Higginbotham Righteous Discontent Summary

173) in much of romance fiction is a Caucasian woman, and as a result, African American women are underrepresented in the pursuit of self-determined desire. By excluding African American women from the “tremendous freedom” (Love Between the Covers) of romantic fiction, romance authors neglect to liberate all the women they intend to encourage with their work. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, author of Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920, corroborates the theory that the sexual politics of African American women differs starkly from that of Caucasian women. Higginbotham, a professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University, discerns that African American women are confined to exist in a modality in which they must “present themselves [in a manner that] relies heavily …show more content…
Although “protesting…[was not] covered in any of [Wallis’] etiquette books” (Cole 237), she realizes that even just the idea of attending the protest meeting “filled her with a sense of excitement and purpose” (Cole 238) that she had never once felt. Wallis “always wanted to say yes when [her friend] invited her” (Cole 237) to attend, but Wallis’ father was not involved in the Civil Rights movement and demanded that Wallis not partake in any such activity. Through her first act of rebellion, attending a protest meeting, she discovers her sexuality when she lays eyes on Ivan Friedman, a Caucasian Jewish man. Wallis internalizes the idea that “her…desires [are] abnormal” (Francis 172), a mindset that prorogates the detrimental belief that she, as an African American woman, cannot dictate her own desires–both societal and sexual. An abider of the understood cultural laws regarding African American sexual desire, Wallis’ reaction to her first arousal from Friedman, a Caucasian Jewish man was experiencing “another type of