Sexual Objectification
Although reasoning and reality blatantly display the interdependence of race, class and gender, many people—especially those who are privileged—continue to pressure the separation of race- and gender-specific issues. For example, Black women are not seen as people as opposed to white women who are seen as daughters and mothers. Black women are often sexually objectified for the perverse pleasure of men. Black women often experience racial-sexual oppression that is neither solely sexual nor racial; this can be seen in the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.
The slave system defined black people as chattel; Black women were often seen as genderless because they were only viewed in terms of value in relation to their labor for slaveholders. Rape is often used as a weapon of domination and repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist, and in the process, to demoralize their men. Slaveowners encouraged the terroristic use of rape to ‘put women back in their place;’ in the male supremacist vision of the period, this meant passivity, …show more content…
Black feminists Pauli Murray and Pauline Terrelonge Stone both agreed that the issue of black men enforcing the patriarchy was an “ideological ploy to heighten guilt in black women over their supposed collusion with whites in the oppression of black men.” These intraracial tensions worked against the public Black feminist forums, sabotaging or delaying most feminist activism that could have been achieved with the support of male
Although reasoning and reality blatantly display the interdependence of race, class and gender, many people—especially those who are privileged—continue to pressure the separation of race- and gender-specific issues. For example, Black women are not seen as people as opposed to white women who are seen as daughters and mothers. Black women are often sexually objectified for the perverse pleasure of men. Black women often experience racial-sexual oppression that is neither solely sexual nor racial; this can be seen in the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.
The slave system defined black people as chattel; Black women were often seen as genderless because they were only viewed in terms of value in relation to their labor for slaveholders. Rape is often used as a weapon of domination and repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist, and in the process, to demoralize their men. Slaveowners encouraged the terroristic use of rape to ‘put women back in their place;’ in the male supremacist vision of the period, this meant passivity, …show more content…
Black feminists Pauli Murray and Pauline Terrelonge Stone both agreed that the issue of black men enforcing the patriarchy was an “ideological ploy to heighten guilt in black women over their supposed collusion with whites in the oppression of black men.” These intraracial tensions worked against the public Black feminist forums, sabotaging or delaying most feminist activism that could have been achieved with the support of male