oneself to others. This utility of the mammy archetype endures.
The sassy Black mammy evolved but did not disappear into the emasculating Sapphire, another stereotype used to mitigate a changing racial landscape where Black women’s sexuality was no longer subsumed by ideas of reproductive capacity for slave labor.17 Sapphire wasn’t playfully vexed with her husband the way mammy was (though mammy’s husband was rarely if ever seen); she was mean, ordering Black men to do her bidding and behave in ways she saw fit. This seeming gender role reversal—where Sapphire wore the pants in the family—became another enduring trope, still visible in the drag performed by Black male comedians and in the digital blackface and digital minstrelsy employed by white social media users for their own ends, as discussed in chapter 1 of this text.18 Sapphire’s emasculation and seeming hatred of Black men never ventured into the realm of sapphic sex or desire, ensuring that her representation remained a controlling image without a possible liberatory libidinal escape from heteronormativity.
Sapphire also appears as the sassy Black friend to white women protagonists in film and television, pulling on some of the threads of mammy, as she is never depicted as having a life of her own, forever in service to her thin white friends. She might also appear big in frame, having prominent muscles or big breasts and body, when compared to the white women and Black men near her. Sapphire’s mean streak or sass is a source of comedy when directed at other Black people, a winning strategy for both the box office and Nielsen ratings. From Jennifer Hudson in Sex and the City (2008) to Alex Newell in Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist (2020), Sapphire provides the “magical Negro” balm of wit and wisdom, despite having no discernible life from which to have drawn these insights, given her deployment on-screen only in relation to her white friend.19 The image of Black women can be distorted in ways that perpetuate misogynoir and ease the consciousness and line the pockets of everyone else. In other words, misogynoiristic representations allow Black women to be ignored in society without guilt and allow for people to profit from these enduring negative images at the expense of real Black women’s lives.
Black women are caught at a vexing crossroads: hypervisible in media through misogynoir and invisible when in need of lifesaving attention. Misogynoir is the visual representation of anti-Black misogyny not only through caricature and false representations of Black women that inform how Black women are treated, but also through the omission of Black women and girls from view altogether.20 The so-called “missing white woman syndrome,” in which news media cover stories about missing white women and girls with a ferocity that is unmatched when women and girls of color go missing, continues to belie societal claims of growing racial equality.21 Sixty-four thousand Black women and girls were missing in the United States in 2017. Amber alerts are not even issued for many of these girls because there is an assumption that Black girls run away. The lives of Black women are so devalued that there is little public outcry when we are violated or exploited.22 When Black trans women are murdered, most often at the hands of men of color, there is no community outpouring of support for the victim or the victim’s family. The life expectancy for trans women of color is just thirty-five years.23 Initiatives like #SayHerName, discussed in chapter 2, and the Movement for Black Lives are trying to make the invisible visible, but it has been and continues to be an uphill battle. Whether it is through hypervisibility or complete erasure, Black women and girls are grappling with the negative consequences of misogynoir on their lives.
Misogynoir in Policy
During the 1940s, Black women who were in the hospital for any reason could be given hysterectomies without their consent or knowledge. This practice was so widespread in Mississippi it was dubbed a “Mississippi appendectomy.”24 Famed civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was one of the women subjected to this practice, and the experience was a major impetus for her activism.25 Sterilization abuse as a tool of white supremacy exceeded the Jim Crow era and continued well into the 1970s with victims like the young Relf sisters in Alabama, sterilized without their knowledge or consent as teenagers.26 These practices were supported by media representations like Warner Brothers’ Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, which portrayed Black women as sexually irresponsible and in need of outside intervention.27
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, media outlets and political officials constructed the image of the “welfare queen” to justify federal policy decisions that cut social services for millions of US Americans.28 Using the case of Linda Taylor, who in 1974 defrauded the welfare system of $8,000 among other much more serious crimes, President Reagan and his administration painted a picture of Black women willfully taking advantage of governmental aid.29 Despite the fact that the very rare occasion of welfare fraud was generally committed by men (as former NFL player Brett Favre’s 2020 payments of over one million dollars in restitution to the Mississippi Temporary Assistance for Needy Families attests), the representation of Black women as the culpable parties remains to this day.30 The welfare queen was depicted as an irresponsible Black woman who was having kids and getting rich from government checks. She got a “handout” for having lots of children and being unmarried. In a 1999 Harvard study on the impact of “welfare queen” imagery on participants’ ideas about welfare reform, “the most gender liberal white participants appear to be most likely to implicitly blame African-Americans for the plight of their racial peers, and there is early evidence to suggest that this tendency is most pronounced among women.”31 Language and images about the “welfare queen” were used to stoke misogynoiristic sentiment that was leveraged into actual legislation. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 was the culmination of years of Republican efforts to reduce the number of people using government assistance; it overhauled the welfare system by creating time limits for the use of assistance as well as work and marriage requirements, which were all designed to re-engineer Black women’s perceived dependence on the welfare state. The circulation of the myth of the welfare queen negatively impacted Black women by limiting federal resources that provided beneficiaries access to food, money, and healthcare.32 Black women’s access to the very means of life were curtailed for themselves and others because of the misogynoiristic image of the “welfare queen.” Even though most welfare recipients were at that time and still are white, one Black woman’s abuse of the system and the Moynihan Report were used by politicians to portray the Black family, particularly Black women, as pathological.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary of labor in the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential administration, took it upon himself to investigate poverty in Black families. In his 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” he noted that the major threat to racial equity was the deviant nature of the Black family, in which Black women often took on the role of head of household and primary breadwinner. Rather than address the structural impediments that made it difficult for Black men to find work, Moynihan pathologized the Black family, painting Black women’s marginal success in finding work outside the home as a form of emasculation that further inhibited Black men’s industry by making them depressed.33 Rather than address the undergirding white supremacist, capitalistic, and heteronormative imperative implicit in the idealization of the nuclear family and man as the rightful money maker of the home, Moynihan demonized Black women. This Sapphiric representation of Black women as emasculating Black men and the welfare queen’s continued circulation are examples of misogynoir’s ability to create material consequences that harm Black women’s health because these ideas informed and shaped public policy.
By the 1990s, anxieties around Black motherhood were further energized in the context of the burgeoning crack epidemic. An organization called CRACK (Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity) responded to the crisis by offering $200 to women of color using crack cocaine if they agreed to long-term or permanent birth control.34 Instead of offering resources or assistance to help the women overcome their addictions, CRACK promoted sterilization through this small monetary incentive. Comparatively, the 2010s opioid crisis, which has disproportionately affected white communities, has not seen similar tactics designed to sterilize white women drug users. White users are not criminalized, and the crisis has been treated as a public health problem. In the 1990s, news media described the children of users as “crack babies,” while media headlines
