes of such images in maintaining hegemony. Such a curriculum would do what Gramsci suggested in his work, of creating class consciousness, a historic bloc, and, finally, a war of position, whereby the hegemonic narrative of African American womanhood can be replaced with more positive and complete narratives. This could be a start for more calculated and replicable plans for challenging and changing hegemonic narratives about gender, class, and race for other groups of people who must negotiate negatively gendered, classed, or raced identities and citizenships.

Purpose: In this study I focus on the following question: What are the regimes of representation present in the public curriculum that contribute to the ways that African American women and girls experience citizenship? The purpose of this study is to address this question by 1) providing a genealogy of commonly used controlling images of African American women and girls, particularly the mammy, jezebel, bad black mother, and welfare queen. The genealogy will be linked to social and political movements in order to trace the emergence, evolution and exploitation of these images and the effect these images have had on the treatment of African American women and 2) analyzing three examples of current media manifestations of these images which have

occurred within the last year to demonstrate how they are rearticulated in current day media outlets. The knowledge produced from this project will later be used to begin to craft a curriculum that can be used to support African American women and girls in the project of education for liberation. The curriculum will equip women and girls of color with the language and techniques to combat the effects of controlling images in an increasingly digital age.

Chapter Two What is Public Curriculum? While one may assume that, within the discipline of curriculum studies, public curriculum would be a defined and central concept, it very rarely is. In fact, public curriculum seems to be a word that scholars from various branches of educational studies mobilize to understand the ways that people interact with each other, and the knowledge they take up in doing so. Vallance (1995) defined public curriculum as “an informal, randomly accessed structure of knowledge”. Vallance defined the concept in her study of how museums organize art to influence patrons’ understandings of the world. Stone Hanley (2006), called the public curriculum “cultural knowledge” and defined it as “what passes between the society, the institutions of education, groups and individuals”. Stone Hanley was concerned with the way that public curriculum has been used to help people understand themselves in relationship to the world. Similarly, Moodley and Adam (2004), argued that the public curriculum is messages sent through government actions and initiatives and “how politics is conducted and communicated” (p.172). They used public curriculum to discuss the efficacy of citizenship education initiatives in post- apartheid South Africa. Lastly, in the Journal of Teacher Education, Cortes (1983) defined public curriculum as that “massive, ongoing, informal curriculum of family, peer groups, neighborhood, organizations, occupations, religious institutions and other socializing forces”. He did so as an attempt to make the case that educators and other cultural workers needed to pay attention to the pervasiveness of the media in what he called the “societal curriculum”. Of the four definitions, Cortes is the only scholar who specifically named media as an instrument of the structures and institutions that construct the public curriculum. In fact, he claimed that “among the most powerful, pervasive components of that societal curriculum are the mass media” and “among the most omnipresent subjects taught within this media curriculum are those themes that comprise civic education”. While I agree that media are major components of the public/societal curriculum, Cortes falls short of explaining exactly how people activate and use this curriculum in their everyday lives. He also falls short, in that he names media as an apparatus, and not an entity of the structure. It becomes important to recognize media as more than just a tool used to

construct public curriculum in today’s society, because media is so much more influential. Media is no longer used simply to justify our interactions, but media dictates our actions in ways that are sometimes indiscernible, and, therefore, often ignored. In the past, our identities, actions and relationships were echoed in our use of media, but now the media issues its own directives about who we can be, what we can do, and with whom or to whom we can do it (Kellner, 2002; McCarthy, 1998). I am not arguing that we have a passive relationship with the media; after all, we create more media, as a society, than at any other point in history. However, it is the narratives, images, and ideas, stripped of their histories, but not their power, which circumscribe our use of the media to tell “new” stories, and create “new” images and ideas. All four of the aforementioned definitions seem to allude to the quasi- intentionality of public curriculum. Public curriculum is not constructed from a set of unifying intentions or interests. Instead, it is constructed, reconstructed, mobilized, and remobilized in ways that speak to various interests and various publics, depending on various degrees of positionality and power. Cortes (1983) calls public curriculum informal, Vallance (1995) calls it randomly accessed, and Stone Hanley (2006) seems to allude to a fluid passing of information between individuals, groups and institutions. However, even in its fluidity and in its informality, there is a hierarchy of dissemination, which empowers institutions and structures in the construction of public curriculum, and empowers the masses in the use of it. Each of the four definitions also asserts that the public uses the public curriculum to make sense of themselves and their experiences. Vallance (1995)argues that the ways in which art and other cultural artifacts are organized in museums send messages to people about how they should organize and categorize experiences. Stone Hanley (2006) argues that we create curriculum (beliefs and behaviors) “to control an uncontrollable reality, and to make sense of and explain the turmoil of experience” (p.52). Moreover, Moodley and Adam (2004) argue that the public curriculum directly affects the ways that South African youth respond to their rights and responsibilities as citizens of an emerging democracy. Each of the four definitions is equally negligent in that they do not address history or circumstance in the construction of the public curriculum or in the way that it is

used. The public curriculum does not remain static from space to space or from time to time. Therefore, it is imposed upon any scholar who discusses public curriculum to avoid doing so without first discussing the historical and social context in which the public curriculum is situated. When scholars do discuss the public curriculum without a historical or social context, it creates a misconception that the public is passive in the cycle of constructing and mobilizing the public curriculum. However, it is the public’s mobilization of the public curriculum, within particular historical and social contexts, which serves to fortify and empower institutions and structures in the construction and the maintenance of it. It is only by studying the history and evolution of the public curriculum, that scholars are able to identify the ideals and interests that are inherent in the public curriculum, as well as the public(s) which are being served, empowered, and even disenfranchised by them. Likewise, when these definitions fail to acknowledge the historicized and socially constructed nature of the public curriculum, and when they fail to acknowledge the power of the public, it becomes difficult to imagine the possibilities for identity formation as a result of the public curriculum. Identity formation is not something that happens independent of a social context or public curriculum. Instead, one is constantly making and remaking one’s self amidst many messages about how people should be categorized within a historical and social moment. The identity(ies) that one takes up determines the ways in which (s)he will understand and mobilize the public curriculum. Based on this discussion of the various definitions of public curriculum available, I will define it as the ideologies (systems of abstract thought applied to public matters), and discourses (formalized ways of thinking made manifest in language) which are inherent in the interactions we have or witness between people and institutions. I believe that this simple definition covers the hierarchical relationship between institutions and individuals in the construction and mobilization of the public curriculum, because it conceptualizes power as fluid, and because it does not conceptualize identity making processes as entirely vicarious. Instead, it alludes to negotiations of power and identity, which inherently means struggle, and differentiated outcomes. I will also characterize the public curriculum as deceptively ahistorical and acontextual, because the public curriculum is rife with myths and imagery, which were

created in a historical and social context, but are stripped of such as they are re- appropriated to fit the social, political and economic interests and ideologies of the current hegemonic regime. Borrowing from Cortes’ definition, I will also describe the public curriculum as pervasive, in that it is present in every institution of the civil society. Borrowing from Stone Hanley’s definition, I would also say that the public curriculum is difficult to name and deconstruct, because it is so attached to the concept of citizenship that it would necessitate unpacking one’s own identity and working through the ways in which our efforts to “control” our experiences simultaneously and intricately implicate us in multiple forms of citizenship, some more oppressive than others.

What is Citizenship? Citizenship also has various meanings, as multiple disciplines have crafted definitions of citizenship to fit specific arguments. One of the most commonly referenced definitions of citizenship comes from the Marshallian perspective (Meekosha & Dowse, 1997) in which “citizenship is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community” and “all those who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed” (Lister, 1997, p. 29). Marshall studied the concept of citizenship and identified three aspects of citizenship that are important; civil citizenship, political citizenship, and social citizenship (Knight Abowitz & Harnish, 2006). The civil aspect is specific to a person’s right to free speech, faith, and to property. Political citizenship is specific to a person’s right and responsibility to participate in the democracy, primarily through voting and paying taxes. Social citizenship is specific to a person’s right to a modicum of economic welfare, and access to a social heritage. Many other frameworks and discourses for citizenship have been birthed out of the Marshallian framework, of which the most popular is the civic republican discourse. This discourse tempers the rights of the citizens with the obligations that the citizens must perform to prove their allegiance and love for the nation-state. Within this discourse, the ultimate goal is commonality and unity, where the citizens interpret their obligation as one of personal responsibility which is understood as activities that are non-taxing on the nation-state, and “emphasizes participation that is cooperative and supportive of the

state” and which “supports existing governmental and community institutions” (Knight Abowitz & Harnish, 2006). This framework often assumes that all citizens are created equal, and are only differentiated based on their demonstrations of allegiance to the state. Other, less known, discourses of citizenship are used to challenge the civic republican discourse. For instance, the liberal citizenship discourse defines citizenship not simply as a show of allegiance with the nation-state, but as a commitment to individual freedom, the respect of fellow citizens, and conscious social reproduction. However, it is rarely taken up, as people often opt for a definition that closely relates to the citizenships they experience, and one which can be critiqued for its ability to be operationalized. Therefore, many scholars use the civil republican discourse of citizenship to validate other traditional definitions of citizenship, to critique current forms of citizenship and to propose new ones. For instance, scholars and cultural workers have begun to interrogate citizenship, not just as a concept, but as a performance (Moodley & Adam, 2004; Keating, Benton & Kerr, 2011; Olson, 2012; Philippou, Keating & Ortloff, 2009). These scholars are asking questions about how citizenship gives membership status, how citizenship confers identity, how citizenship assumes participation, and how citizenship assumes a set of values, and a body of legal and structural knowledge. They assume that citizenship is rife with just as many forms of exclusion as inclusion, and that citizenship is just as costly as it is beneficial, especially for those who, for many reasons, are not easily able to take up the identities which are inherently legitimized in citizenship. For instance, Moodley and Adam (2004), writing from a critical citizenship discourse, and in an effort to detail the exclusionary practices of civil republican citizenship, argued that “citizenship equalizes inhabitants of a state by bestowing upon them identical rights and obligations, regardless of their other differences. At the same time, citizenship excludes ‘foreigners’ from access to such entitlements” (163). Similarly, Keating, Benton and Kerr (2011, p. 226) argued that citizenship is the practice of “voting, volunteering, and helping people” which may be easier for some citizens than others . Lastly, Olson (2012) suggests that citizenship, also described as the European “we” is a collective in which those included must assume the identities and characteristics of the “we”. She also argues that citizens are socialized to understand

citizenship as inherently exclusionary, in that anyone who lacks the resources, abilities or “heritages” to become model citizens are excluded from the collective “we”. Scholars who write from a feminist discourse of citizenship, argue that it is difficult for women to access the fullest forms of citizenship because of separation of private and public spheres of society. Frazer (1999), argues that when certain issues are considered issues specific to women, and therefore private, it “serves to make politics inaccessible to and irrelevant to women” (234). Feminist scholars also argue that it is difficult for poor people to access the fullest forms of citizenship, not because the lines between the public and private are the same for them as for women, but because their contributions to the public sphere, by way of paying taxes and contributing to the economy, are not as robust as other citizens. As a result of this unfair separation between the private and the public spheres, feminist scholars espouse an inter-relational form of citizenship, where the need to strike balance between the public and the private, and the rights and responsibilities of citizens become less necessary (Lister, 1997). This inter-relational form of citizenship is undergirded by an ethic of care, in which the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are not fixed, but instead “emerges as a dynamic concept in which process and outcome stand in dialectical relationship to each other” and “remain the object of political struggles to defend, reinterpret, and extend (p.35). There is also a queer discourse of citizenship which argues that citizenship is not simply a set of rights and responsibilities, identities, or status, but instead is a performance. Those who espouse queer discourses of citizenship understand the performance of citizenship as interpersonal interactions based on existing power differentials (Yuval-Davis, 1997; Piper & Garratt ,2004). This is particularly important to my study, as the negotiations that African American women and girls engage in, as it relates to citizenship and identity, are certainly through interpersonal interactions with agents of larger institutions and organizations. While my ideas about citizenship are confirmed in many of the definitions, concepts and discourses previously mentioned, I find it problematic to adopt one discourse, as none are complete. As Lee (2006) wrote, “discourses of citizenship as legal status, a process of identity formation, a framework of entitlements and responsibilities, and/or a mode of political participation are never neutral in their constitution or effects”

(p. 93). Citizenship, in an American context, is about rights and responsibilities. As citizens of this nation, we hinge our struggles for freedoms and equality on the rights and responsibilities outlined in legal documents that have existed since the nation’s inception. However, when we consider the history of the nation’s becoming and existence, we must admit that definitions of citizenship were created with the white, propertied male in mind. Women were not allowed to participate in political life, nor were people of color, for they were considered sub-human. Citizenship in an American context is also about identity and status, in that physical borders and ideological borders provide a framework for who we can be and what we can do. America, as Ortloff (2012) suggested of Europe, certainly involves a “we” in which citizens must espouse and operate in a national identity or suffer exclusion. However, citizenship, more than identity, status, or an articulation of rights and responsibilities, is an interpersonal negotiation and struggle in which “one is formed as a citizen of a nation through daily dialogical processes of self-making” ( Lee, 2006 p. 92). This means that we understand ourselves and interact with each other as citizens with varying degrees of access to the rights and responsibilities legally conferred to us by the state, and with varying degrees of access to colonial and historic heritages (Shachar & Hirschl, 2007). However, it means also that our interactions with each other as citizens are the frameworks by which we constantly confirm and re-confirm our identities as citizens. It is through these interactions that differentiated citizenship is created (Mitnick, 2004); one in which two citizens of the same nation can experience two different forms of citizenship even though they are said to have equal access to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship outlined in legal documents and in social contracts between the people and the nation.

The Public Curriculum’s Influence on Citizenship If citizenship is a daily process of self-making, then there must be something in place that reminds us of the frameworks and boundaries within which we constantly make and remake ourselves. I argue that the public curriculum is that thing. Public curriculum are those deceptively ahistorical, acontextual, pervasive, and difficult to name networks of ideologies and discourses, which are inherent in the interactions we have or

witness between people and institutions. The public curriculum helps us to understand the historical and colonial heritages we have access to. It also helps us to understand the rights, responsibilities and identities that are sanctioned within those historical and colonial heritages, and, consequently, helps us to understand ourselves in relationship to other citizens, and form the boundaries (legal, spatial, and ideological) that form our interactions with each other. For instance, even though women are now able to vote and more fully participate in public life than before, there still exists a public curriculum that portrays women as less capable than their male counterparts of adequately participating in public life. As a result, this inaccurate, ahistorical and acontextual public curriculum relegates women to a historical and colonial heritage that continues to make it difficult for women to access full political power.

Public Curriculum’s Role in Understanding Historical and Cultural Heritages As citizens within a nation, our identities are dictated by various intersections of difference, such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion, and sexual orientation. Those intersections of differences are understood in relation to the intersections of power that were dictated in legal documents and in social contracts that have existed since the inception of the nation. From an American context, then, the intersections of power were outlined in the Articles of the Confederation, which laid the foundation for individual freedom and economic autonomy, the Declaration of Independence, which united an entire nation in that pursuit, and in the social contracts which influenced or were influenced by these documents, such as which groups of people were conceptualized as citizens, and beneficiaries of these documents. Consequently, the intersections of power only pertained to white, propertied, and arguably Christian, men. Therefore, an American citizen’s identity in relation to a white, propertied Christian man determined the extent to which (s)he was granted full participation and protection under the law. The extent of this participation and protection determined the colonial and historic heritages in which one was involved, and, consequently, determined the colonial and historic heritages in which one’s lineage will be involved. This is mainly so, because those colonial and historic heritages guaranteed rights and ownership to certain ideological and material wealth. For instance, because white women were not allowed to participate in

political and public life, they were eventually relegated to a colonial and historic heritage of diminished participation in political and public life, and found it difficult to vote, be elected to official office, and do business with men. So, the colonial and historic heritages of women in America is a two-edged sword, in that even though the material circumstances are present for certain kinds of public and political participation, the ideological circumstances that name women as inherently incapable are also present to curtail their demonstrations of full citizenship. Likewise, because African Americans were not seen as human, let alone partial citizens, the colonial and historic heritages that we have access to are ideologically and materially structured in ways that make it difficult for us to access and demonstrate the full citizenship legally sanctioned by government documents. This idea of colonial and historical heritage is essentially the root of what Black feminist and critical race feminists call intersectionality (Hill Collins, 2000,2004; Jordan Zachary, 2009; McGuire, 2011), and what determines specifically what our understanding of the matrix of domination is. Public Curriculum’s Role in Understanding Our Rights Responsibilities and Identity The public curriculum, in all of its deceptive ahistoricity and acontextuality, works to define the axis of power and the matrix of domination (Hill Collins, 2000), which determine the colonial and historic heritages that we have access to. According to Hill Collins, the matrix of domination is structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal in nature, meaning that the structural aspect organizes oppression, the disciplinary aspect manages oppression, the hegemonic aspect justifies oppression and the interpersonal aspect influences everyday experiences and interaction within the matrix of oppression (McCall & Skrtic, 2009). The public curriculum is present in all of these spaces, the structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and especially the interpersonal. It is the public curriculum that helps guardians of the structure determine how resources are distributed, how the law is interpreted, and how aid and protection are administered. It is the public curriculum that helps those same guardians create the criteria that will determine these things. It is the public curriculum that, through schooling, religion, legislation and statutes, and most definitely media, helps people to reconcile themselves to the structural and disciplinary aspects of the matrix of domination, even when their

rights, responsibilities and identities don’t align themselves with the rights, responsibilities and identities that are outlined in legal documents and social contracts; it helps them to do so even when they know that their access to rights, responsibilities and identities are greater or diminished compared to their fellow citizens. The Public Curriculum’s Influence on our Interactions The extent to which we are able to reconcile ourselves with the citizenships we experience, as a result of the structural, disciplinary and hegemonic managing of the matrix of domination sets the stage for how we interact with other citizens. Consequently, it is the public curriculum that allows us to take what we know about our rights, responsibilities and identities, no matter how advantaged and disadvantaged they might be, and use that knowledge to interact with our fellow citizens across clearly uneven axis of power. For instance, it becomes normal for the same justice system to administer punishments for the same crimes in different ways. It becomes normal for certain types of citizens to gain unequal access to aid and protection under the law. It becomes normal for resources, ideological and material wealth, to be distributed unevenly, and in such a way as to ensure that the colonial and historical heritages of those yet born can be determined. Moreover, it becomes normal for individual citizens to extend or withhold the dignities and graces inherent in rights, responsibilities and identities, from one another, so that even the occupation of space or the access to basic human necessities become a struggle. The ideologies and discourses inherent in the public curriculum do indeed come from a historical and contextualized space, one in which very few people were considered in the original definition of citizenship. However, that public curriculum has become so enmeshed in our identities and so pervasive in every aspect of our society, that there isn’t a desire, ability or need to consider the historical and contextual spaces in which our public curriculum and, consequently, definitions of citizenship were created. As a result, through our identities, and the colonial and historical heritages which have determined our rights and responsibilities, we are all in constant negotiation and struggle for an ideal form of citizenship, one in which the fantasy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is idealized while the reality of one nation with different publics and different citizens is denied. Within this struggle, the extent to which even a modicum of life, liberty and the

pursuit of happiness is ever realized, is related to one’s ability to identify symbolically or materially with the epitome of the American citizen, the white, propertied, Christian male. Across those intersections of power, citizens are able to understand the intersections of difference they personally contend with. So, for an African American woman, it becomes her reality to struggle for citizenship in a body marked as diametrically opposite from the ideal citizen. Moreover, it becomes her complicated reality to struggle with her fellow citizens who understand themselves quite differently on the spectrum of whiteness, maleness, propertied, and Christian.

Where it all Began In the early 1600’s, when European immigrants began arriving in North America, there were de facto understandings of citizenship. One’s status as a Christian and indentured servant determined the citizenships (s)he had access to. In fact, there were many Africans who traveled and survived the Triangular Trade, were christened on the voyage, and arrived in America as free citizens. Some of them enjoyed status and wealth far greater than their European counterparts. It wasn’t until 1643 that things began to change. The Church levied tithes on African women as property in 1643, and in 1662 the courts determined the freedom of a baby by the race of its mother. If the baby was born to an African mother, slavery was its destiny. After this turn of events, one’s basic right of citizenship, freedom, was determined by the color of one’s skin. These legislative moves were made during one of the earliest identity crises for the white public. There were few laws that spelled out clearly what indentured servitude was, and for how long a person could be bound. Skin color and gender made those lines between temporary bondage and perpetual servitude safer for English men and women who were not legally protected from indefinite exploitation. This was the beginning of raced and gendered citizenship struggles, with African American women in the eye of the storm, playing out the age old dilemma of women being the guardians of culture, identity and nationhood. This is the first colonial and cultural heritage for African American women. These legislative and social landmarks also began the process by which the legal, economic and social mores of the day resulted in a race-specific concept of womanhood.

Race became a “technology of power”(Brown, 1996, p. 110). Eventually, race “acquired rhetorical force as a consequence of English efforts to naturalize them by connecting them to other power relations defined as natural, like those of gender” (p. 110). Before controlling images took root in the American public curriculum, there were raced and gendered ideas about enslaved African women, which preceded. English accounts of women of West Africa as heavily burdened drudges – a staple of most English colonial literature by the second quarter of the seventeenth century – may have influenced the predominantly cosmopolitan owners of African labor to set their female slaves to work in the fields. (Brown, 1996, p.115) This lack of consideration for the femininity of African women lead to the complete “subordination of African women to the needs of English labor” and “provided the legal foundation for slavery and for future definitions of racial difference” (p.116) The social norm of exploiting the labor of enslaved African women was the advent of the mammy image, but the increased dependence on African slave labor began the process by which the Jezebel image was born. Although the additional field labor was helpful to English planters, the taxes and tithes levied on indentured and slave labor was expensive. Eventually, breaking under the pressure of the growing agricultural economy and the heavy taxes, they did away with indentured servitude, and moved to a more cost effective and stable labor force, African men and women (Brown, 1996). African women presented the bedrock upon which perpetual servitude rested, leaving them vulnerable to the reconceptualization of their sexuality from a private matter to a public (economic) matter. African women were not only seen as a labor force but as a breeding force. As a result, not only were African women robbed of the “privilege” of femininity in the labor sphere, but they were also robbed of modesty and general protection/surveillance afforded white women as it related to their sexuality. This began the stark binary created between the sexualities of European and African women. European women were conceptualized as pure, demure, innocent women in need of protection, and African women were conceptualized as dirty, impure, sexually wanton women in need of control (Davis, 1983). The Mammy and

Jezebel images eventually led to other controlling images of African American women, which were born out of the changing socio-economic times. By the end of the eighteenth century the legal and economic status of white men was thoroughly protected under the law, and so were the legal statuses of white women, African men and African women. Status was also solidified in a socio-cultural sense. Race was defined through the criterion of civilization with the cultivated White Western European male at the top and everyone else on a hierarchical scale either in a chain of being… or […] on an evolutionary scale of development from a feminized states of childhood (savagery) up to a full (European) manly adult. In other words, race was defined in terms of cultural, particularly gender, difference- carefully gradated and ranked. (Young, 2002, p. 94) “Gender had a racial face, whereby African American women, men and white women and men occupied distinct race/gender categories within an overarching social structure that proscribed their prescribed place” (Hill Collins, 2004, p. 221). After the Civil War, however, the once immovable pillar began to move. With the passing of the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the legal and political status of newly freed slaves changed. The backlash was devastating (Chunchang, 2000; Sommerville, 2004) . From the beginning of the Reconstruction Period and well into the twentieth century, gender and race specific terrorism was used to maintain the economic and social status of white men. Lynching and rape was used as a form of terrorism to ensure that white men maintained the labor of African Americans, and to ensure that they remained politically and socially submissive. African American men were portrayed as especially violent and a threat to the safety of white women. The lynching of African American men were public events, and garnered the attention of African American activists. However, the continued institutionalized rape of African American women returned to a private sphere, no longer serving an economic purpose, but instead a social and political purpose, instilling fear in the African American community. The Jezebel image remained the justification for the rape of African American women with impunity. The children born of these rapes represented the fear of the white hegemonic regime losing its social status; it also represented the reality that African American men could

not protect the women in their community. African American women were often blamed for their own sexual assaults and again our sexuality became dangerous (Hill Collins, 2004). The controlling image of the Mammy remained as well. Even though slavery was ended with the Thirteenth Amendment, the agricultural economy had not changed, and the need to secure cheap, steady labor from African American women remained. The same justification for exploiting African American women’s labor during the period of American chattel slavery was used after the end of slavery. The use of the Mammy and Jezebel image to justify terrorism and exploitation of the African American community served to restore order to white citizenship and identity in those changing social and economic times. The use of the Mammy image remained a staple of maintaining white hegemony and citizenship in America well into the latter part of the twentieth century, surviving the world wars and the Civil Rights Movement. African American women remained a strong presence in the work force, particularly in domestic positions and in service positions (Omolade, 1994). However, when African American women demanded equal access to social services benefits, and threatened the economic and social identity of the white hegemonic regime, the mammy image was no longer enough to justify the labor exploitation of African American women, while white women enjoyed the middle class luxury of being removed from the labor force (Baldwin, 2010). Over the course of the last half a century, the creation and use of the welfare queen justified punitive welfare reform, that helped to continue to blame African American women for never having had access to adequate education, employment, housing, and healthcare, even though programs to provide services were available. The image of the welfare queen was created and heavily exploited by Ronald Raegan, who spoke about a woman who fraudulently collected hundreds of thousands of un-taxed dollars in welfare benefits. She was an ill-educated African American mother, who used her fertility to collect more benefits with the births of countless illegitimate children, and was intent on working the system instead of seeking gainful employment. The welfare queen, while unique in its creation, echoed of the sexually irresponsible Jezebel, and of the racialized stereotypes of African Americans being lazy and shiftless (Smith, 1987; Neubeck and Cazenave, 2001; Hancock, 2004; Cruickshank, 1999).

Politicians and media outlets used the controlling image of the welfare queen to systematically influence welfare reforms that hurt all poor people, but was especially effective in making sure that African American women, as a collective, did not threaten the social and economic standing of the white hegemonic majority, by demanding to be treated as fully feminine within a white patriarchal society. The results of those reforms, particularly the Personal Responsibility Act and the Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act, mandated a two year cap on benefits, required recipients to perform forty hours of work or community service per week, and required job training (Clawson & Trice, 2000). These policies, and others like them, have denied women the benefits they needed to care for themselves and their children and essentially amounted to state mandated child neglect and abuse. Moreover, these policies have turned the bodies of poor women and children into state property by mandating that they give up their rights to choice and privacy in exchange for food, shelter, and medical care. These women are further humiliated and marginalized by a public curriculum that has depicted them as failures, who are morally bankrupt, lazy, selfish, and often sexually irresponsible, and opened them up to additional victimization from the state and other entities that see these women as a sub-human and expendable population (Adair, 2002). The Mammy image was still helpful in justifying the labor exploitation of African American women within the welfare system, as service and care occupations were aggressively pushed in the job training programs, and because service industry jobs were often the only ones available to under-educated poor women who were mandated to maintain employment in order to qualify for benefits. Again, the balance was restored, albeit on the backs of all poor women, no matter their race. African American women remained the immovable pillar, “pretenders to the thrones of both femininity and masculinity…women pretending to be women but more male than men – bare-breasted, sweat-glistened, plow-pulling sole supporters of their families” (Williams, 1996, p.812). Along with the controlling image of the welfare queen, the bad black mother and black matriarch images were created and gained popularity. They helped to further pathologize and blame African American women for, not only their own material circumstances, but the dire material circumstances of the poor African American community. The controlling image of the black matriarch first gained popularity with the

publication of the Moynihan Report (Davis, 2004). This controlling image is of a middle- aged African American woman, who is the head of the household and emasculates men in her family and community. She is aggressive, rude and cunning. She is accompanied by the bad black mother, who cannot adequately care for her own children, so she assumes a selfish, calloused air towards them, leaving them to care for themselves in harsh impoverished environments (Kennelly, 1999; Roberts, 1997; Alexander-Floyd, 2003). These two controlling images have been used in response to the strides made through the Civil Rights Movement to craftily blame African American women and not institutionalized racism for the failure of African American families and for the stark circumstances that many African American children are raised in. The Jezebel image remained as well, continuing to justify institutionalized rape as terrorism during the Civil Rights Movement, a major point in American history when the social identities of the white hegemonic regime was threatened (McGuire, 2004, 2010). In the late twentieth century, the Jezebel image has been used profusely in the media to hypersexualize African American womanhood. Through movies, music, and television, the Jezebel image has been rearticulated (Morgan, 1999; hooks, 1992; Hill Collins, 2000; Jones & Shorter-Gooden, 2003), and continues to influence the ways the larger society interacts with African American women (Brown, 2008; West-Stevens, 2002). Today, the political, economic and social status of the white hegemonic regime seems, yet again, to be hanging in the balance. The election of President Obama has proven that the upper echelons of our political system is penetrable by racial minorities, and that an African American woman can fill the post of the First Lady; the failure of banks, the housing market, and the manufacturing industry threatens to ruin the middle- class; and upward mobility of white women and other minority groups threaten the social hierarchy that white men have benefited from since the beginning of American history. The hegemonic regime is so up in arms, that people are literally rallying to “take back America”. This begs the question, take America back to where, and from whom? It seems that the sentiment is to take America back to a time when the law, the economy and the civil society recognized unequivocally a raced and gendered social hierarchy; and, like so many other times in American history, the controlling images of African

American womanhood, which have justified this social hierarchy, are being rearticulated and reused in order to reestablish it in these uncertain times. There are blatant rearticulations of the mammy, jezebel, welfare queen, bad black mother and black matriarch present in the texts and images which permeate the public curriculum about citizenship and identity concerning African American women. They are most prevalent in mass media.

Media’s Role in the Public Curriculum and Citizenship When participation in public life was reserved for a small portion of the public, and when media was primarily print resources, media could be used as a tool for indoctrination and propagandizing. Today, however, when participation in public life is far more involved, and when media as grown exponentially, media is no long an easily wielded weapon. It is simply too big. It is true that big business and the political machine use the media to send certain messages and to control the spending and thinking habits of the people, but, when the average citizen can create a blog, update a status, create and post video, self-publish a book, or document her entire life via twitter, the power of media as a tool is no longer exclusively accessible by the elite. Instead, media become an entity, a space, a community, or a society whereby we interact in ways similar to the ways we do in our tangible society. Media is a space where the average citizen can shape and reshape her identity, “understand” the identities of others, and exercise her identity in ways that create boundaries for interaction with her. By being able to vicariously live the lives of the “other”, people are able to accept myth as truth and, because the lines between our cyber society and our tangible society are so blurred, those same truths become the truths we use to live our “real” lives (McCarthy, 1997). Kellner (2002,p.5) says “radio, television, film, and other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities, our sense of selfhood, our notion of what it means to be male or female, our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality, of ‘us’ and ‘them’. He goes on to say that, “media stories provide the symbols, myths and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture”. Media, in this sense, is so powerful that it isn’t only apart of

the public curriculum, like Cortez suggested, but it influences the public curriculum. Media tells people what they know about themselves and what they know about each other. Thus, media is a powerful mediator of the ways that citizens negotiate and struggle for citizenship. African American Women in the Media The influence the media has on the ways that we live our lives and experience citizenship is not inherently problematic. It only becomes problematic when the images and symbols that represent a group of people adversely affect the level of citizenship that they are able to access. Such is the case for African American women. African American women are portrayed in the media in such a negative light as to suggest that African American women are to blame for the disparities we deal with in almost every facet of the larger society. The constant repetition of the same disparaging tropes of African American womanhood in the media solidifies the myth of the sexually irresponsible, loud, unintelligent black woman that mediates the interactions society has with African American women. It is the combination of race, gender, class, and often location that makes African American women particularly vulnerable to such a mediated nightmare. Some scholars have written about cultural images and representations in the media, and, while they define their work differently, the way they understand the nature of their work is very similar. For instance, Stuart Hall (1997) discusses what he calls racist regimes of representation. While Hall does use the word intersectionality, and shortly after Kimberle Crenshaw coined the word in 1989, his analysis focused primarily on race and class. On the other hand, African American women, and other women of color took up the word to include gender (Jordan-Zachery, 2007). For instance, Patricia Hill-Collins discussed the ways that images of African American womanhood have been used to determine how the world understands African American women. In her 2000 book, Black Feminist Thought, she termed these images controlling images, in that they literally control the ways that people interact with African American women. These images are not only powerful in themselves; they gain greater influence and traction as they are employed within a socio-political context. For instance, the mammy image is conjured in the minds of citizens during the times when we are discussing poverty, or the problems with the welfare state. African American women are seen as the

poster-children for government subsidies, and as the face of American poverty, yet the image of the mammy does not evoke a sense of urgency to change the system that creates the inequalities that African American women navigate. Instead it prompts more “welfare to work” programs, where African American women are put to work, against our own mental, physical, psychological and emotional health, to care for society in underpaid and generally exploited service positions. Eugenia Siapera (2010) discusses this phenomenon in her work, and, in a move to extend Hall’s racist regimes of representation, she has created additional ways to see the representations of minorities, particularly women of color. She situates her work by calling on Michel Foucault’s term “regimes of truth”, which denotes the idea that images and representations are part of larger networks of power which virtually turn those images and representations into true depictions of who or what they represent. She, like Hall, argues that there are always multiple regimes of representation at work simultaneously, and no regime of representation is equal in power, thereby making the argument that certain regimes of representation win over others in naming and defining institutions and groups of people. In terms of how regimes of representation are used to construct racialized and gendered individuals in the United States and abroad, Siapera argues that there are different types of regimes of representation that forward different facets of the agenda to withhold full citizenship to certain groups of people, African American women and girls included. There is the (i) racialized regime of representation which is the precursor to the more violent and overt (ii) racist regime of representation. There is also the (iii) domesticated regime of representation, and the (iv) regime of commodification. The racist regime of representation is mobilized to justify the creation and maintenance of strict laws, policies and institutions. This regime constructs alterity [otherness] primarily as irrational, or not rational enough, and therefore brutal, violent and sexualized; it is further constructed as generally unable to speak, while, when it does speak, it is seen as demanding but not deserving because of its irrationality, hence, it must be treated primarily through power. (133)

The second characteristic of the racist regime of representation is that it generally removes agency and autonomy from gendered and racialized subjects which “works to justify the political, social, and cultural exclusion of ethno-culturally different women” and renders us “unable to represent…[ourselves] autonomously and participate in political processes as equal citizens” (137). Within a racist regime of representation, African American women are essentialized as part of a culture that has been negatively racialized as lazy, backward, stupid, incompetent, sexually irresponsible and dirty. We are also gendered in a way that further solidifies our position as a group needing to be civilized, spoken for, and ruled over. A racist regime of representation becomes particularly problematic for African American women and girls because of its function as a double-edged sword. We are silenced because we lack the agency to speak for ourselves in public, but, if we do find a way to voice our concerns and our interests, our voices are deemed irrational and not worthy to be acknowledged. Therefore, many of our attempts to resist other equally detrimental regimes of representation are thwarted, due to our seemingly absent voice(s). For instance, while the domesticated regime of representation may seem less problematic and less overtly racist compared to the racist regime of representation, its purpose is to “tame and contain difference within confines deemed safe and acceptable” (Siapera, 2010, p. 139). Difference is either made safe by making it seem unimportant, archaic, or peripheral to a particular culture, or it is hybridized, by mixing hegemonic sameness with othered difference. The latter possibility is only employed if the difference can be successfully neutralized through marginalization or hybridization. If the difference cannot be overcome in these ways, then it is violently opposed, and those who wear the difference or insist that they are representations of that difference are ostracized from mainstream society. In this regime of representation, sameness, acculturation, and assimilation are the words of the day, and any material or symbolic inequalities are made null and void for the sake of maintaining a “hegemonic harmony”. The racist regime of representation and this domesticated version “act together and must be seen as two sides of the same coin. If difference cannot be controlled and dominated through the racist regime, then it is contained and refused through the regime of domestication” (140).

The two aforementioned regimes of representation, the domesticated and the racist regime, bring to mind the Sapphire and the Black Lady images that African American women often have to navigate, and the ways in which we are silenced within the navigation. The Sapphire image, just as old as the mammy image, is of an African American woman who is angry, emasculating, violent, and treacherous. This image was used in order to deny African American women the right to equal protection under the law. African American women have been and continue to be compared to white women, with white women being the epitome of moral character, and African American women being the exact opposite. We are loud, angry for no reason, and overly demanding, while white women are well-mannered, meek, deserving and in need of protection. When African American women walk into a hostile situation, in which anger is a legitimate and fitting response, Sapphire arrives before us in the minds of those who share in the problem. African American women immediately have a choice… do we “conform” and “confirm” the Sapphire image, or do we opt for the Black Lady image, yet another representation of African American women, an image that has been recently conjured up with the politics of respectability. The Black Lady image was created in the opposite image of the Sapphire. She is meek, accommodating, genteel and contented. Cahn (2007) argued that during and after the Reconstruction Period, well-to-do African American women adopted the image of the Black Lady in order to make their female and male counterparts comfortable doing business with them and sharing in the efforts to provide opportunities for other African American women. She also argued that in addition to the mammy image, African American female domestic workers also adopted the Black Lady image in order to safely navigate their work spaces. The Black Lady will respond in a “less aggressive” manner, often denying or disregarding the seriousness of the offenses committed against her, for the sake of maintaining a more palatable image of African American womanhood. In this situation, which Patricia Hill-Collins recently wrote about in her newest book, Another Kind of Public Education (2010), African American women can “choose” to be “blackened” by assuming the controlling image of the Sapphire, or we can choose not to be “blackened” and assume the controlling image of the Black Lady. In either case, we have to silently endure having our voices and our

responses predetermined for us, and our identity crafted for us, as we negotiate our citizenship with individuals and institutions. Unlike the aforementioned regimes of representation and the conundrums they often create for African American women, the regime of commodification welcomes and accepts difference – only in as much as that difference can be pimped for a profit. In this regime, difference is accepted but is reduced to identities which are then “made into things exchanged, bought and sold, thereby losing their complexity and humanity” (Siapera, 2010, p. 143). The market is placed above social justice, and for the sake of making or saving a dollar, the societal inequities that accompany difference are erased as identities are judged equally for their profitability. The signs and symbols that are linked to certain identities are amplified while the material circumstances of those identities are ignored. It is perfectly normal in this instance to exploit hyper-sexualized images of African American womanhood for the sake of selling anything, from music to apparel, like Beyonce’s latest album or a House of Dereon shoulder bag, while ignoring the material problems African American women face while living in hyper-sexualized bodies. It is equally as normal to sell ideas and politics in the same way as material goods. Consider the many ideas and politics sold to the larger public about African American women. African American women are the face of poverty and the face of the welfare state, even though the demographic statistics of those who access benefits such as welfare, food subsidies and housing subsides tell a very different story. Conversely, the face of sexual assault and domestic violence is that of a white woman, when the demographic statistics of victimization tell a very different story. How does this affect the lived experiences of African American women? One need only look to the Nafissatou Diallo case as an example of how the controlling image of the mammy was mobilized in a racist regime of representation to place her in an extremely vulnerable position. The mammy, like many other controlling images of African American women, was created during American chattel slavery. The mammy was portrayed as an asexual, docile, accommodating, and often unattractive slave woman who cared for the slave master and his family. It was designed to hide the fact that the women who worked closely with the slave master and his family were often overworked, sexually abused, and made to be silent about such abuses (Jordan-Zachery, 2009). Today

this same image is appropriated to justify much of the same treatment of African American women, or women of African descent (Omolade, 1994). Nafissatou Diallo is the hotel maid who accused Dominique Strauss Kahn of sexual assault. She was overworked, underpaid, and very vulnerable to sexual assault, but the likelihood of her being vindicated rather than punished for speaking out about the life she lead, as a result of what is expected of her as a woman of color, was slim. Other controlling images, such as the jezebel, sapphire, matriarch, lady, and bad black mother work the same way. They provide a framework for how to read the African American female body as a text embodying everything that is or could be wrong with the moral fabric of American society. We are made public enemy number one, our bodies lusted after and loathed simultaneously, as we are seen as not quite woman, not quite American, and not quite anything deemed normal and worthy of respect and protection.

Summary In this chapter, I have defined public curriculum and citizenship, and I have detailed how public curriculum, largely influenced and controlled by the media, helps citizens to negotiate citizenship. Lastly, I have provided a framework and an example of how a mediated public curriculum names African American women as problematic, and the American “anti-citizen”, and how African American women must navigate the hostile spaces created as a result. This discussion is the basis of my project. By examining images and examples of media that have been created within the last year, I will detail and historicize the public curriculum surrounding what it means to be an African American woman in our society, and connect this public curriculum to the historical and colonial heritages that African American women have had and continue to have access to, and what rights, responsibilities, statuses, identities etc. African American women have access to as a result. In the next chapter, I will expand the theoretical framework I will use to analyze my chosen images and examples of media. This expansion will include a discussion of Critical Race Feminism, text analysis, and a discussion of Hill-Collin’s controlling images, including a socio-historical genealogy of each.

Chapter Three Methodology Critical Race Feminism is a theoretical framework created out of a need to attend to multiple markers of difference and their effects on the ways people experience the world. The particular need for a framework to specifically study African American women emerged in the 1980’s, when scholars began to realize that, within feminist frameworks, women were conceptualized as white and middle-class and, in critical race studies, African Americans were conceptualized as men (Alexander-Floyd, 2010). When other critical frameworks, such as Critical Race Theory, emerged, they were found inadequate in speaking to the lived experiences of women of color. Critical Race Feminism extended the reach of Critical Race Theory and of Critical Legal Studies, and specifically attended to race, gender, and class. Critical Race Feminism helped us to understand the material circumstances that circumscribe the lives of African American and other women of color, and it often helped to uncover the historical and cultural heritages, which have created such circumstances. Critical Race Feminism is most closely related to Critical Race Theory, and they share some of the same tenets. There are four main tenets of both Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism which relate specifically to this study. Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism both share the belief that race and racism are entrenched in American society; they both recognize the necessity and the power in engaging in revisionist history; they both critique the liberal idea of color-blindness, and they both see the value and the power in counter-storytelling.

The first tenet that Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism share is the idea that “race and racism are endemic, pervasive, widespread and ingrained in society” so much so that race and racism is “deeply rooted and embedded in our ways and systems of knowing and experiencing life” (Milner, 2007, p.390). From an American standpoint, both Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism see the connections between the economy of chattel slavery and its lasting effects on modern day life in America. They both recognize that the limited access to adequate education, gainful employment, quality healthcare, and other “privileges” are only a few of the remnants of the historical and

colonial heritages of such an extremely stratified social hierarchy (Bengtson, 2005). The second tenet that both Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism share is the belief in the power of revisionist histories. Revisionist histories reexamine historical record with the goal of replacing long-held and safe interpretations of events with more accurate interpretations, especially consistent with the experiences of minorities. Revisionist history directly connects the experiences of minority groups with the economic and social interests of the white elite and understands that “attitudes follow, explain and rationalize what is taking place in the material sector” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001, p.20). The third tenet that Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism have in common is their critique of liberal color-blindness. Critical Race Theorists understand the idea of color-blindness as counter-productive to uncovering the structurally and culturally embedded indecencies of racism and believes that the only way to uncover the subtle repercussions of racism is to actually acknowledge race. Similarly, Critical Race Feminism critiques the erasure of any difference, including race. Critical Race Feminists argue that one’s position as a raced, classed and gendered person directly affects how she is interacted with and acted upon by institutions and individuals. Lastly, Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism both acknowledge the value of counter-storytelling. Each framework believes that narrative aids in the maintenance of hegemonic beliefs, and that counter-narrative (stories told from the marginalized) can serve to challenge the authority and truth in grand narratives (Yosso et. al., 2004; Delgado & Stefancic, 1993; Kridel, 2010). These four tenets are important to my study, because they allude to the fact that there are racist, and arguably sexist, narratives in the public curriculum, which are often covered up by erroneous yet widely accepted versions of history. Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism agree that these narratives have the ability to maintain differentiated citizenships and identities within American society. Moreover, Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism both value the work in uncovering these narratives and reconnecting them with the histories that created and necessitated them. There are, however, some nuanced differences between Critical Race Theory and Critical Race Feminism that further solidified me choosing Critical Race Feminism as the theoretical framework for this study. Critical Race Theory is traditionally understood as

having two camps, the idealists and the realists. The idealists believe that race is a socially constructed concept and that the effects of racism can be alleviated by directly addressing the social and cultural beliefs concerning race. Realists believe that race is a more concrete concept and understand racism as “a means by which society allocates privilege and power” (Delgado & Stafancic, 2001, p. 17). This fundamental difference in opinion is not enough to divide scholars who subscribe to Critical Race Theory. However, it is understood that these two different ways of looking at race and racism directly impact strategies for activism. Critical Race Feminism recognizes race as both a socially constructed concept and as a real entity that affects the distribution of power, privilege and resources. This allows scholars and activists who use Critical Race Feminism to work to change circumstances in both the ideological and material realm. It also helps scholars to complicate the stark dichotomy between the two, and uncover the ways in which the ideals of the people affect the way that power, privilege and resources are distributed amongst a diverse citizenry. Critical Race Feminism lends itself to the larger goals of this project specifically, because it supports my ultimate goal of creating a curriculum that will change the way that African American women and girls understand and strategize against the effects of racism and other forms of oppression. Critical Race Feminism also departs from Critical Race Theory, particularly by being able to address the wrongs women of color have endured at the hands of men of color (Potter, 2008). Because the use of Feminist Studies often served as an erasure for race and Critical Race Theory served as an erasure for gender, African American women were not able to use any of the two frameworks to adequately speak to sexual assault, domestic violence and other forms of abuse and victimization that were the cause of multiple forms of oppression working in concert. Critical Race Feminism opens that door with the concept of intersctionality. The concept of intersectionality is the analysis of the intricate ways that race, class, gender, sexuality and location work together to determine the citizenships that African American women have access to. Intersectionality, as a concept, had many precursors, such as double-jeopardy, multiple-jeopardy and simultaneous oppression (Jordan-Zachery, 2007). However, not until the term was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, did it gain significant consideration in the academic community. Unfortunately, the

concept of intersectionality has been overused to deconstruct the lived experiences of people who do indeed experience difficulties in negotiating citizenship, but not in the same ways that women of color do (Jordan-Zachery, 2007). As a result, many black feminist scholars have sought to recover the integrity of a concept which is at the root of our citizenship experiences as African American women. Intersectionality was important to my study as I analyzed how certain markers of difference serve as symbols and conjure up particular controlling images of African American womanhood. For instance, it helped me to connect class and skin color in the Diallo Case to the controlling image of the mammy. Using Critical Race Feminism in this study helped to reveal the power that controlling images of African American women still have in the media and the way they are currently used to affect the material lives we live. Finally, Critical Race Feminism was especially helpful for this study because it allowed me to historicize the work/activism that African American women have engaged in long before the Women’s Suffrage Movement, and consequently reveal the unique issues that African American women have had to overcome. For instance, Critical Race Feminism has been used to conceptualize the plantation of antebellum America as a large workplace environment, and uncovered the role African American women played in naming and fighting against sexual harassment, long before activism against it gained notoriety in the twentieth century (Alexander-Floyd, 2010; Boris, 2003). This was important to my study because it allowed me to explore the ways that controlling images of African American women, namely the jezebel, mammy, bad black mother, and welfare queen have been used throughout American history to define citizenship for all Americans in multiple spheres of society.

Data: For this study I analyzed a total of three texts, a pro-life billboard in SoHo, the Nafissatou Diallo Case, and a viral Youtube video entitled, “It’s Free, Swipe Yo’ EBT”. The first text I analyzed was the pro-life billboard that was released in New York’s SoHo community. I chose this pro-life billboard for three reasons, which are largely based on my use of Critical Race Feminism as my theoretical framework. Critical Race Feminism

requires the researcher to consider the historical and social context in which the study is being conducted. Additionally, CRF requires that the researcher seek to understand the material circumstances connected to what is being studied; it also mandates that the researcher’s purpose be, if necessary, to use the knowledge created from the study to help improve the lives of those adversely affected. Lastly, Critical Race Feminism mandates the researcher to connect the symbolic to the material. Based on these mandates, my reasons for choosing this billboard are as such. First, the billboard is a blatant representation of two major historically exploited controlling images of African American womanhood. It calls upon the image of the Jezebel, by depicting a growing African American girl, ambiguously raced like the mulatto sirens of antebellum America, and it calls upon the image of the bad black mother, by using a caption to name African American women as the perpetrators of genocidal abortions. Secondly, this billboard is part of a larger project by pro-life groups to use African American women, and arguably, African American children as the bodies upon which the next wave of reproductive rights struggles can be fought. Lastly, these billboards, through the use of symbolic imagery, worked to create negative material circumstances for women, particularly poor women of color, by curtailing their access to reproductive health care, and by creating hostile legislation against those who would provide reproductive options to these women. The next image/text I chose was the the Nafissatou Diallo case for similar reasons. Like the pro-life billboard previously mentioned, the image/text of the Nafissatou Diallo case is one largely built from the controlling image of the Jezebel, but it is more specifically built from the controlling image of the Mammy. Secondly, the ways in which this case was portrayed in the media and the subsequent dismissal of the case is based on a larger ideological campaign to punish those who live in bodies marked female, poor, colored, and, more specifically, immigrant. It is also part of a larger ideological problem that conceptualizes women of color as unrapeable beings. Lastly, it speaks to a historically documented pattern of robbing women of color, African American women in particular, of the right to seek justice against sexual abuses, and a historically documented pattern of relegating African American women and other women of color to positions and situations that are extremely vulnerable to abuse, violent trauma, and labor exploitation.

I chose the image/text of the viral YouTube video, by Chapter, namely for its uniqueness. This is a satirical video, created by an African American female artist, which chronicles a day in the life of a welfare recipient. While it does speak to the controlling images of the jezebel, bad black mother, and of the more recently created Welfare Queen, and while it also fits neatly into a trend of political and economic conservatism that names gendered and raced minorities as a group of people solely dependent on a system of government subsidies for survival, I chose it mostly because it provides a look into how African American women are taking up these images in current political commentary. Critical Race Feminism does urge researchers who use it to consider the knowledge and wisdom of African American women as central to their projects. In my studies of the framework, I always assumed that the knowledge and wisdom of African American women would be for the collective benefit of African American women. However, when this video was released, it provided an opportunity for me to consider how knowledge created by African American women can have the potential to reify negative stereotypes about African American womanhood, and contribute the diminished citizenships we experience. Method: In chapter two, I discussed the power of representation, and, more specifically, the power of racist regimes of representations. These concepts come from the work of Stuart Hall (1997) and Eugenia Siapera (2010). Hall defines representation as the production of meaning through language and symbols. His definition was particularly important to my study, as he, without actually calling it such, alludes to the power of a public curriculum in the production of meaning through language and symbols. He termed it a system of representation. This system of representation is A system by which all sorts of objects, people, and events are correlated with a set of concepts or mental representations which we carry around in our heads. Without them we could not interpret the world meaningful(sic) at all. Meaning depends on the system of concepts and images formed in our thoughts which can stand for or ‘represent’ the world, enabling us to refer to things both inside and outside our heads. (p.17)

Hall also wrote that people have the capability to make meaning of very obscure and abstract ideas because people have ways of “organizing, clustering, arranging, and classifying concepts and of establishing complex relations between them” (p.17). Most importantly, Hall asserts that people who share the same culture(s) have the same concept maps, the same code by which to read and interpret language and signs. This certainly alludes to public curriculum, as one’s experiences as a cultural being determine the concept maps and codes with which to read and interpret language and signs. With the use of Stuart Hall’s definition of representation and with the use of text analysis, network analysis more specifically, I was able to analyze my chosen texts within a cultural context. Text analysis was the most appropriate method to use in order to analyze my chosen texts. Described as an unobtrusive method (Lee, 2000), text analysis can be employed differently, based on the nature of the text and the goals for the analysis. Shapiro and Markoff, in Roberts’ 1997 text, describe text analysis as “any methodical measurement applied to text or other symbolic material for social science purposes” (p. 14), and argue that text analysis can be used to measure individual or collective attitudes, values, ideologies and political positions. They name two different types of text analysis, thematic text analysis and network analysis. Thematic analysis is a more traditional type of text analysis, which is used to uncover themes and concepts within verbal language. Those who use thematic text analysis usually do not take into consideration the nonverbal components of a text (pictures, symbols, settings). Some of the criticisms of thematic analysis is that it has a tendency to “throw away” information, limit the analysis to themes that are discernable or implied through their research questions, and fail to provide context, as much of the text is ignored. While thematic text analysis is validly criticized, it has proven valuable in predicting outcomes, and uncovering non-obvious patterns of behavior (Stone, 1997). Network analysis is somewhat different, and it better fits my purposes, as it is often used to make connections – networks- between themes and occurrences in seemingly unrelated texts. It is also particularly useful for those studying culture and media, which is the root of my project (Roberts, 1997). Network analysis can be used to focus on different aspects of a text, the language and images included. For instance, in the SoHo billboard, network analysis can be used to understand the picture,

it’s location, and the slogan. Likewise, in the Diallo case, network analysis can be used to understand the language used in articles written about her, images released of her, and even comments made by the general public. The key to using network text analysis is to make connections between concepts, “single ideational kernels” (Carley, 1997, p 81), within the network, explain the thing that connects the concepts and to what degree they are connected. Network analysis, used within a Critical Race Feminist framework, should also be used with the intent of providing a historical and social context within which the concepts and network fits. In the analysis of each text/event , I asked/answered the following questions: 1. What controlling image is being called on in the text/image? 2. How is the image reconstructed to fit the socio-cultural context of the day? 3. In what ways is the current use of the controlling image in this particular text similar/akin to the ways that it was used in previous socio-cultural contexts? 4. What reality is silenced, perverted or otherwise negated in the use of this image in the public curriculum? Pro-Life Billboard, SoHo For the billboard, I used a network analysis, in order to interpret both the picture of the little girl and the caption, as they work together to name a network of concepts which make the billboard an example of racist and sexist propaganda. In my analysis of the billboard, I also incorporated its geographical location/position. Although it is not part of the billboard, it does speak volumes about its meaning.

Nafissatou Diallo Case In order to bring to bear the significance of Diallo case, I continued to use network analysis. However, because the written language is so much more in the Diallo case than in the billboard, I relied primarily on traditional forms of text analysis, as described by Scott and Donovan (2009). They argue that by studying documents, namely government documents, one can do better research in order to understand and work with and on behalf of historically marginalized groups of people. Others echo this sentiment by urging researchers to search for the physical traces before disturbing the landscape (Lee, 2000)

In my analysis of this text/image, I worked with the understanding that, as Roberts (1997) explained, “language is a chronicle of social knowledge that is predicated on the society’s history, culture and social structure” (p.59). I looked specifically for trends in the use of certain words or phrases which speak to controlling images. I looked for allusions to gender, race, class and citizenship status. I also included in my analysis the comments left at the end of online articles in order to provide an understanding of collective ideology. Chapter’s “ It’s Free Swipe Yo’ EBT” Viral Youtube Video In order to analyze Chapter’s viral Youtube video, I continued with my use of network analysis. Doing so allowed me to focus on the images in the video, as well as the words to the song. While the commentary on the video, including the comments from Youtubers are important, I wanted to devote my attention to the actual video, in order to bring to the forefront how Chapter chose to mobilize the controlling image of the Welfare Queen. In order to be consistent and thorough in my analysis, I analyzed the video by paying close attention to smaller still images, and analyzed the words of the song separately. Once I analyzed the lyrics and the images separately, I analyzed them together to reveal networks of meaning. Rationale: Making it Con(text)ual My rationale for choosing the three texts is simple. I argue that it is the crisis of identity, caused by changing economic and social circumstances, which creates the need for the re-articulation of the controlling images of African American women. One needs only to look to history for confirmation of this reality. It was the Jezebel image that allowed white slave owners to be both Christian and adulterer/rapist. It was the mammy image that allowed the forefathers of this country to fight for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, while depriving an entire group of people of their wages and ownership of their very bodies. It was the Sapphire image that allowed men, white and black alike, to extend to white women the decencies of protection and modesty, while depriving African American women of the same. It was the bad black mother image and the black matriarch image that allowed the larger society to believe in meritocracy and the credence of the bootstrap theory, while providing disparate circumstances for white and black children to grow up in. So it is today, these images help the larger public reconcile

the myth of American democracy and equality with the reality of discrimination and differentiated citizenship. Unfortunately, it is the bodies and lives of African American women upon which this exercise in futility is constantly played out. No matter how much African American women struggle and triumph, it will be these images which define us, because it is the people who find safety in these images who have control over them. As Baldwin said over fifty years ago to his nephew concerning the lie of inferiority, which still rings true for African American women today: They have had to believe for so many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men [and women] are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of identity. Baldwin, in the same essay, goes on to say that African American men, and women, have functioned as an immovable pillar in the lives and psyches of the white public. When that pillar is moved, it upsets the order of nature and “is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s own sense of one’s own reality”. Although Baldwin seems to suggest that this work is done by the individual, I would argue that the “identity” he and I are both writing about is a collective identity, and thus, is dealt with outside the realm of the private. Recall the discussion of cultural heritages in chapter two. These cultural heritages are accessed and bestowed upon the collective and not the individual. Therefore, it is the collective, and not the individual, responsibility to “protect” and maintain the integrity of those heritages. This is the price of benefiting from the citizenships that result from them. We often call this staunch and collective defense of heritage and identity nationalism. However, when one considers the civic republican discourse of citizenship and its understanding of citizens being responsible for maintaining commonality and unity (Philippou et.al., 2009; Knight-Abowitz & Harnish,2006), one could argue that nationalistic fights can occur between groups of people who occupy the same nation- state, but who may have access to very different forms of citizenship and the identities that are attached to them (Mitnick, 2004). Therefore, it is reasonable to argue that a

hegemonic majority can conceive of a hegemonic minority as an enemy of the state, and feel justified in destroying that enemy as simply a duty of citizenship. Reread, this means that, in America, it is conceivable that the white hegemonic regime can conceive of African American women as an enemy of the state, and go about the business of destroying them, both literally and figuratively. This is where the controlling images of African American women prove especially important. These images aid in the justification of destroying the lives of African American women by providing them with diminished access to citizenship in every facet of our society. These images provide the lens by which the larger society understands African American women as solely responsible for the lives we lead, even in the face of laws, policies and legal documents which should provide the utmost form of citizenship to all of America’s citizens, including African American women. These images, particularly the Jezebel, the Mammy, the Welfare Queen and the Bad Black Mother, are being used now, at another point in American history when the economic, and social context of the day proves threatening to the citizenships and identities of the hegemonic majority.

Summary In this chapter I have explained my use of Critical Race Feminism as my theoretical framework, and my use of network text analysis for the study of my chosen texts. I also provided a rationale for choosing my texts. I argued that it is the identity crisis created by uncertain socio-economic times that necessitates the need for the rearticulation and use of controlling images to restore order and protect the identities and privileges which are attached to certain articulations of citizenship. In the next chapter, I will provide a detailed description and analysis of each of the texts/images I have chosen, connect them to the controlling images that are rearticulated in them, and discuss how they negate the truth about the lives that African American women lead.

Chapter Four The purpose of this study was to analyze a series of images and events which made news headlines in 2011. I embarked on the task with a belief, based on my experiences living in a punitively raced, gendered and classed body, that there is a public curriculum of African American women at work, which negatively affects the citizenships and identities we are able to take up. Through the analysis of the billboard picturing Anissa Fraser, the coverage of the Nafissatou Diallo case, and the viral video by Chapter, I was able to uncover the existence of a persisting public curriculum of African American women, which has maintained all of its mythology in this present moment, but very little of its historical narrative. Through the analysis of these texts and events, I have learned that the controlling images of African American womanhood are interrelated and dependent upon each other for ultimate influence on the lives of African American women and girls. I have also learned that the controlling images of African American women are so pervasive, so far reaching, and so seemingly innocuous that it creates the necessity to see the use of these images not as the deliberate work of extremists, but instead as the almost involuntary consequence of a legacy of raced and gendered oppression stripped of its historical significance. Pro-Life Billboard, SoHo The first image/text that I analyzed was the pro-life billboard which was revealed in New York’s SoHo community. The billboard depicted a little African American girl, in a pink jumper dress with a matching bow in her hair. Next to her picture were the words, “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb”. The billboard, which covered three stories of a building on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Watts, was sponsored by the Texas-based pro-life group called Life Always, and by New Horizon Church in Harlem (Anderson, 2011). The billboard created quite a commotion in the community surrounding the billboard, and stirred heated conversations on the national level. Eventually, Louisiana-based Lamar Advertising, decided to remove the billboard, citing that it had become an issue of public safety, after employees of a restaurant near the billboard complained of being harassed by protestors (Lee, 2011).

Michel Faulkner, of New Horizon Church, argued that the reason the church co- sponsored the billboard, and released it during Black History Month, was to bring attention to the fact that while the African American community was celebrating a rich history and a long list of worthy accomplishments, a plot to commit genocide against the African American community was being exacted with abortion as its main weapon. He, and other pro-life organizations that supported the billboard, and other billboards like it, which went up in other cities across the country, cited alarmingly high abortion rates in the African American community as justification. According to statistics released by health organizations in New York, and subsequently cited by pro-life organizations, for every one hundred abortions performed in the five boroughs of New York, sixty-one percent of them are of African American babies, even though the population of African Americans in all five of the boroughs range from twelve to thirty-seven percent. Moreover, thirty percent of all abortions nation-wide are of African American babies. Faulkner also names Planned Parenthood as one of the most culpable organizations in regards to these statistics. In fact, many pro-life organizations that seek support from the African American community, bring to bear the fact that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist and would have approved of the systematic extermination of African Americans via abortion (Clabough, 2011). Faulkner argues that his support of the billboard was not to incite hatred against African American women, but to force the community to talk about a very serious issue. While few people are contesting the statistics that Faulkner and Life Always have cited, or the fact that abortion does pose an issue for the African American community, there are many who take issue with the use of such an inflammatory billboard to spark the conversation. Mae Collazo, an African American woman who works in the SoHo community was offended by the billboard and said, “It makes it sound like all we do is abort our babies” (Resto-Montero, 2011). Reverend Al Sharpton, says that the conversation is needed but “the way you address that is not by demonizing black women” (Clabough, 2011), and Stacey Patton, a reporter for the Defender Online, said “it is an example of right-wing conservatives, and those organizations which share similar religious beliefs, albeit arguably different socio-political beliefs, such as New Horizon

Church, drawing on black people’s history of discrimination and pain to garner support and numbers for their own conservative agenda” (Patton, 2011). There are many narratives and evocations of controlling images in this text, and they absolutely speak to the hegemonic regime’s need to maintain the stark lines between different forms of citizenship and identities attached to them. The picture of the little girl rearticulates the controlling image of the Jezebel, the caption rearticulates the controlling image of the bad black mother, and the location of the billboard speaks to the motive of further othering African American women in front of a normalized audience, for the purpose of provoking fear and added control over the sexualities of subordinate and marginalized groups. The picture of the little girl in the billboard is a modern day reincarnation of the jezebel controlling image. She is light skinned and has curly hair, which is reminiscent of the mixed-raced slave girl, with European features, who was said to entice white slave masters to abandon themselves. One might ask how a little girl can be portrayed as a jezebel image. The answer is simple, and it is intricately tied to race. A young African American girl can be a portrayal of the jezebel image because there is no girlhood conceptualized for African American girls – the innocence, naiveté, and purity of childhood, and arguably womanhood, is negated by the perceived worldliness and sexual prowess of the African American female body (Brown, 2008). Gonick (2006) argues that girlhood is not “a universal biological grounded condition of female experience” but rather is “produced within shifting sociohistorical, material and discursive context” (p.3). This means that the public curriculum which has so circumscribed the lived experiences of African American women and girls, is the same public curriculum that grants or denies certain groups of females a space for girlhood. My discussion in chapter three demonstrates that there has always been a sociohistorical, material and discursive context which necessitated denying African American girls a girlhood, from the need to exploit African female labor in the early 1600’s, to the need to produce more free labor through the wombs of enslaved African women and girls before and after the abolition of the slave trade , and finally to the current need to blame economic and social mayhem on the sexual irresponsibility of African American girls today.

The American public curriculum as it pertains to womanhood is also influenced by the curse of the binary. Nayak & Kehily (2006) argue that Because discourses are fused with power, particular signs may come to take on a differing social status within the symbolic regime of language. Derrida deploys the term logocentrism to describe the western pattern by which meaning is produced through a binary of presence and absence. The binary, designed around opposition and exclusion, seeks to avoid intermixture through the polarization of categories. (p.9) In other words, within a hegemonic regime, language takes on a symbolic nature, in which words are linked to their symbolic prototypes, as well the prototypes being simultaneously linked to their antitheses. In this case, it is the binary between African American womanhood and white womanhood, which was crafted centuries ago, that is the culprit. Angela Davis, in her 1983 book Women, Race and Class, argued that African women were made genderless within the system of American chattel slavery, and, when the discourse surrounding womanhood, read white womanhood, was being crafted, African women were left out, or, using Nayak’s and Kehily’s words, they were absent. Davis noted that, Expediency governed the slaveholders’ posture toward female slaves: while it was profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusively female roles. (p.6) Davis goes on to explain that while industrialization was working to make white women’s labor defunct and push them into the inferior role of housewife, the labor of African women was still in the public and just as necessary as the labor of their male counterparts. Davis also went on to explain that while white women were regarded as mothers, African women, within their reproductive exploitation, were seen as breeders, not mothers. These two instances created the staunchness of the binary. White women were seen a genteel, fragile motherly figures, who were too pure to be sexually defiled, and African American women were seen as strong, crass unmotherly figures, who could not afford to be pure in their perpetual sexual abuse and exploitation. Of course, this

binary had to evolve with the changing sociohistorical, material and discursive context. However, the only substantial and pointed change is the fact that African American women are now blamed and shamed for the womanhood we have been forced to take up, and white women are coerced, through fear and surveillance, to maintain the womanhood they have been forced to take up. Therefore, within the raced and gendered American public curriculum that has denied African American females a childhood, and arguably a womanhood as well, this young girl is a danger, her very womb, though undeveloped, is a menace. She represents the next baby factory, which is no longer immediately lucrative to the economic majority, and is thus perceived as excessive and in need of control. In this case the jezebel image is not evoked to justify the sexual exploitation and institutionalized rape of African American women, as it was during American chattel slavery and well into the twentieth century. However, this billboard does evoke the jezebel image to portray African American female sexuality as dangerous and deviant, again creating a binary between African American female sexuality and white female sexuality, thus maintaining ideological control over the sexualities of marginalized and subordinate groups. Foucault, in his work, wrote about the notion of bodies being texts that can be written on and used to discipline. According to Foucault, the body is a technology of power and this disciplining comes through a “normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish” bodies (p.184). Within this normalizing gaze, “it is the subjects who have to be seen, their visibility assures the hold of power that is exercised over them” (p.187). Who they are and what they represent, in relationship to what is deemed normal, is organized, categorized and put into a hierarchy. In the process of the gazing, writing and organizing, African American women and girls are judged against a normalized conceptualization of American, read white, womanhood. The extent to which African American women and girls measure up against this process, provides a framework by which other women can assess how they measure up. The picture of the little girl, in the context of this billboard and in the context of the American public curriculum about African American female sexuality, is effectively used to provoke outrage, and encourage added policing and control over the bodies of all females. To

associate with the impurity, the deviance, the irresponsibility, and the unnaturalness of African American female sexuality is to be vulnerable to punishment. The normalizing gaze and subsequent othering and punishment of African American female sexuality does not stop at the picture of the little girl. The caption on the billboard further echoes the danger of the African American female womb; we are so dangerous now that our own offspring are not spared. This caption echoes the controlling image of the Bad Black Mother. As previously stated, the Bad Black Mother is not as old as the Jezebel image, but is just as powerful in demonizing African American women and blaming us for the state of our families and communities, and is just as efficient in limiting the citizenships African American women have access to. Within the American public curriculum, deeply and intricately tied to the histories and heritages of early America, the bad black mother reiterates a time, during American chattel slavery, when the order of the day was perpetual servitude, and when the dire fate of an African American child was decided solely by the identity of her mother – if she was a slave/non- citizen, then her children would be so as well. In this case, the caption on the billboard is likened to a call to action to “save black children” by stopping their mothers, and seems to suggest something similar to the Moynihan Report. The report “directly linked the contemporary social and economic problems of the Black community to a putatively matriarchal family structure” (Davis, 1983, p. 13) and argued that if African American women are left to control ourselves and our bodies, the results will be disastrous at best and genocidal at worst. The location of the billboard is just as problematic as the billboard itself. Reverend Faulkner argued that his reason for sponsoring such an inflammatory billboard was to bring awareness to the African American community. However, the billboard was located in a geographic location with an extremely low African American demographic. The SoHo community is located on the island of Manhattan, and is known as a shining example of inner-city regeneration and gentrification. The area is known for its ritzy art galleries, its luxury shopping options and its high priced homes. Locating the billboard in this community is very telling of its motive, which seems not to inform the African American community of the issue of abortion, but to use African American women as the bodies upon which the next wave of reproductive rights of women, more specifically

white women, is debated and fought over. In chapter two, I discussed Eugenia Siapera’s regime of commodification, in which people’s identities are separated from their bodies and their lived experiences, and treated as commodities. Note that Reverend Faulkner argued that he legitimately purchased and used the picture of the girl on the billboard. This is a classic case of the body of this African American girl being symbolically bought and sold within the regime of commodification; she is being used to sell panic, fear, condemnation, and the immediate need to police and bring under control female sexuality and reproductive rights. The sad news is that the American public bought it. During and after the release of this billboard and others like it, harsh pro-life legislation was introduced and enacted all over the country. By May of 2011, over sixty pieces of legislation passed, with thirty of them in the month of April alone (Bazelon, 2011). Sixteen states introduced and enacted legislation that would ban insurance companies from covering abortion. It passed in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Eleven states introduced and enacted legislation that would require mandatory wait times and cost-prohibitive ultrasounds before abortions could be performed. It passed in Indiana, Kentucky, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia and Wyoming. Seven states introduced and enacted bills to prohibit state funds from being used to provide abortions, except in cases of rape, incest and health reasons (Frase, 2011). Some states passed bills to defund Planned Parenthood, to mandate stricter regulations on abortion providers, and to strengthen the policies on informed consent and parental notification. Although these pieces of legislation seem harsh, there were other pieces of legislation that were especially so. A Georgia representative, Bobby Franklin, introduced House Bill 1, a piece of legislation that renamed abortion, calling it prenatal murder, and made it punishable by a minimum of ten years in prison and a maximum of the death penalty. It also legislated that a woman could be criminalized for suffering a miscarriage, making it lawful to investigate miscarriage to make sure that human conduct did not contribute to the unfortunate circumstance. Georgia also introduced another bill, HB 1155, in 2010, which passed. It put the responsibility on abortion clinics to prove that they did not coerce African American women into getting abortions, and made clinics liable for performing abortions on women who were proven to be coerced by

others, such as partners and family members. While this bill was passed in 2010, it gained momentum during the same time that dozens of billboards, naming African American children as “endangered species” cropped up all over the state. The anti-abortion laws affect all women, but are especially detrimental to African American women and poor women. Requiring an ultrasound before abortions are performed could prove to be cost prohibitive to clinics that serve in African American and poor communities. Requiring that abortion providers produce proof that they don’t unfairly target African American women as clients may serve to deter clinics from setting up in African American communities. Given the report statistics for African American rape victims, the laws mandating that state-funded abortions only cover rape and incest victims could prove discriminatory to African American women. Finally, states’ moves to de-fund Planned Parenthood clinics are definitely detrimental to the reproductive rights of African American women, many of whom are dependent on low-cost access to birth control and life-saving screenings. If using the picture of Anissa Fraser to demonize African American women was not enough, the billboard does something equally as egregious; it masks reality. By naming African American women’s wombs as the most dangerous places for African American children, the billboard and the pro-life organizations that sponsored it failed to name all of the institutions and places that are truly dangers to African American children and their mothers who are tasked with ensuring their safety. According to statistics from the Children’s Defense Fund, an organization that generates reports based on data provided by United States Government agencies, when African American boys and girls escape their alleged in utero perils, there is quite a cold world to greet them, and it begins the second they are actually born. Moreover, the circumstances under which many African American babies are born, is not the fault of their parents, but instead indicative of an unfair and discriminatory education, economic, healthcare and judicial system. According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the National Vital Statistics Report and a report from the National Center of Health Statistics (2009), African American babies are twice as likely as other babies to be born with low birth weight, and twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday. According to the United States Department of Commerce, forty percent of African

American babies are born into poverty, compared to eight percent of white babies. For African American babies who do live past their first birthday, they are three times as likely to live in extreme poverty, and seven times as likely to live in persistent poverty (Ratcliffe & McKernan, 2010). According to a national health interview survey done by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, African American children are sixty-five percent more likely to be uninsured than white children, and seventy-five percent more likely to go without needed medical care than other uninsured white children. African American children are also four times as likely as white children to be in foster care, and suffer the highest rate of child abuse and neglect within the foster care system. According to a 2009 national report card published by the United States Department of Education, African American children enter school academically behind white students, and remain that way for much of their school careers. Thirty-five percent of African American youth grow up to attend identified drop-out factories, which are schools where less than sixty percent of the population graduate within four years (Balfanz, Bridgeland, Moore & Fox, 2010). While, the annual number of firearm deaths decreased more than fifty percent for white children from 1979-2007, it increased more than sixty percent for African American children over the same time period (Department of Health and Human Services). According to a 2010 report published by the United States Department of Justice, African American children make up seventeen percent of the youth population in America, but account for thirty-one percent of juvenile arrests, twenty-six percent of juvenile arrests for drug abuse, and fifty-two percent of juvenile arrests for violent crimes. African American children make up fifty-eight percent of juveniles who are housed in adult prisons, and over sixty percent of juveniles who are serving prisons sentences of life without the possibility of parole; in some states it is as high as eighty- five percent (Nellis & King, 2009). These types of statistics are very similar to those for African American women and are akin to modern day perpetual servitude, in that the chances that African American youth will find gainful employment and not a prison sentence are somewhat diminished. Persistent poverty, subpar health, poor education and a hostile relationship with the

criminal justice system does not position African American women or our children to threaten, in any substantial way, the citizenships and identities that the hegemonic regime has almost exclusive access to. In fact, it proves quite the opposite…that the most dangerous place for African American women and children is in America! If it was indeed the goal of pro-life institutions and supporters like Reverend Faulkner to save African American children, would it not seem more effective to care for their safety post-partum? Would they not save more African American youth by lobbying for adequate health care, quality education, safe neighborhoods and homes, increased employment opportunities, and an equitable criminal justice system? I posit that this billboard was never designed to save, help or bring awareness to the plights of African American children, but instead to forward a discourse and set of ideologies that further places the power in the hands of the mostly white, mostly male legislative body to protect white female sexuality, demonize African American female sexuality, and render African American men powerless or minimally cooperative in the process. Nafissatou Diallo Case While the arguably well-meaning yet inflammatory pro-life billboards boil down to an ideological warfare that does indeed lead to detrimental effects on the material lives of women of color, I would argue that the Nafissatou Diallo case of 2011 begins with the diminished material lives of women of color and boils down to the ideological warfare that supports such situations. Nafissatou Diallo is a woman from Guinea, Africa. She emigrated to the United States after she was granted asylum in 2003 (Dickey and Solomon, 2011). When she arrived in the United States, she began working in a friend’s store and braiding hair to earn money. She could not read or write in any language. After working hard to support herself, and working with the authorities to be reunited with her daughter, whom she left when she fled her home country, she was finally seeing the fruits of her hard work. Within four years of being in the country, she was settled in stable housing in the Bronx, and working at the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan. However, things took an unexpected and ugly turn, on May 14, 2011. She was cleaning rooms on the twenty-eighth floor of the hotel, when she entered the room of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. When she realized that the room was not empty,

and that there was a naked man in the bedroom, she apologized for entering and attempted to leave. Instead of allowing her to exit the room, Dominique Strauss-Kahn allegedly pulled her into the bedroom, and, later the bathroom, where he groped her genitals, and forced her to perform oral sex. After she was assaulted, she sought safety in the hallway, and eventually told two of her supervisors. Over an hour after the assault, the hotel security finally called the police. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was eventually arrested aboard an all-night flight back to France. By the next day, he was in the custody of the NYPD, and Nafissatou Diallo would be afraid for her life, after she watched the morning news and learned that Dominique Strauss Kahn was in fact, head of the International Monetary Fund, and a shoe-in for the next president of France. Over the next month, Nafissatou Diallo and her daughter were held in protective custody, as lawyers fought over whether or not the case was strong enough to go to trial. Amidst this clash of the counsels, Diallo was questioned, much like a defendant, about her relationships with men in her community, her financial status, and her life story before being granted asylum in the United States (Davidson, 2011). Eventually, her reputation would be publicly destroyed, as Strauss-Kahn remained in almost complete silence about the happenings of May 14, 2011 (Goldstein, 2011). Although the medical records and the hotel pass-key records supported the account that Diallo gave to her supervisors, to the police and to her lawyers, her case was being dismantled, based solely on her character. It was learned that Diallo lied on the documents used to determine whether or not she would be granted asylum. She said that she had been gang-raped by four soldiers on a night when she failed to make it home before state-mandated curfew. She later told authorities that the story of her being raped did happen, but that she exaggerated the details to ensure that she would be granted a green card. It was also learned that while in the states, she lied on her tax documents, claiming a fictitious second child. She also under-reported her income to qualify for subsidized housing in a building meant to house ailing HIV/AIDS patients. While these lies are egregious, I would argue that they are not the lies of a dubious woman, but rather the lies of a desperate woman who, like many women of color, struggled just have a safe space to exist, and enough resources to maintain a

modest lifestyle. However, to law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges, these lies were enough to ruin her credibility, and thus her case. It did not help either that other news outlets, such as the New York Post, reported unfounded claims that she was a prostitute, and that the case was not one of rape but of failure to pay for services rendered (Italiano, 2011), or that she spoke with an incarcerated man, in a very difficult to translate Fulani, and said that she knew what she was doing by accusing such a rich and powerful man of rape. Eventually, after her case was systematically dismantled by the court of public opinion, she would have no choice but to go public with her own side of the story, and on July 24, 2011, she gave exclusive interviews to ABC News, and to Newsweek. Her goal was to repair her character, which had been torn to shreds in the media, and to force prosecutors to take her case to trial (Melnick, 2011; Katersky, 2011; Martinez, 2011). In her interview, she said, “Now, I have to be in public, I have to, for myself. I have to tell the truth.” (Katersky, 2011). Unfortunately, her efforts did not work. In fact, some reporters who watched the interview claimed that “occasionally she wept, and there were moments when the tears seemed forced” (Dickey & Solomon, 2011). In July, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was released from house arrest and, in August, the prosecutors dropped the case, and she was left alone to pick up the pieces of her life. It did not matter that her character, good or bad, did not negate the medical reports, or the DNA evidence which supported her story. It did not matter that two front desk attendants also reported that, during his stay at the Sofitel Hotel, Dominique Strauss- Kahn made inappropriate and unwanted advances towards them. It did not matter that Strauss-Kahn was facing separate charges in France, after French writer Tristane Banon accused him of raping her. It did not matter that he was known in France as a womanizer, who frequently became violent and uncontrollable during consensual sex, so much so that, in certain circles, he was known as “Dr. Strauss and Mr. Kahn” (Dickey and Solomon, 2011). It was only Nafissatou Diallo’s character that was questioned unceasingly, which led to her not being able to seek justice from a supposedly blind legal system. Diallo’s case is not a clean-cut case; her unique position as an immigrant makes it difficult to untangle the web of imagery which connects her to multiple controlling

images. Nafissatou Diallo is a reincarnation of the controlling image of the mammy. Like the mammy image, Diallo was made invisible, was discussed in terms of her physical appearance, and was referred to in regards to her “docility”. These things served, early in the case especially, to rob her of the right to speak for herself and to seek justice for the alleged attack. Diallo is also a reincarnation of the Jezebel image; her sexuality as an African woman, caused those involved in the case to employ the jezebel image to accuse her of prostitution, and to even suggest that her previous rape somehow negated the possibility that she could be raped again. Lastly, Diallo is a reincarnation of the Welfare Queen; she collected government subsidies by deliberately using false information, and her character was called into question because of it. In early articles and news reports on Nafissatou Diallo’s case, she was often referred to as “the housekeeper”, “the maid” or the “the DSK maid”. Her name, although known, was not used, thus invoking a symbolic invisibility. Similar to the mammy image, Diallo was only acknowledged by her station, as a “servant” in relationship to the hotel patrons she served. Later in the investigation and reporting of the case, Diallo began being called “the DSK accuser”. Of the twenty-five articles I analyzed, fifteen were specifically about Nafissatou Diallo, and twelve of them neglected to use her name in the headline. Rendering Diallo invisible in the investigation and reporting of the alleged assault, is similar to the ways that African American women were made invisible and subsequently silent in the institutionalized rape and sexual assault during American chattel slavery and into the reconstruction period. During those times, African American women were shamed into remaining silent, or forced to see their pain and victimization as secondary to the pain and victimization visited upon African American men through lynching (Hill Collins, 2004), In those cases, and in the Diallo case, rendering the victims invisible also separated them from their humanity and thus their right to claim justice or mere acknowledgement that a crime had been committed against them. The articles and news reports rarely referred to Diallo as a victim. In fact, the only articles that did were those that reluctantly supported the case being taken to trial, and only after the stories about Strauss-Kahn’s other alleged crimes were heavily reported to news outlets.

Weeks after the incident, and the subsequent investigation, news reporters began asking age-old questions about the credibility of Diallo’s claims based on her physical appearance. One of the first articles written about the case seemed to subtly compare her beauty to the normalized understanding of what beauty is in the American public curriculum and arguably within a Western context. Dickey and Solomon (2011) wrote that she “is not glamorous. Her light-brown skin is pitted with what look like faint acne scars, and her dark hair is hennaed, straightened and worn flat to her head, but she has a womanly, statuesque figure”. In less than forty words, they commented on the color and condition of her skin and the color and condition of her hair, age-old indicators of beauty in America. Notice the “but” after the first clause of the second sentence. It seems to suggest that her hair and skin were not beautiful, but her body was in perfect working condition, almost to assume that she would never have attracted Strauss-Kahn’s attention. This statement, however, was not the worst. Some articles commented that given Diallo’s size and perceived strength, such a small man as Strauss-Kahn could not have assaulted her. Some reporters claimed that she towered over Dominque Strauss -Kahn, and that she, akin to the mammy controlling image, had a “sturdy build” which certainly echoed times past when the femininity and fragility of African American women were denied in order to deny the possibilities of their sexual assault. Later in the case, some reports mocked Diallo for the cosmetic changes she made, claiming that she was “glammed up” or “dolled up” (Melnick, 2011). They mentioned her patent leather heels, her freshly highlighted hair, and her smart black pantsuit as evidence that she was performing a false femininity and that she did not deserve to be thought of as feminine or worthy of the protection and vindication offered to legitimately feminine beings. Diallo was not only made invisible and unfeminine, but she was also portrayed as docile in her service to the hotel and its patrons, very similarly to the way that the controlling image of the mammy was constructed in times past in order to justify the labor exploitation of African American women. Some articles claimed that Diallo loved her job, and that she frequently talked about how many rooms she was able to clean in a shift, the fact that she had recently been assigned a floor of her own to keep clean, or how close she and her co-workers were (Davidson, 2011; Dickey and Solomon, 2011;

Barnard, Nassiter & Semple, 2011). Some reported about her life before being hired by the hotel, and claimed that her labor there was much better than the service positions she had before. Dickey and Solomon (2011) said “working at the Sofitel for the last three years, with its security and stability, was clearly the best job she’d ever hoped to have”. Diallo’s perceived contentment with her job at the hotel and the fact that others attested to that fact, is consistent with Jewell’s research on the mammy image. In her 1993 work, Jewell discussed the fact that a major, yet anomalous, component of the mammy image was her white teeth, which were always visible. Creating the mammy with white and visible teeth was said to communicate a positive comportment, and to deny the harshness and inhumanity of the institution of slavery, thus absolving slave owners and all those who participated in the slave economy of any responsibility for such a barbaric institution. Similarly, portraying Diallo as a contented hotel maid, absolves all of us who benefit from the exploited labor of African American women, of any guilt in maintaining drastically unfair systems of power and labor compensation. Later in this analysis, I will further elaborate on the significance of this issue. In addition to being a portrayal of the mammy controlling image, Diallo was also a portrayal of the jezebel image. In her case, however, the jezebel image maintained its characteristics from its use within the framework of American chattel slavery, but also morphed to fit Diallo’s unique case as an immigrant. The prosecution asked Diallo about the relationships she had with the men in her community, and reporters even accused her of being a prostitute; this echoed the characterization of the jezebel image as being a sexually indiscriminate woman, who used her sexuality to cause the fall of unsuspecting men. The use of the jezebel image in this way was called on to suggest that no crime had been committed, but that the sexual encounter was consensual and could not have been rape. Her femininity combined with her immigrant status complicated the use of the controlling image of the jezebel, and caused one reporter to ask whether she was a “liar, extortionist, prostitute, or a dutiful, naïve imam’s daughter” (Melnick, 2011). This statement, in effect, made use of the binary discourse to suggest that she was either a flawless woman or a fallen woman, and that she was either an honest American or a fraudulent immigrant. One article even had the audacity to ask whether Diallo’s life on “the margins of quasi-illegal immigrant society” (as if being granted asylum in this

country isn’t completely legal) gave her access to “petty con artists and dubious types trying to get a foothold in this country” (Dickey & Soloman, 2011). She was accused of prostitution and money laundering and her status made it all believable. It did not matter that she had worked in the hotel for the past three years without issue, and that all the evidence supported the story she told the police and her lawyers. Nafissatou Diallo was doubly caught in the matrix of domination. There is also one more issue of historical heritage in this case, status. Strauss- Kahn’s status coupled with Diallo’s status also echoes a time in American history when rape was not the assault of another human being, but rather the theft of property. When the first European immigrants to America began creating the laws that would solidify the power and influence of white, male, propertied individuals, rape was only considered a crime if the act robbed a husband or a slave owner of the labor of his property. In Diallo’s case, her status as a single mother, with no one to advocate for her, Strauss-Kahn had done no wrong, especially, as one article, (Katersky, 2011) stated, since Diallo had been raped before this incident. It seems far-fetched that the thought of women as property is a lasting component of the American public curriculum, but one need only consider the many other practices in American culture, i.e. marriage, that still echo this sentiment in order to see that it is more than plausible. Diallo’s alleged attack did not hurt anyone worthy of seeking justice or restitution, so it was like a crime was never committed. Diallo’s unrapability as too big, too manly, to unattractive, too alien, conveniently too feminine or not feminine enough, and unfortunately, too single allowed the justice system to fail her. By painting Nafissatou Diallo as the strong, large, masculine, unattractive, mammy and as the dubious sexually wanton jezebel , it resulted in the same consequences as in early America and even in contemporary times. Firsts it absolved the alleged attackers of African American women of all sexual responsibility. The people who reported on the case frequently reported that Dominique Strauss Kahn remained silent through out the two-month ordeal, as Diallo’s character was ripped to shreds. Strauss-Kahn’s previous record of sexual assault wasn’t even enough to cast doubt on his innocence. When Strauss-Kahn finally did talk about the allegations, he claimed that the sex was consensual, and that it was a mistake to have entered into such a situation with

Diallo, again invoking the innocent white man caught in the web of the reprehensible black woman (Erlanger, 2011). In fact, when he finally sat down to talk with anyone, it was on his own terms. He was able to give an exclusive interview to French journalist, Claire Chazal, who is good friends with his wife. French and American news outlets reported alike, that his interview seemed scripted, and that Chazal did not ask him any difficult questions (Erlanger, 2011). Secondly, evoking the jezebel image in the Diallo case served to condemn the victim for reporting, and this was exacerbated by her immigrant status. Because Diallo was already assumed to be unrapeable within the American public curriculum about African American women as victims, she was never treated as a rape victim. The day after Diallo reported her attack, her name and address were released to the press, and everyone knew where she and her young daughter lived. In fact, Diallo and her daughter were placed in protective custody after her contact information was leaked. Additionally, within days, reporters were privy to confidential medical information as it pertained to the case. Lastly, but certainly not least, Diallo’s personal life was put on trial, as people questioned the types of relationships she maintained with men whom she had frequent contact with, men whom one reporter incredulously wrote “were not referred to as boyfriends or fiancés, but ‘just friends.” Denying Diallo a chance at justice was criminal enough, but it wasn’t the only tragic result of this case. Trying Diallo’s case in the public silenced the many realities that are the consequences of a persisting mammy image and the jezebel image. First, it silences the fact that poor women often have their labor exploited and their persons placed in very vulnerable positions, sometimes due to their own “choices” to engage in risky/criminal behaviors just to secure the living conditions that many of us deem basic (Adair, 2002; Bush-Baskett, 2010). It also silences the very real truth that power is not solely determined by how big or strong a person is, but rather what identities and citizenships a person has access to, and the resources that are attached to them (Lee, 2006). What we learned from Diallo’s case is that a woman cannot expect the justice system to work for her if the economy is already turned against her, and the mammy controlling image further complicates this issue. African American women, and other

women of color are more likely to be under-educated, ill-educated, or in some way more vulnerable to having their labor exploited (Boris, 2003; Cohen, 2002; England et.al, 2004). In Diallo’s case, it was her immigrant status, her status as a black woman in America, and the fact that she was only recently literate in any language, that made her additionally vulnerable. It was her vulnerability to labor exploitation and her limited access to power and cultural capital that hurt her character assessment the most. She was found to have lied about her earnings to secure safe housing for herself and her daughter, and she was found to have claimed a fictitious child on her taxes, presumably for extra money. Both of these things seem to amount to a woman, who is working hard to make ends meet, and navigating an economic and social system that claims to be fair and balanced, but in reality thrives off of the cheap labor of women like her. These things should not have, in any way, cast doubt on her claims of being sexually assaulted by Strauss Kahn, especially given his record. Yet, it seems that she was punished for being poor. The persistence of the mammy controlling image is used today not only to normalize labor exploitation, but to also normalize the conditions under which African American women often work, especially women who work in the hospitality service industry. According to Tomsky (2011), “the country’s 250,000 housekeepers are in a difficult position. They’re often alone on a floor, cleaning a vacant room, back to the door, the vacuum’s drone silencing all sound. A perfect setup for a horror movie”. In Diallo’s case, she knew and assumed the risk, and in her interview with ABC News and with Newsweek, she claimed that while she was being attacked, she feared for her job, not her life. The timeline within which the hotel contacted the authorities also seems to suggest they knew and assumed the risk, by proxy of course, and that they were weighing the necessity in alarming others outside of the organization, as if rape and sexual assault is not cause for immediate involvement of law enforcement, but rather an occupational hazard. Poor women, especially poor women of color, who work on the margins of society assume a great risk to their physical, emotional, mental and psychological well- being, and because the larger public understands their employment as a favor to the poor women who would otherwise be stuck braiding hair or serving soup to their neighbors, like Diallo, there are few efforts to protect them.

What we also learned from this case is that power is not solely determined by the size and strength of one’s body. In fact, in this case, the short and seemingly fragile Dominique Straus-Kahn, standing atop his connections to the world bank, to the political society of France, and to his ties with the rest of the Western World, “towered” over Diallo. He had more resources, social power and economic reach than she did, so much so that Diallo reported being afraid for her life after she learned who it was she had accused of such a serious crime. Strauss-Kahn’s status as a moneyed and well-connected man made people question whether he could be a rapist, because he was “attractive” enough to engage in consensual sex, but that is not what rape is. Rape and sexual assault is not about sexual gratification, but about the power one wields over another human being (West –Stevens, 1999). Strauss-Kahn would have known that Diallo’s status as a maid, as an immigrant, and as a woman of color made her a target for such violence, and an “unlikely victim” within a system that was built off of favoring the status and interests of a man like him over the security and honor of a woman like her. There was a time during the out of court litigation of the case, when Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers actually argued that he should be granted diplomatic immunity as the head of an international organization (Eligon, 2011). This essentially meant that his citizenship status literally had the potential to allow him to get away with his crime. The sad thing is that the people who did understand the dynamics of power in this case, were those who are often on the short end of that power distribution. Diallo’s lawyer, an African American man, filed to have a special prosecution appointed, claiming that the prosecution treated his client like the defendant instead of the victim/plaintiff (Eligon, 2011). Other West African women in Diallo’s community said they felt more vulnerable knowing that women were still being blamed for their own victimization (Buckley, 2011). Finally, Diallo herself, understood the dynamics of power, stating in her interview with ABC that, “I want justice. I want him to go to jail. I want him to know that there are some places you cannot use your money, you cannot use your power when you do something like this” (Katersky, 2011). As I read through each article, and recorded my observations, my gut told me to keep writing, but my mind forced me to stop and ask if my claims were overzealous. Afterall, I was analyzing a large amount of print, and those who use text analysis often

warn of assigning unintended meaning to texts. I struggled with the answer to that question, but then I asked myself where I could go to confirm what I thought had happened in this case. Where could I go to find the words, explicit and unapologetic, that would confirm to me what I assumed to be the public curriculum of African American women? I went back to the articles, read more closely, scrolled slowly, and found the answer, the comments that people leave, unsolicited, at the end of online articles. These people were the public, they were the people who were following the case, the people who were not afraid to share anonymously, or safely in cyber space what they may not have verbalized in the real world. I found all the confirmation I needed to be comfortable with my assessment that Diallo’s identity and citizenship as a poor African, female, immigrant lay at the heart of the failure of her case. Through the articles I used for this analysis, I was able to find ninety-five comments from unsolicited people. Of the ninety-five comments, eighty-six spoke explicitly in Diallo’s favor or explicitly against Diallo. The other nine comments were neutral. Of the eighty-six comments, twenty-six spoke explicitly about citizenship, eighteen spoke explicitly about race, twenty-four spoke explicitly about gender, twenty- two spoke explicitly about her socio-economic status, four spoke explicitly about her literacy, sixteen spoke explicitly about her physical appearance, seventeen spoke explicitly about her morality, twelve spoke explicitly about the amount of power she wielded in society, and nine comments did not specify a reason for supporting Diallo or not supporting her. Many of the comments cited a combination of citizenship, race, gender, socio-economic status, literacy, physical appearance, morality, or power. People who spoke against Diallo often claimed their disbelief was because she was too big to be assaulted by Strauss Kahn, that she was a liar and a prostitute looking for money and that she should be jailed or deported. “Rabitcotton52” argued “the thing I don’t understand is how a women (sic) who looks to be in good health. Didn’t fight off what is essentially an old man” (Katersky, 2011). “Lulaheal” argued “why would a young woman that does manual labor and therefore works her muscles daily, not be able to simply give a man in his middle sixties and smaller than her a strong shove and get out of there, if she really, really, wanted to” (Davidson, 2011). “Sarah” argued, “what force could a naked 62- year old man, not an athlete have used on a hulkingly large, taller,

stronger, younger woman who came into a room having seen a naked man” (Buckley, 2011). “Yakubu” stated, “ I don’t believe a word this woman says I never believed her story about a man springing from the shower to attack her. And I don’t even believe she can’t read or write in any language. How the hell do you get a $45,000 a year job in New York City, and get subsidized housing, file false tax returns, and false asylum claims if you can’t read or write in English” (Davidson, 2011). “John Prewitt” argued, “No way this chubby old guy would have put his tender tool tween the angry teeth of a strong young African…now maid & her lawyer hope to get bigoted pro-afro judge/jury to go along with anti-Jew, anti-French media” (Dickey and Solomon, 2011), “John Giordano” argued, “that’s what happen when you let these mutts in……not to mention the illegals! Stop illegal immigration, stop obamacare, stop socialism…SAVE AMERICA HAPPY 4TH OF JULY if we are still allowed to wish that?” , “Les Redman” argued, “ she should make this into a race case….oh my bad, she already has! Now deprt (sic) her for lying to Immigration and throw DSK in jail of bestiality, having sex with a skunk!”. “RobLearns2000” stated, “ God as my witness, not Allah, How the illegal immigrants learn so quickly how to manipulate our legal system, and play against our cultural prejudices for financial gain. I guess that is the main reason for coming here – make a buck” (Katersky, 2011). “Don Johnson” stated about Diallo’s lawyer, “staying true to his colors, they never want to help the law or society, open your dumb mouth, him and her should both be deported back TO THE MOTHRLAND”; finally, “Annie Demarest” stated, “what do you expect from black people? $$$$$$$$$$ and a lack of integrity!” (Italiano, 2011). The people who supported Diallo and her fight to have her case taken to trial were often wordier in their comments, but often cited the same reasons to support her. “Tintinyana” stated, If one’s credibility is dependent on past dealings, and if matters otherwise unconnected to the particular experience of violence being addressed comes up in a present case of rape, then none of us would stand a chance if raped. And as feminists have clarified many years prior, rape is a violent crime that is about a display of power and a desire to make that power manifest to self/Other, rather than some nebulous thing at the nexus of

‘flirtation’ gone wrong, mismatched communication, and differences of opinion about what to do with those pesky bits of body parts linked to sex and desire. (Davidson, 2011) Milkcowblues” posted the lyrics to “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” by Bob Dylan. The song is about a rich and connected young man with wealthy parents, who killed a domestic worker. One of the lyrics of the song says “the rich can buy justice from corrupt courts” (Martinez, 2011). “IamThatDiva” stated, Help me understand…are you saying a liar cannot be raped? Or her lies ought to bar from due legal process? After I lived and worked in hellish conditions in a third world country for 2 years, I am not surprised she would lie on her asylum application to escape abject poverty or death. She goes on to say “the woman reminds me of the boy who cried wolf, she has told a bunch of lies, fact, but there is also vital DNA evidence that supports her version of events in this particular case” (Martinez, 2011). When “IamThatDiva” responded to another person’s comment, which claimed that she was a man hater, she cited Diallo’s immigrant status, and her position as a “chamber maid” as reason for Diallo’s victimization. She said To someone of her social and intellectual standing, the chamber maid job was a prestigious to her, as a brain surgeon’s is significant and prestigious to society. So when a guest at the sofitel tell a migrant maid (with a third world mentality) living on the margins of western society to perform oral sex and she does it because she is afraid of losing her job, I believe her. “Discusted1” argued that “ many times, powerful people abuse their power, when they do, it is difficult to prove because powerful money covers up” he goes on to say “unless there is hard evendence(sic), powerful people get away with doing awful things” (Katersky, 2011). “William Querfurth” echoed those sentiments and said, “She might be right to press this, but, there is no place where you cannot use power. There will be carnage from this for years to come, and she will be lucky to see even a forced apology by way of punishment” (Melnick, 2011). “Female”, in response to those who cited Diallo’s status as reason to doubt her claims, said,

I am a 30 year old black female. … I find it incredible that a maid, such as myself, would walk into a room to clean it, and within about 10 mins perform oral sex on a 62 year old white man guest that she had never met before. Would a female physician, lawyer or CEO immediately agree to have sex with a total stranger who walked into her office? If no, then why would a maid do the same thing on her job? It makes no sense. (Buckley, 2011). “David” says, Lessons learned: if you want to rape someone, make sure you are rich and you pick someone who has struggled all their life. There is bound to be something to exploit and get yourself off the hook. Just don’t rape any rich chicks unless you already know hat they don’t have perfect reputations. And remember; you can do this over and over and no one will look into your background. Let the good times begin! (Buckley, 2011) “Sonja” says in response to Dickey and Solomon’s article “The Maid’s Tale”, By all means who is this writer to describe Ms. Diallo as not glamorous! Does that even matter. To paint her as unattractive not only is yet another attempt to validate Psychology Today’s July miss-step but to also equate the likeliehood (sic) of her rape being “real” because it wouldn’t happen to a woman who was glamourous, black curly haired, curvy with a relaxed sense of sensuality as his wife is described in several post. The perspective of this article is troubling. (Dickey & Solomon, 2011) These comments speak clearly to the claims I have made about the American public curriculum concerning African American women as victims. Many people who commented, even in support of Diallo, used problematic ideologies and discourses about African American womanhood. Take “IamThatDiava” for instance. This person assumes that immigrants possess a level of intelligence that will make them vulnerable to victimization and exploitation. Consider “John Prewitt” and his description of an “angry, strong, young African”. Consider “lulaheal” and her thought that because Diallo “works her muscles daily” she could not be victimized. Finally, consider multiple comments that called for Diallo’s deportation, and the deportation of her African American lawyer, who

happens to be a U.S. citizen. The veracity of Diallo’s case almost becomes secondary to the narratives that the news reporters, larger public, and arguably the professionals who investigated her case, used to evaluate her. It begs one to ask whether she, based on the body she navigated the world in, ever had a chance at seeking justice.

Chapter’s “ It’s Free Swipe Yo’ EBT” Viral Youtube Video While Anissa Fraser, the little girl pictured in the Life Always billboards, and Nafissatou Diallo did not willingly become the next negative reincarnations of African American womanhood, Chapter, the creator of the viral Youtube video “It’s Free Swipe Yo’ EBT” did. She uploaded this video in late August, and it immediately became fodder for the masses. In the video, she plays a character named Keywanda, who has ten children and receives government subsidized housing, food, and monetary assistance. Before the video begins, Kewanda stops for a public service announcement, and reminds the tax payers in the state of California, and arguably all over the nation, that this is where the taxpayer money goes. After providing the frame by which viewers should interpret the video, Chapter’s character, Kewanda, meanders through the city, detailing the ways in which she fleeces the system. With the EBT card, which she is supposed to use to buy food for her children, she instead purchases liquor, fast food, clothes and hair supplies. Amidst the chorus, “all you have to do is fuck, and nine months later you gettin’ the big bucks”, she gyrates her scantily clad body between two shirtless black men, languishes around the neighborhood, and mimics child birth. The outro of the video is a recording of children’s voices as they rattle off unhealthy things they want to eat and do with their mother’s government resources. Within the first week of the video’s release, it had been viewed 31,000 times, uploaded to the websites for white supremacist organizations, and garnered hundreds of comments from YouTubers and social and cultural commentators. Many people argued that Chapter contributed to the propaganda that continues to sustain the image of the welfare queen, while others argue that she brought an unapologetic and truthful look into the abuses of public programs such as WIC, Section Eight, and the EBT Food Program.

Shortly after the video was criticized, Chapter uploaded a new video to explain her actions in creating the first. She stated that her work is largely satirical, and that she is an artist who creates from personal experience. Others responded to her inadequate explanation, by saying that her video exploited the poor to advance her career, that she should take responsibility for the ways in which her video was being used and that she should not create art based on her personal experience which can be misconstrued as a representation of all African American women (Powers, 2011). Eventually the video was forgotten by social commentators, but daily people are watching it, and using the images to confirm and question what they know about African American women and the welfare system. In fact, at the time this analysis was completed, over one million people had viewed the video on Youtube alone. This number does not include the many sites that host the video independently. Chapter’s video is a modern day rearticulation of the welfare queen, made popular in the late twentieth century by Ronald Reagan. Like the welfare queen, Chapter’s character, Keywanda spends more time using the government subsidized benefits she gets than she does caring for the children that are supposedly her meal ticket. Keywanda, based on the number of children she has, the chorus of the song, and the relationship she is seen having with her children, can also be considered a modern reincarnation of the controlling images of the jezebel and the bad black mother. The controlling image of the welfare queen is the most recognizable image in the entire video. It starts with the disclaimer Keywanda made to the taxpayers of California at the beginning of the video, and it continues with her refrain one minute and sixteen seconds into the video of “free welfare, free dental, free food, free housing, free daycare, free clothes, this is where the taxpayer money goes” . It is also implied in the actions of the characters in the video, including the lines of African American women waiting outside of the county building and the WIC office, or in Keywanda’s son’s concern that if the family is not approved for section eight housing, that he and his siblings will have to live with his grandmother again.

There are also many instances in the video when the controlling image of the jezebel is called upon. One of the most disturbing images in the video is the cake at Keywanda’s fictional baby shower. Three women, with brown skin and afros, are giving birth. The women are completely naked, their legs are stretched open, and their babies seemed to have fallen out of their vaginas, with the umbilical cords still attached. While there is nothing wrong with the bodies of naked women or of women who are giving birth, there is a problem with this picture within the context of this video. It speaks to the myth of African American women being hyper-fertile, and it further exploits the bodies of African American women as public spaces and as texts to be imbued with problematic meanings about womanhood, sexuality, fertility, and sexual responsibility.

In addition to the fictional baby-shower cake, there is also the fictional baby shower banner, which reads “I’m having another baby”, the scene, forty-eight seconds into the video in which Keywanda is walking down the street, in the middle of the day with two babies in a stroller, and five children, dressed in pajamas, following her, or the fact that during most of the video, Keywanda is almost always squatting with her legs open or thrusting her pelvis towards the camera. It seems as if the combination of the welfare queen and the jezebel image automatically casts Keywanda for the part of the bad black mother. She continues to have children that she cannot afford to care for on her own, and she is passing down the pathology of poverty to her offspring, who already understand the inner-workings of government assistance. The children seem, in their speech, to be totally and completely dependent on the presence of the benefits, not on their mother. Throughout the video, Keywanda is pictured with her children, and they are present as she suggestively drinks from beer bottles and smokes cigarettes. The children are also present as Keywanda sings the chorus of the song, and their voices are usually the background for Keywanda’s direct interactions with state offices. Some of the most disturbing commentary on the video came from conservative, seemingly non-violent white-supremacist groups, not those who are known for inflammatory hate speech. Specifically, there is a blog, called “Stuff Black People Don’t Like”, which used Chapter’s video to support his claim that BRA (black-run America)

was costing tax payers money and stunting the progress of the country. He and his followers specifically believe that humans would be populating the moon by now if it weren’t for the droves of African Americans who believe that welfare is the equivalent of reparations, and that African American women are to blame, stating “black women bear the blame for most of the ills: they produce these uncivil mongs, teach them nothing, and repeat the process over and over all the while garnering a ‘prize’ for their behavior in the form of government subsidies”. A similar website, called Moonbattery, created a forum based on the video and used it to suggest that there are thousands of deserving white people who need help, but are purposefully denied benefits because of African Americans. One person on the forum commented that her husband works dozens of hours a week and they cannot afford their baby’s formula because they are supporting “obvious illegals and people with designer bags and clothes, cell phones and hands full of gold jewelry with one and sometimes two huge carts full of food”. Another forum member commented “you can take to lowlife out of the third-world, but not the third- world out of the lowlife”. When another forum member commented that the qualifications for someone to be awarded welfare benefits is impossible for any person to meet, “AC” responded, “ imagine for a moment that your husband was instead your boyfriend and he wasn’t listed on any of the paperwork (as would be the case for the typical welfare queen) then the numbers would all work out. Your family was penalized for marriage. The federal welfare plantation prefers its occupants be married to the monthly check”. Comments like these are indicative of what Hancock (2004) calls the politics of disgust. In her work, she connects the media’s portrayal of African Americans and the image of the welfare queen to the public debate about welfare reform. One of her most interesting arguments is that the general public’s interface with media is largely passive, in that they do not question the veracity of the messages and images they consume. The general public uses what is “learned” from the media to fuel misplaced resentment about the state of the national economy on those who are portrayed as the culprits. Chapter’s video is one such example of media that allows this politics of disgust to continue. The realities that this video negates and the myths that are turned into truth are many.

Moreover, the material conditions that myths like these create have been documented, and have changed the lives of thousands of women and children over multiple decades. The controlling image of the welfare queen is the embodiment of much of the misplaced resentment that the American public directs towards welfare and welfare recipients. Like the controlling image of the bad black mother, the welfare queen is a recently created image in relationship to the much older mammy and jezebel, but is very powerful. History has shown the power of the controlling image of the welfare queen in changing and enacting policies that have further hurt poor women and children of this country. There are many (Smith, 1987; Neubeck and Cazenave, 2001; Hancock, 2004) who would argue that contemporary welfare reform policies are raced and gendered phenomena that have almost exclusively exploited the public narrative of the welfare queen. Welfare was created in large part to uphold the belief that mothers and mothering were important aspects of American culture, and much needed for the development of healthy contributing members of American society. In the late nineteenth century, women “exploited the ideology of motherhood to attain mothers’ pensions and other ‘maternalistic’ legislation” and argued that “widowed mothers needed government aid so that they would not have to relinquish their maternal duties in the home in order to join the workforce” (Roberts, 1997, p. 312). The expansion of welfare programs operated on the same premise, which was that the work of mothering was more important than any work women could do in the public sphere. At that time however, African American women were systematically denied welfare benefits. The states had control over determining eligibility requirements. Some states, particularly southern states, excluded agricultural and domestic workers from eligibility, largely to maintain an almost exclusively African American menial labor force (Roberts 1995). It was not until the Civil Rights Movement that African American women effectively lobbied for equal access to welfare benefits. Soon after, the controlling image of the welfare queen emerged. As previously discussed in this chapter, African American women are seen as non-mothers or as poor mothers. Therefore, the idea that mothering would be important to African American women or valuable to the health of American society is not present

in the American public curriculum. Coupled with the fact that African American women, unlike white women, have historically been seen as a necessity to the public workforce (Davis, 1983; Roberts, 1995; Roberts, 1997), the idea of African American women being “only mothers” was antithetical to the public curriculum about African American women with children. In fact, when African American women lobbied for equal access to welfare benefits, it was not under the guise of protecting the sanctity of motherhood, but rather as support for working mothers (Roberts, 1997). When African American women began collecting benefits on par with white women, the image of the welfare recipient changed, and became an African American woman (Roberts, 1995). Soon after, the African American woman, within the myth of the hypersexual, hyper-fertile, fraudulent, non-mother present in the public curriculum, was morphed into the welfare queen. The welfare queen was made popular by Ronald Reagan, who painted a picture of an African American woman who is content to collect benefits from the government as opposed to working to support herself and her children (Davis, 2004). She is caricatured to have access to dozens of social security numbers, and multiple dead husbands, which net a six figure amount of benefits per year. Unlike the white welfare recipient, who was effectively made invisible with the advent of the welfare queen, she is not poor or in any way deserving of government assistance. The controlling image of the welfare queen created the ideology that eventually deemed welfare a wasteful program that encourages laziness, and is largely associated with minority groups in the American public curriculum (Smith, 1987). Because America functions on the intangible and meritocratic myth of the American Dream, the accumulation of material wealth becomes the litmus test for one’s moral and social value in society. As a result, the existence of any poor person is deemed an example of the misuse of ability, intelligence, and moral conscience. In this way, society does not have to deal with poverty and the causes of poverty, but instead blames the individual for her plight (Adair, 2002). Because welfare demonization is largely a raced, gendered and classed phenomenon, African American women remain the face of the welfare queen. Myths about the welfare queen are generated and maintained out of the nation’s need to rationalize the overwhelming existence of poverty and the poor policies that are enacted to supposedly deal with it. As a result, the war on poverty becomes a war on welfare,

(Harvard Law Review, 1994) and a war on the welfare recipient. Middle-class America is made to believe that increased spending in social services is a result of funding welfare, instead of Social Security or Medicare, which are primarily used by elderly white Americans, and the nation is made to forget that AFDC is designed primarily to help children, who have no choice in circumstances of their birth or upbringing. The visual and symbolic representations of the welfare queen become necessary in maintaining myth and in defining welfare reform as a political issue. In many media images of poverty and welfare the public sentiment is played upon. In a study done by Clawson and Trice (2000), they found that in fifty-two percent of the pictures accompanying stories about welfare, the people were African American, while the government statistics say that only thirty-eight percent of welfare recipients are African American. Women were over-represented as well, with them being in seventy-six percent of the pictures, while they represent only sixty-two percent of welfare recipients. In the stories about unpopular topics related to poverty, like welfare dependence, teen pregnancy or welfare fraud, sixty-three percent of the people in the pictures were African American. However, in the stories about welfare reforms, like welfare to work programs, or work training programs, ninety-six percent of the people in the pictures were white. This analysis seems to convey that black women represent the majority of people who receive and are dependent on welfare, while white people are only in situational poverty, and use welfare merely as assistance while they are working to change their situations. The truth about African American women who receive welfare benefits is in total opposition to the myths of the welfare queen and the characteristics of the fictional controlling image of the jezebel. Data shows that African American women on welfare actually have fewer children than women who do not receive welfare. Data also shows that as many as forty percent of women who receive welfare-benefits work full-time jobs, and over sixty percent of women collect welfare benefits for less than two years. Most importantly, research also shows that a change in relationship status (divorce, death, or incarceration of a partner) is the reason for over seventy percent of AFDC and/or TANF applications – not a change in employment status or the result of a new child. Unfortunately, this truth is rarely shared with the public, nor is it used to draft policies on poverty or welfare reform.

One could argue that “if attitudes on poverty-related issues are driven by inaccurate stereotypical portrayals of the poor then the policies forwarded by the public and political elites may not adequately address the problems of poverty (Clawson & Trice, 2000, p.69). Instead, these attitudes are used to discipline and punish the public. As stated earlier, Foucault talks about bodies being written on or invested with meaning and inserted into regimes of truth via the operations of power and knowledge. Societal norms are created and bodies are written on, examined and judged for where they fit into ideals of normalcy. In American society, the white middle-class Christian, heterosexual male is the norm, and every other body is judged for how well it fits this norm. In this case, class and access to power are produced on raced and gendered bodies. This is certainly the case for African American women, and other women, who receive welfare benefits. African American women, who already live in punished bodies for not being male and not being white, are then punished for threatening the heterosexist system of patriarchy. Their being on welfare is read as depending on the state and not on a man. As a result, their bodies and the bodies of their children “are produced and positioned as texts that facilitate the mandates of a didactic, profoundly brutal and mean-spirited political regime” against welfare (Campbell Adair & Dahlberg, 2003, p. 35). Essentially these women and their children become sitting ducks for middle class America’s resentment. Their identities are negated out of a need for middle class America to narrate itself as the victim of taxation and fraud, and cast these women as the perpetrators. The results of this resentment is decades of electing officials like Ronald Reagan, who are hostile to the lives of African American women, and the enactment of punitive and ineffective welfare reforms like Clinton’s Personal Responsibility Act or Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act, and current reform efforts, like the recent moves to drug test all welfare recipients, under the erroneous belief that the majority of welfare recipients are drug addicts. The everyday results are also problematic. Consider the poverty statistics cited in chapters one and three and the long-term effects it has on children who are raised in poverty and extreme poverty. Consider the poor women who are believed to be bad mothers, and morally inept human beings because they cannot afford to provide for their children the things that middle class America considers

necessities, like nutritious food, adequate educations, and health care. Moreover, consider the fact that the system is set up to make sure that these women remain that way, from mandating unreasonable income requirements to qualify for assistance, to training these women to fulfill the same mammified service and care occupations, to controlling the structures of families and every aspect of these women’s private lives. For African American women who do receive welfare benefits, the controlling images of the welfare queen and the jezebel are constantly attached to them, so much so that every aspect of their lives are filtered through these problematic narratives. Chapter’s video only served to reify this reality. The Ties That Bind In analyzing the three texts I chose for this study, I found that the controlling images of African American women serve distinct purposes, but rarely stand alone within the public curriculum. The jezebel is connected to the mammy is connected to the bad black mother is connected to the welfare queen. I posit that the connectedness of these images is the result of the intersections of race, class, and gender, and the matrix of oppression that is dependent upon this intersectionality. When one looks closely at the texts I analyzed, it becomes clear that the oppressions that necessitate the controlling images of African American women are the results of the lasting interests the hegemonic regime has in maintaining power through the use of myths mediated by race, class and gender. African American women would not be understood as mammies if not for our raced gender; African American women would not be understood as jezebels if not for our gendered race, and African American women would not be understood as bad black mothers or welfare queens if not for our classed and raced gender. The connectedness and complicatedness of the images within the public curriculum creates a normalizing gaze that is so concentrated and so difficult to untangle, that African American women are, at all times, in a negotiation for identity and citizenship. Not only are our bodies hypersexualized, but they are also hyper-textualized, in such a way that it becomes impossible to separate our actions or our interests from our bodies. This negotiation that African American women are always actively involved in is convoluted, and, as Gilmore (1997) stated, one “cannot always compartmentalize and distinguish either the oppression

or the injury” that results from this constant negotiation, especially in the face of such a disparaging public curriculum. Similarly, Roberts (1997) says, Black women experience various forms of oppression simultaneously as a complex interaction of race, gender and class that is more than the sum of its parts. It is impossible to isolate any one of the components of this oppression or to separate the experiences that are attributable to one component from experiences attributable to the others. (p. 128) This is especially so when power is a fluid concept and the hegemonic regime is invested in maintaining a public curriculum that traps African American women and girls on the demarcating line between what is normalized raced and gendered power. What raced women are allowed to do and be within the American public curriculum set the standard for what all women and all men are allowed to do and be. It is only in the interrogation of the historical and cultural heritages that we are able to understand the economic, social and ideological interests that are also tangled into this formidable web of oppression. Understanding those heritages and interests helps us to begin the process of strategizing transformative and lasting ways to deal with the complicatedness of the oppression and effectively negotiate for the power that is, nevertheless, fluid within it. One of the all-intended consequences of the images of the Mammy, the Welfare Queen, the Jezebel, and the Bad Black Mother, is the negotiations that middle-class African American women must engage in, as a group of citizens uniquely affected by broad definitions of African American womanhood. This negotiation certainly affects the relationships that African American women have with one another, the level of solidarity we can accomplish and the ways middle-class African American women negotiate citizenship and identity with the larger public. As a young African American woman, I have experienced the difficulties of negotiating citizenship amidst the narratives of African American women that exist in the public curriculum. While working on this study, I found myself wondering if it was possible to separate what has been written about the controlling images of African American women with the multiple narratives, written and spoken, about the lived experiences of African American women, in our negotiations of citizenship and identity as a result of the existence of those same controlling images.

As I worked on the analysis of the Pro-Life billboard, I found myself uncomfortable with claiming that Annisa Fraser could be thought of as an adult woman within the public curriculum, given her innocent look on the billboard. I contemplated the repercussions of adding such a claim to the body of literature on African American girls. However, I remembered the necessity in making sure that African American girls are provided an equal opportunity to live inside their bodies without being disciplined to the point of denying themselves their own humanity to prove that they are “good girls”. It became more of a necessity to provide a glimpse into the historical narrative and heritage that has forced African American women to participate in the unfair and unwarranted disciplining of African American girls’ bodies for the sake of protecting them and presenting them worthy and faultless within the larger society (Brown, 2008; Cahn, 2007). As I worked on the analysis of the Nafissatou Diallo Case, especially amid the new reports that have almost unequivocally characterized Diallo as a liar and extortionist, I wondered if it was foolish to approach her case as if she were the victim. When I talked about my research with my peers, they often likened her case to Crystal Magnum and the Duke Scandal, which made it even more difficult to process. However, I remembered that in the same way the controlling images of African American women do not affect women as individuals, but as members of a collective, so too does Diallo’s case affect the collective of African American women, all of whom are vulnerable to assaults, exploitation and failures of the justice system, no matter the plausibility of their victimization. At the end of the day, my primary focus was not on the veracity of Diallo’s story, but rather on the ways that her reputation was crafted in the mass media and the ways that the general public understood her as a victim of a sexual crime. What I found was consistent with the writings of West-Stevens (1999), McGuire (2010), and other scholars who tell the stories of African American women, like Recy Taylor, who have suffered unspeakable victimization, and never received justice. My analysis not only spoke to the difficulties African American women, and other women of color, have in being seen as victims of assault and exploitation, but also to the complicatedness of victimhood and citizenship within a severely stratified society.

As I watched Chapter’s video, and as I wrote the analysis for the text, I found myself nervously questioning whether or not my reading of the video and my consequent analysis was the result of my indoctrination into the hegemonic regime’s public curriculum of African American womanhood. I was forced to ask myself questions about a woman’s right to have children despite her ability to financially care for them, I was forced to question my own beliefs on the efficacy and ethics of training poor women to fill service and care positions as a means towards the end of financial independence. I was forced to ask whether my analysis of chapter’s behaviors in the video was simply a demonstration of my knowledge about skewed curriculum, or a deeper narrative of my own negotiations of citizenship and resulting resentment. I questioned whether or not it was reasonable or fair to subject an artist like Chapter to a higher standard of social responsibility than to other artists, who have based their work on equally egregious stereotypes of poor women without consequence. This was especially important to me, as she also negotiates citizenship as an African American woman, within a public curriculum that almost necessitates that African American women are portrayed, even by our “own” media outlets (Woodard & Mastin, 2005), in stereotypical ways. After all, how much damage could she have really done in the mediated era of African American female “characters” being portrayed as mammies, jezebels, and sapphires within the new trend of reality television (Pozner, 2010)? However, I remembered the position that African American women occupy as it relates to negotiating citizenship with the larger public and the effects that controlling images have on those negotiations. I also remembered the ease with which those who watched the video and commented on it, connected Chapter’s portrayal of Keywanda to the controlling image of the Welfare Queen.

The negotiations I engaged in just to write the analysis of the three texts/events is nothing compared to the negotiations that African American women and girls must endure daily to navigate this world with even a modicum of self-respect and self-esteem, yet we manage to do it. As a result of this analysis and this study, my new concerns deal with the unspoken trauma and stress that these negotiations result in.

In what ways do we protect and shield ourselves from the trauma and stress that surely accompanies the constant negotiation for citizenship and identity? In what ways can African American women and our allies strategize against a public curriculum that is all at once hostile and all-encompassing? In what ways can we prepare African American girls to strategically and successfully take up action to garner the citizenships and identities that have always been out of our reach? Is that even possible? In the next chapter, I will speak to these questions and provide practical and pragmatic ways of working to garner fuller forms of citizenship and identities for African American women and girls.

Chapter Five Embracing a New Strategy Years ago, I happened upon a piece written by Anna Julia Cooper, in Harris’(2000) anthology on African American philosophy. In it she wrote on behalf of African American women and girls and said about African American women specifically, Now the fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the retraining of the race, as well as the ground work and starting point of its progress upward, must be the black woman. With all the wrongs and neglects of her past, with all the weakness, the debasement, the moral thralldom of her present, the black woman of today stands mute and wondering at the Herculean task devolving upon her. But the cycles wait for her. No other hand can move the lever. She must be loosed from her bands and set to work . (Harris, 2000, p. 135) She said of African American girls in the same piece, I would beg, however,… to add my plea for the colored girls of the south – that large, bright, promising, fatally beautiful class that stands shivering like a delicate plantlet before the fury of tempestuous elements, so full of promise and possibilities, yet so sure of destruction; often without a father to whom they dare apply the loving term, often without a stronger brother to espouse their cause and defend their honor with his life’s blood; in the midst of pitfalls and snares…Oh, save them, help them, shield, train, develop, teach, inspire them! Snatch them, in God’s name, as brands from the burning! There is material in them well worth your while, the hope in germ of a staunch, helpful, regenerating womanhood on which primarily rests the foundation stones of our future as a race. (Harris, 2000, p. 133) Her words stirred something on the inside of me, and made me realize the gravity of understanding African American womanhood in utterly negative ways. As I reflect on her words at the end of this project, they are no less true today. African American women and girls have functioned, all at once, as the immovable pillar upon which citizenship in America is understood, and the delicate plantlet, never given the room and the right to define ourselves independent of someone else’s interests and desires. We are the bedrock

of the social hierarchy in American society, our ability to define ourselves and to affect change in the public curriculum is paramount to lasting and transformative change in that social hierarchy. In Cooper’s piece, she was addressing Black clergymen, and women after her have addressed other sectors of the public on behalf of African American women and girls. However, I am now convinced that asking other people to save, protect respect, or otherwise see African American women and girls as human is an exercise in futility. African American women and girls are the living, breathing embodiment of the raced and classed gender that is the foundation of power relations in America. “White men struggle to maintain their hierarchical position in a social structure that is constantly being challenged, questioned and chiseled away”. The use of controlling images as the primary framework for understanding African American womanhood “allows white men, in the absence of slavery, to maintain the boundaries of their relationship with black women… and gives white men a way of oppressing African American women that replaces the historical slave/master structure” (Davis, 1997, p. 195-6). In other words, the times change but the players and the game remain the same. The only recourse African American women and girls have is to save ourselves, and to acknowledge and celebrate our own humanity in all of its complexity. We have to accept the fact that the fight for citizenship is America is attached to a highly entrenched and embedded historical narrative, and that all people would be in danger of having to understand themselves in fundamentally different ways in order to challenge this public curriculum. We cannot wait for people to take such a drastic and costly step. This is not to say that we cannot benefit from allies, but we cannot see our allies as necessary in this endeavor. African American women and girls, at this point in history, must be completely and wholly committed to our own uplift, not the uplift of the African American community or even of American society as a whole; our uniquely raced and gendered bodies necessitates a singular focus. By focusing on our own uplift, we will undoubtedly shake the foundation of American societal norms as they relate to citizenship, and affect change for others. Our focus should be on preparing ourselves to forward a critical and truthful class consciousness, one that names us as the strong, capable women who, voluntarily and

involuntarily, contribute to the economic and social growth of this nation. Secondly, we have to create a revisionist history of our experiences in America. Doing so will enable us to begin to heal from the trauma of this history and it will allow us a foundation upon which a counter-narrative and counter-curriculum can be built. It will also provide the opportunity to create spaces for training our girls to understand themselves in ways that will foster a disposition to negotiate for the citizenships they deserve.

Although the idea of completely changing the public curriculum of African American womanhood is inconceivable at this time in history, beginning to affect the ways that African American women and girls see ourselves, and thus negotiate citizenship is a viable and necessary alternative. Affecting the ways that we as African American women and girls see ourselves begins with creating a class consciousness and a revisionist history that names African American women as substantial contributors to the growth of America. The creation of a class consciousness for African American women and girls will necessitate acknowledging the complicatedness of our history in this country, and it will also necessitate acknowledging the ways that this complicated history has negatively affected our understanding of who we are. Consider Chapter’s video. Nobody prompted her to make such an inflammatory display of African American womanhood, yet she contributed to the maintenance of a disparaging stereotype which was completely antithetical to the historically proven record of African American women and the welfare system. A revisionist history would help African American women and girls to begin to untangle the web of lies that has named us as unintelligent, ugly, aggressive, emasculating, irresponsible, lazy and otherwise unworthy of full citizenship in this country. A more accurate history will not do away with examples of irresponsible media images, but it will prepare us to navigate the results of them in more productive ways. In response to the persisting mammy image of the docile, hard-working, physically unattractive slave woman, our history will show that women who worked closely with plantation owners, were crafty women, who often used what they knew to aid slave resistance, (Jewell, 1993). In response to the persisting hypersexual and fallen jezebel image, our history will show that African American were victims of sexual exploitation,

and often understood their attractiveness as a curse (Hill Collins, 2004). I response to the resurfaced image of the lazy and leaching welfare queen, our history will show a legacy of hard work to keep our families together (Roberts, 1995). For other controlling images of African American womanhood, our true history will likely show similar inconsistencies. The danger in creating a revisionist history of African American womanhood, within an entrenched patriarchal society, is subscribing to the binaries that have prescribed the boundaries of “normal” articulations of raced and classed gender. It would be counter- productive to subscribe to the “true womanhood” ascribed to white women which was solidified by the creation of the “fallen womanhood” ascribed to African American women. In creating a revisionist history, we must be very careful to strategically create spaces for African American women to be full human beings, who, regardless of lifestyle, deserve to be treated like human beings. Consider the Diallo case. She turned to the media to “repair” her reputation as a woman. She was especially concerned with making sure that the public knew that she was not a prostitute. Her concern was understandable, since the accusation was not true. However, within a patriarchal society, she believed, and so did others, that if she had been a prostitute, she would be less deserving of justice. We cannot afford to make that mistake consistently, as to do so will not change the matrix of domination at work in this society, but would, only possibly, result in us attaining a more palatable position within it. Instead, African American women must acknowledge the fullness of our history, one in which our access to citizenship was extremely limited, an endeavor to create a fuller and more inclusive one.

Dealing with the Trauma The first part of that focus is to admit and deal with the trauma which results from being the bodies upon which struggles for citizenship and identity are primarily fought and won. When one refers to citizenship and identity negotiation, it is not cordial discussions across a beautifully appointed conference table, nor is it brutal exchanges in the mean streets of America. Citizenship and identity negotiation are everyday, and sometimes subtle, exchanges between people and institutions (Lee, 2006). Some exchanges have immediate material consequences, while others do not. Some exchanges

have immediate symbolic consequences, while others do not. For African America women, these exchanges are often violent, not always physically violent, but violent nonetheless. Patricia Williams (1997) coined the phrase spirit murder to describe the problematic exchanges people have as it relates to citizenship and identity. Williams says that spirit murder is “disregard for others whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard” and “produces social structures centered around fear and hate” (p.234). The use of controlling images to understand and interact with African American women and girls is spirit murder. In fact, controlling images are the epitome of “social structures centered around fear and hate”. In the past, African American women have dealt with the physical, emotional and psychological trauma of controlling images by endeavoring to prove to ourselves and others that we were not inherently pathological. These efforts often leaned towards a politics of respectability and essentially launched the Black Women’s Club Movement Cahn, 2007), but it was not enough, nor will it ever be. As previously stated, any efforts to prove that we are or can be shining examples of womanhood and femininity would only serve to reify raced and gendered citizenship stratification and would not negate the fact that our bodies enter spaces and discourses before our actions ever do. African American women must, instead, consider what it means to be fully human, instead of one half of a twisted binary, and endeavor to live fully human lives. Living fully human lives means embracing the complexities of our gender identities, our sexualities, our relationships, and our work ethics. Living fully human lives means embracing that our interactions with the public will more than likely always be strained and uncomfortable, while vowing not to compound the strain and discomfort with our own distorted images and understandings of self. Instead, we must vow to unload the hurt and trauma that we face in spaces that will affirm our humanity and support our healing. Ridding ourselves of distorted images and understandings of African American womanhood is easier said than done, and absolutely depends on our abilities to connect to alternative images of African American womanhood. This means that African American women and girls must be committed to embracing the work of creating a radical subjectivity. Creating a radical subjectivity, one in which we begin to define ourselves, necessitates that African American women work diligently, strategically, and in concert

to make the lives and the stories of other African American women the center of our identity making processes. This does not mean that African American women would be idolized, as bell hooks (1992) suggests, doing so would serve to further dehumanize us, and rob us all of the experience of learning from the full lives of radical and revolutionary women. Instead, African American women, in embracing a radical subjectivity, must see the courage and grace it takes for African American women of all walks of life to daily persevere, the strength it takes to recover from mistakes, and the wisdom and care it takes to prepare future generations to live better. Creating a Counter-Curriculum Supporting and sustaining the work of developing a radical subjectivity and a healthy framework for mentoring requires the creation of an explicit counter-curriculum. Within a public curriculum that is almost completely absent of narratives of African American women’s achievements, and relationships, there must be a cache of examples present for African American women and girls to call upon. We will not be able to turn on the television to find them, we will not be able to open up a newspaper or a magazine to find them, but they are there. African American women have been laying the groundwork for counter-curriculum for decades, and all we are tasked to do is collect the pieces in a strategic and coherent way. African American scholars, activists, cultural workers and educators need only identity the ways that the American grand narrative ignores the lives of African American women and girls and identity the ways that controlling images of African American womanhood have been mobilized and used in order to disparage the identities of African American women and girls, and create educational modules to speak against them. In the same ways that canonical literature and other texts have been used to insulate and justify the power and influence of the hegemonic regime, we must use our own literature and texts to speak to and legitimize our experiences, our influence and our power. In the face of narratives of African American women as welfare queens, bad black mothers, crack addicts, and the cancer on the American economy, we must embrace the balanced narratives of African American women like Sarah Breedlove (Madam C.J. Walker), who became a self-made millionaire and philanthropist, or Lutie Johnson, the protagonist in Ann Petry’s The Street, who tried the myth of the American Dream and

failed. In the face of narratives of African American women as sexually wanton jezebels and sexually irresponsible baby factories, we must embrace the balanced narratives of African American women like Mawu in Perkins-Valdez’s novel The Wench, who loved at the violent whims of her slave master, or the fiercely independent and strong Jane in Shange’s Betsey Brown, or even the complicated life of Helga Crane in Larsen’s Quicksand. In the face of narratives of antagonistic and less than supportive relationships that African American women are rumored to have with one another, we must embrace balance narratives of relationships between African American women like the loving, supportive and healing relationship between Sugar and Pearl in McFadden’s Sugar, or the mother-daughter relationship complicated by the circumstances of urban life in Sapphire’s Push. In the face of racist standards of beauty, African American women and girls must confront the tragedies that Pecola Breedlove suffered in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and the truths about beauty and citizenship Martha Brown voiced in Brook’s Maud Martha. The possibilities are endless, and the potential for further healing, empowerment, and strategizing are boundless. A counter-curriculum made exclusively of the voices of African American women would provide us with a mirror with which to appreciate our own reflection, and a platform by which to initiate difficult conversations and take responsibility for the undeniably deadly consequences of having our humanity denied and our identities distorted for centuries. A counter-curriculum for African American women and girls must also include explicit instruction and exploration of modern media. We have to understand the ways that media helps to control the narratives about citizenship and identity, and understand how to harness that power for our own ends. While it is futile to try to eradicate a centuries-old public curriculum of African American womanhood, it is more than wise and feasible to infuse a robust and very influential media culture with more diverse and positive images of African American womanhood, if for no other reason than to provide ourselves with a more complete reflection of our complexities. Instruction and exploration of modern media needs to include positive examples of African American women using their voices and resources to tell our stories, such as the recently developed “Black Girls Rock” movement or the blog “Crunk Feminist Collective” which is a group of scholars and cultural critics who write specifically about current issues facing women

and girls of color. This instruction and exploration should also include problematic uses of our voices and resources, such as Chapter’s video, and discussions of the repercussions of such uses. However, within this facet of a counter-curriculum, African American women and girls should give ourselves the space to discuss the need to avoid re- inscribing binaries concerning the merits or lack thereof the images we produce. We should instead, focus on evaluating images based on their positive or negative influence on our material and symbolic circumstances. Essentially, we should prepare ourselves to be responsible and critical consumers and producers of new media images.

But What of Our Girls? The primary goal of working towards a radical subjectivity is not only to help deal with the trauma caused by a hostile public curriculum, but to provide a framework for training African American girls to negotiate fuller forms of citizenship and identity within a hostile public curriculum of African American womanhood. This work is delicate and requires embracing the knowledges and wisdoms of all African American women and girls, and includes extending and accepting true forms of mentorship. In order to provide healthy forms of mentorship for African American girls, we must embrace the reality that living lives circumscribed by an unbalanced social hierarchy has negatively affected the relationships we have with one another. African American women have to acknowledge that there are binaries which have become apart of the relationships we imagine possible between African American women and girls, and acknowledge the fact that preparing African American girls to negotiate citizenship with the larger public will start with teaching them how to effectively negotiate citizenship with us. We will certainly have to acknowledge and break down some for the binaries that have worked to prevent the most inclusive forms of solidarity and have served to complicate or impede the possibilities of negotiating citizenship and identity. Some of those binaries include the ones that exist between woman and girl, teacher and student, and knowledgeable and knowable. In Ruth Nicole Brown’s article, “Mentoring on the Borderlands” (2006), she argues that in order to create effective and transformative mentor/partnerships, African American women must transcend these binaries, which she calls borders. She introduces a concept called femtoring consciousness which “manifests through the actions of female

mentors when the negotiate the borders in ways that allow girls and women to see themselves in each other” and “underscores mentoring as inherently political and public work by illustrating the political force of female relations typically kept out of social consciousness and public discourse” (p.107-8). The idea of femtoring can serve to inform the work of preparing African American girls to take up fuller forms of citizenship and identity by reminding us of the political and social necessity of building partnerships and not traditional relationships of power in which some people have more authority over the project of radical subjectivity than others. It will also give African American women and girls an opportunity to view mentorship as a form of leadership, which places importance on intergenerational relationships centered on personal and communal growth and progress. But What of Anissa Frasier? In the process of mounting a formidable defense against the hostile public curriculum of African American womanhood, one cannot forget the women and girls who are current victims of very public conversations about what ti means to be an African American female. This is particularly so for a young girl, like Anissa Fraser, who, against her will and knowledge, has become the body upon which the next wave of political posturing has begun. At this moment, no tangible, ready-to-use counter- curriculum exists as a framework for her or her allies to heal in a healthy way. There is no framework to support African American school girls who wonder why they are described as socially mature, while their white peers are describes as intelligent and academically advanced, there is no framework to support adolescent African American girls who constantly struggle with adults, who patronizingly aim to control their bodies under the guise of girl empowerment. The only hope we, as mothers, aunts, teachers, mentors, coaches and allies of African American girls, has is to take up scholarship and activism with and on behalf of African American girls with care and with purpose. We have to ask the right questions, and gain access to the right communities in order to voice the concerns, realities and narratives of those who are silenced in the debates about citizenship, identity, and personhood. We have to complicate the tropes of African American womanhood, and critically address the essentializing media narratives that

characterize African American women and girls in order to provide space for the Anissa Frasers of the world to see and make sense of themselves.

Conclusion While African American women and girls have suffered from a systematically hostile public curriculum of African American womanhood, we are not victims. We have the obligation and the resources to heal, educate and empower ourselves, and to strategize ways to negotiate fuller forms of citizenship and identity. As Anna Julia Cooper said, we do have material in us well worth saving, and we are, based on our uniquely raced and gendered selves, the only hope for further eroding the grip that the hegemonic regime has on power and privilege. The hard truth is that African American women will always be the embodiment of a history we would like to forget and the legacy it left behind. However, with a critical consciousness and strategic actions, we can have some influence over the ways that our bodies are taken up as texts. However, it is only in solidarity of African American women and girls across all markers of difference, concerted efforts to heal and celebrate ourselves, intergenerational mentorship, and the development of an explicit counter-curriculum.

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