POST-TRUMP INTERSECTIONS & “POST-RACIAL” REFLECTIONS:
BLACK WOMEN, RACISM, SEXISM, & CLASSISM IN THE U.S.
By
Jasmine Katosha Cooper

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the degree requirements
for the degree of
Sociology – Doctor of Philosophy
2017

ABSTRACT
POST-TRUMP INTERSECTIONS & “POST-RACIAL” REFLECTIONS:
BLACK WOMEN, RACISM, SEXISM, & CLASSISM IN THE U.S.
By
Jasmine Katosha Cooper
This multi-article dissertation employs life history interviews and qualitative media
content analysis to explore the continued oppression of and discrimination against Black women
in the U.S., with specific foci of everyday experiences, news media, and popular music in the
public sphere. Analysis suggests that the structured and historical relations of patriarchy and
racism shape everyday life for many Black women, but affect media representations, and the
interpretation of their actions in interpersonal and public spheres. Despite their long-term
confrontation with subjugation, Black women, continue to employ strategies to identify,
navigate, and resist such oppression.
Each chapter in the project employs a different lens on these experiences. The first
focuses on media representations, employing qualitative content analysis of online news articles
surrounding the fate of Korryn Gaines and Rekia Boyd -- two Black women who died in
encounters with police. Drawing on contributions by Neely (2015), Winfrey-Harris (2015),
Harris-Perry (2011), and Hill Collins (2000), this article links media disregard of Black women
to their victimization by police. The second article examines Beyoncé Knowles’ video
album, Lemonade in light of enduring Black feminist intellectual and musical traditions. The
discussion is informed by Angela Davis’ (1998), articulation of Black feminist underpinnings
and working-class women’s consciousness in blues music. Finally, the third article draws on
twenty-one life history interviews conducted by the author with young Black women to
illuminate the ways that racism, sexism, and classism impact the everyday lives of Black women

in the contemporary U.S. Conclusions suggest while US society continues to depict and treat
Black women in oppressive ways, Black women maintain traditions of resistance, as means of
survival, empowerment and collective affirmation.

Copyright by
JASMINE KATOSHA COOPER
2017

To my Jeremiahs, your love has propelled me through this process. My partner and my son. You
two have helped me keep going. I thank God for you. To Mommy, you held me up, and you
made this happen. I could not have started or finished without you. To Aunt Sylvia and MomMom, I wish you could have been here for this. You have always been my pillars. I am now Dr.
Jasmine K. Cooper. And I was made great by you. I’ve stood on your shoulders, been lifted,
shaped and corrected by your hands. This project is yours. We celebrate together.

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am thankful to so many people, for the completion of this degree. First, praises to the
Almighty – no words can express my gratitude for the gifts I’ve been given, the paths that have
been made straight for me, and the love I’ve been blessed to encounter. My steps have indeed
been ordered. I am truly grateful to be at this point.
I would also like to express my appreciation to my dissertation committee, Drs. Steven
Gold, Rashida Harrison, Rubén Martinez, and Xuefei Ren. Your encouragement, advice, urgings,
critiques, and questions have been instrumental in my growth and development as a scholar,
especially at the later stages of degree completion. Thank you for everything you’ve done for
me.
To my mother, my siblings, my family, my son and partner – thank you for sharing me
with this work. I know I’ve been consumed by trying to finish. And your sacrifice has not gone
unnoticed. I love you guys.
Dr. Leigh-Anne Goins and Dr. Mary Phillips – two of the scholar-friends who have
supported me, served as listening ears, and whose brilliance has shaped my thinking and writing.
I mention your names here to express my gratefulness, as well. And everyone else who has
contributed to the completion of this dissertation and this degree. I am also grateful to you.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES

ix

INTRODUCTION
1
INTRODUCTION
2
ARTICLE ONE: SYMBOLIC FORMS OF RACISM AND SEXISM IN NEWS
MEDIA
4
ARTICLE TWO: BEYONCÉ’S LEMONADE, BRINGING “WRECK,” AND BLACK
FEMINIST INTELLECTUAL TRADITIONS
6
ARTICLE THREE: POST-TRUMP INTERSECTIONS AND “POST-RACIAL”
REFLECTIONS: BLACK WOMEN, RACISM, SEXISM, & CLASSISM IN THE U.S 8
BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE
9
Civil Rights Movement to Neoliberalism
9
Neoliberal Ideology and Colorblindness
11
Postracialism and Black Feminist Theory
13
REFERENCES
18
ARTICLE ONE: SYMBOLIC FORMS OF RACISM AND SEXISM IN NEWS
MEDIA
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
THEORY AND LITERATURE
Media and Framing
Discourse
Gender, Silencing, “Symbolic Annihilation”
METHODS
Methods – Coverage
Methods – Framing Content
FINDINGS
Comparing Rates of Coverage – Gender
Comparing Rates of Coverage – Race
Framing Content
Culpability (Boyd)
Culpability (Gaines)
Protest
DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION
REFERENCES

29
30
31
38
38
43
44
47
47
47
50
50
52
53
53
55
57
59
61

ARTICLE TWO: BEYONCÉ’S LEMONADE, BRINGING “WRECK,” AND BLACK
FEMINIST INTELLECTUAL TRADITIONS
78
ABSTRACT
79
INTRODUCTION
80
BACKGROUND
83
vii

Subtle and Overt Attacks on Black Women in the U.S.
Bringing “Wreck,” Contemporary Celebrities &Artistic Acts of Resistance
THEORY AND LITERATURE
Black Feminisms
Black Feminist Thinkers & Musicians
METHODS
FINDINGS
Lemonade and Daughters of the Dust: Affirmative References to African
Diasporal Populations and Cultures
Hair/Colorism
Anger
Strength
Independence and Agency
Institutional Oppression
DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
ARTICLE THREE: POST-TRUMP INTERSECTIONS & “POST-RACIAL”
REFLECTIONS: BLACK WOMEN, RACISM, SEXISM,
& CLASSISM IN THE U.S.
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND
Black Women in Trump’s America
THEORY AND LITERATURE
Neoliberal Post-Racialism – A Precursor to Trump
Black Feminisms
METHODS & FINDINGS
Findings: Intersecting Structures of Racial, Class, and Gender Oppression
Findings: Institutional Racism and Economic Oppression
Findings: Intersecting Oppressions – Subtle Discrimination and
Microaggressions
Findings: Shifting/“The Mask”
Findings: Post-Obama vs. Post-Trump Developments – 2011 vs. 2016 Data
Findings: New Media, and the “Natural Hair Movement”
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX
REFERENCES
CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION
Contributions of the Project
REFERENCES

83
87
90
90
92
99
101
103
105
107
110
112
114
116
120

130
131
132
135
135
140
140
143
147
150
150
152
154
156
157
161
163
167
178
179
184
186

viii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Framing Articles

47

Table 2: Online News Coverage of Black Women Killed By Police

50

Table 3: Online News Coverage of Black Men Killed By Police

50

Table 4: Online News Coverage of White Woman Killed By Police

52

Table 5: Interview Participants

147

ix

INTRODUCTION

1

Black women in America have always had to wrestle with derogatory assumptions about their
character and identity. These assumptions shape the social world that Black women must
accommodate or resist in an effort to preserve their authentic selves and to secure recognition as
citizens (Harris-Perry 2011: 5).
INTRODUCTION
From the 1970s until roughly 2016, questions circulated about the “colorblindness” or
post-raciality of the nation, and its transcendence of racial and gender discrimination as major
forms of oppression. However, following the 2016 election, the U.S. witnessed increasing
legislative action against women, and numerous recorded instances of outright hatred and
xenophobia against racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups. Consequently, with growing
infringement on women’s rights, witnessing of/vulnerability to police brutality, increasing overt
racism, xenophobia, and the institutional inequity, Black women precariously lie at the
intersection of very volatile systems of racial, economic, and gender oppression in the U.S.
(Crenshaw 1991; Harris-Perry 2011; Winfrey-Harris 2015).
This multi-article dissertation employs life history interviews, qualitative media content
analysis, and cultural studies, to illuminate the continued oppression of Black women in the U.S.,
with specific foci of everyday experiences, news media, and popular music in the public sphere.
Throughout the project, I employ a Black feminist theoretical approach, along with an
understanding that the particular nature of enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, neoliberalism,
and continued institutional racism have precipitated the contemporary racial, social, political, and
economic conditions of Black American women, and continue to influence both perceptions and
media representations of Black people to this day (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Combahee River
Collective [1978] 1982; Davis 1983; Entman and Rojecki 2004; Harvey 2005; Kendi 2016; Hill
Collins 2004; Neely 2015; Perry 2011).

2

In the dissertation, I explain the maintenance of a set of structured social relationships,
regarding race and gender, and the power, prestige, and ideological resources that accompany
those positions in a neoliberal White-, male-dominated society. Each dissertation article serves as
a lens into the ways longstanding structures of oppression manifest real consequences in the lives
of Black women – regarding life chances, and the ways others see, discuss, and treat them. The
project is not necessarily focused on the maintenance of subordination of Black lives, bodies, and
identities in the U.S. through laws alone. But instead, the dissertation focuses on ideas,
representations, microaggressions, and subtle attacks on personhood in interactions. Moreover,
the dissertation provides windows into the strategies of navigation Black women employ for
survival, affirmation of Black identities, and self-preservation.
I centralize the contradictions emergent between problematic racial, class, and gender
ideologies, and the lived realities of Black womanhood in the United States today: realities that
can include disregard and silencing of experiences with discrimination; problematic media
representations; concrete economic vulnerability juxtaposed with illusions of access and
equality; witnessing (including digitally witnessing) or being victim to racialized and gendered
police brutality; along with increasing legislative action to limit reproductive choices. At the
same time, marginalized groups, particularly the one centralized in this dissertation, continue to
employ strategies to highlight, navigate, and resist oppression in the society. The articles in the
project elucidate these experiences.

3

ARTICLE ONE: SYMBOLIC FORMS OF RACISM AND SEXISM IN NEWS MEDIA
Neely (2015) asserts that even when Black women are victims of homicide, their deaths
are often under-reported by media outlets. Similarly, as noted by Mowatt et al. (2013), Black
women are often represented in media in hypervisible and stereotypical fashions, or they are
systemically erased and invisible in larger society. In the first section of Article One, I explore
news media treatment of two Black women who died in encounters with police: Korryn Gaines
and Rekia Boyd. I compare rates of news media coverage of these two women with the coverage
of Ramarley Graham and Alton Sterling, Black men killed in police encounters. Additionally, I
compare the coverage of these women with that of Justine Ruszczyk, a White woman also killed
in a police encounter.
I focus on the overall erasure/invisibility of Black women, (except for in particular,
hypervisible, and often stereotypical fashions), as a means of continuing their oppression
(Mowatt et al. 2013). I argue that rates of coverage for Black women killed by police will be far
lower than those of White women or Black men. Ignoring and erasing their racialized
mistreatment by police makes this form of oppression against them invisible. Secondly, rather
than the figurative martyrdom and sainthood that often follow young White murder victims, or
the apologetic tones taken in stories about White perpetrators, Black women victims’
presentations are marked differently (Jiwani and Young 2006; Neely 2015). They are often
presented in ways that reference and covertly trigger details about them that make them seem
responsible for their deaths (Jiwani and Young 2006; Neely 2015).
In the second section of Article One, I employ a qualitative content analysis of twentytwo online news articles. I argue that victims’ characters have been called into question by digital
news media sources. Through framing theory, I assert that discussions of their stories include

4

subtle allusions to rebellious, unruly, and/or threatening Blackness. I argue that, because they are
Black women, framing of articles about them will include coded racist and sexist language,
activations of stereotypes, and/or other forms of victim demonization.
Additionally, contemporary media – particularly due to technological advances and the
accessibility of social media to millions of Americans – function as dialectical spaces. In national
news, a number of journalists also critique the disproportionate vulnerability to police violence
experienced by Blacks in the U.S. As final goal, the first article highlights this voice, as well.
The final category addresses articles which frame Boyd and Gaines as subjects of protest, and/or
connected to a larger issue of systemic racism. I interrogate such representations in framing
suggestions in the articles. As evinced by the growing tide of protest in the country, these articles
illustrate ways media also serve as spaces of contestation of representations, unequal treatment,
gender and racial oppression.

5

ARTICLE TWO: BEYONCÉ’S LEMONADE, BRINGING “WRECK,” AND BLACK
FEMINIST INTELLECTUAL TRADITIONS
Though I discuss shared oppression, this does not mean that Black women operate,
experience life, or engage with their social worlds as a monolith. Instead, diverse individuals
often experience collective oppression due to shared membership in minority groups in U.S.
society. Further, although Black women are subject to these oppressions, African descendants in
the U.S. employ various means to affirm the identities, heritages, and cultures of the African
Diaspora (Powell 2002). As another major theme of this project, I address self-informed
resistance to intersecting forms of oppression, through media that affirm Black appearances,
cultures, identities, complexities, and beauty.
Article Two illustrates ways Black women continue to resist intersecting oppressions, and
celebrate the uniqueness of their cultural, racial, ethnic, and gender identities using historicallyrooted Black feminist intellectual traditions. The second article in the project draws on Angela
Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1999). Davis (1999) unearthed Black feminist
underpinnings and working-class women’s consciousness in blues women’s music. Similarly, I
argue that a recent fifty-nine-minute video album, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016),1 aligns
with enduring Black feminist intellectual and musical traditions. I assert that Lemonade
(Knowles-Carter 2016) exemplifies ways Black women employ media and public spaces that
often serve to reproduce their oppression. Media and public spaces also serve as vehicles to
celebrate their identities as Black women, and to highlight, critique, and resist the oppression and
marginalization they experience.
Black feminist scholars, poets, musicians, and writers draw on Black women’s
experiences to build theory about racism, sexism, and classism in the U.S. and globally. Whether
synthesized in scholarship, art, music, poetry, or other forms, Black women’s experiences with

6

discrimination, discussions of oppression, and acts of resistance, speak in contradiction to
dominant ideologies about racial and gender groups today. Their works capture the humanness,
agency, identity, cultures, ethnicities, and the characteristics that comprise the diverse group,
Black women. In the second article, I address ways Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) endeavors
at similar goals.

7

ARTICLE THREE: POST-TRUMP INTERSECTIONS & “POST-RACIAL” REFLECTIONS:
BLACK WOMEN, RACISM, SEXISM & CLASSISM IN THE U.S.
Finally, the third article in the dissertation project employs twenty-one semi-structured
interviews collected in 2016, and in 2011, with Black women aged eighteen to fifty. In Article
Three, I argue that Black women continue to experience daily discrimination, based on their
membership in multiple minority groups (Crenshaw 1991). Article Three interrogates this
group’s experiences navigating persistent, multifaceted, multi-structured oppression in the
neoliberal, “post-racial,” “post-feminist,” U.S
I discuss strategies Black women employ they navigate microaggressions. I address
problematic expectations that uniquely shape interactions with those outside their group. I
discuss ways they deal with others’ overt and subtle acts of daily racism, classism, and sexism.
Secondly, with a specific focus on the most recent data set, I address the unique experience of
witnessing re-emerging overt forms of racial discrimination. Simultaneously, subtle,
institutional, and covert oppression persist, collectively shaping majority and minority group
experiences in unique fashions.

8

BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE
The remainder of this article contains an exploration of social, economic, and political
shifts beginning in the 1960s that precipitated the present socioeconomic, and overt/post-racial
ideological situation. This is to provide an illustration of the social context into which the
dissertation articles fit.

Civil Rights Movement to Neoliberalism
As a consequence of prolonged scholarly, activist, and public effort, in the mid-twentieth
century the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, which situated “Coloreds” and “Whites” into
separate but unequal accommodations, housing, and employment for nearly a century was
largely destabilized (Winant 2001). The modern American civil rights, women’s rights, and
Black power movements, rulings against segregation and discrimination (e.g., Brown v. Board of
Education 1954), African independence struggles against European colonization, and the passage
of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, all helped to
contribute to a breakdown in the traditional systems of racial segregation, and discrimination
once coded into American law. As discussed by Winant (2001: 158-159),
Beginning in the war years and accelerating after 1945, U.S. racial politics
underwent a striking metamorphosis. This was the transformation of the U.S.
Black population from its thorough subjugation and general relegation to rural
peonage in the pre-World War II period to its emergence after the war’s end as a
largely mobilized and urbanized national community with egalitarian and
democratic commitments…. They linked discrimination and racism to the
dawning of the Cold War…. questioned the U.S. Cold War rhetoric, with its
professions of adherence to democratic values and personal freedom, by
documenting numerous instances of attacks on Blacks, racial bigotry and the like.
The increasing post-WWII interaction of global racial networks, non-Whites’ international
demands for racial equality, post-war political shifts, and post-WWII increases in global

9

migration all contributed to the shift away from overt, legalized White supremacy (Frederickson
1981; Winant 2001).
Occurring along with these shifts, studies of neoliberalization highlight the transitions of
nation-states, including the U.S., away from the welfarism/Keynesianism of the 1960s-1970s to
the neoliberal political and economic doctrine of the 1980s (Harvey 2005; Peck and Tickell
2002). As shown by Harvey (2005) and Peck & Tickell (2002), it was at this point that
neoliberals took advantage of a public burdened by financial “overregulation,” social unrest, and
disgust for governmental provision for the “undeserving” poor—all defined as burdens by
neoliberals, attributed solely to Keynesianism. The failures of Keynesianism, paired with social
unrest created a historical moment and swayed the economic and political climate toward
neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell 2002).
To be clear, neoliberalism “seeks to bring all human action to the domain of the market,”
contending “that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of
market transactions” (Harvey 2005: 3). According to neoliberal ideology, government
intervention in employment, social welfare, and the provision of economic safety nets are
unnecessary and interfere with the market (Harvey 2005; Peck and Tickell 2002). The
preexisting Keynesianist social and political safety nets are removed; free markets, finance,
“equality,” and individual freedoms and choice are privileged.
With social safety nets removed, the neoliberal project's intent to regulate inflation and
rejuvenate the market regardless of the consequences for jobs, resulted overall in “an awkward
mix of low growth and increasing income inequality” (Harvey 2005: 23, 88). As impediments to
the implementation of the neoliberal project were removed, the economic inequality it created
worsened. According to David Harvey (2005), “redistributive effects and increasing social

10

inequality have in fact been a persistent feature of neoliberalization” and are “structural to the
whole project” (Harvey 2005: 16).

Neoliberal Ideology and Colorblindness
Under the neoliberal political and ideological project, income and wealth are increasingly
marked by stark inequity – even more drastically along lines of race and gender. Through the
neoliberal lens, people are encouraged to see themselves as active and independent agents,
operating within the market and responsible for their own well-being—or lack thereof (Keil
2002: 234). Social and economic stratification are perceived as matters of choice and hard work
alone, not structured into the relations of society for centuries. This is a major force helping to
mask, dismiss, and cover the consequences of continued oppression, contributing heavily to the
emergence of post-racial/post-feminist ideologies (Harvey 2005; Bonilla-Silva 2006).
When individuals are affected by unequal social structures suffer or are unable to attain
higher incomes or greater economic or social success, it is their fault, not the fault of the state
(Harvey 2005; Peck and Tickell 2002; Keil 2002). This repositions the role of the state and
leaves its citizens as sole parties responsible for their economic and social survival regardless of
circumstance or larger structures that create unequal life chances. As it pertains to race, shifting
the focus of fault from structure to individual coincided with the shift from overt to covert
racism; it permeated dominant discourse (re)socializing Americans and reshaping dominant
racial ideologies (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Winant 2004; Brown et al. 2003).
Brown et al. (2003), Bonilla Silva (2006) and Winant (2004) characterize the shift
towards colorblind racial attitudes as precipitated by a national political turn towards
neoliberalism/neoconservatism during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Eduardo Bonilla-

11

Silva (2006) contends that a new racial ideology has emerged as a consequence of
neoliberal/neoconservative2 ideological dominance and racial changes occurring in the midtwentieth century.
By the 1980s, discussions of “colorblindness” 3 as an American reality emerged and grew,
as the political right took the language of the Civil Rights Movement, and employed the rhetoric
of neoliberalism and “race-neutrality” to redact the movement’s race-specific reforms (Blauner
1989; Bonilla-Silva 2006; Haney Lopez 2014; Omi and Winant 1986). Winant (2004), provides
key insight to the intersection of race with the political shift to neoliberalism. The author
highlights neoconservatism's responsibility in the development of colorblind racial policy, with
its arguments against any presence of racial difference, and subsequent claims for reverse racism
in “racially-targeted” policies like affirmative action (Winant 2004). Similarly, Doane (2015: 15)
asserts,
At the core of colorblindness is the belief that because the Civil Rights Movement
was nearly a half-century ago and White attitudes have demonstrably changed,
racism in no longer embedded in the U.S. social structure and no longer serves as
an obstacle to success. If racial inequality persists, then it is due to actions (or
inactions) on the part of minority group members.
According to Bonilla-Silva (2006: 28) this “colorblind racism” entails “abstract
liberalism,” which “involves using ideas associated with political liberalism (e.g., “equal
opportunity” the idea that force should not be used to achieve social policy) and economic
liberalism (e.g., choice, individualism) in an abstract manner to explain racial matters.”
Additionally, “cultural racism,” attributes racial inequality to cultural pathologies in blacks, e.g.,
laziness and failure to work hard enough to achieve. Further, the “minimization of racism”
ignores race as a significant factor in determining quality of life for racial minorities. (BonillaSilva 2006: 28).

12

Linked to the imposition of neoliberal ideologies, post-racial/post-feminist ideologies
encourage members of the public to view individual American accomplishment as separate from
structured relations of racial, class, and gender inequality. Consequently, blatantly racialized,
classed, and gendered phenomena are viewed as having no such influence anymore. Moreover,
policy measures to redress the continued effects of the racialized American system are often
labeled reverse racism, without attention to legacies of centuries of enslavement, nearly 100
years of Jim Crow segregation, and persistent differential outcomes for people of color brought
about by the intended and unintended effects of the country’s institutional policies (e.g.,
FHA/VA loan policies of the post-WWII era that helped secure wealth for middle class White
families).

Postracialism and Black Feminist Theory
Until very recently, scholarly, and public debates have raised questions about whether the
U.S. had become “post-racial” and “post-feminist” – finally transcending racial and gender
inequity as critical factors to individual opportunity and experience (Bobo 2011; Bonilla-Silva
2006; Cohen 2008; Hollinger 2011; Perry 2011; Wilson 2010; Wise 2009). The historic elections
of President Barack Obama – the country’s first Black Commander-in-Chief – in 2008 and 2012;
post-1965 changes in immigration; and increasing rates of interracial relationships served to
complicate dominant understandings of race and racism in the early twenty-first century U.S.
(Cose 2009; DiTomaso 2012; Gold 2004; Lee and Bean 2012; Treitler 2013; Waters 1999).
For many Americans, especially White Americans, the election of Barack Obama
marked what they believed to be a major shift in the racial consciousness of the
country, with a colorblind framework predicted as rightfully coming to dominate
the racial landscape. In the wake of the election, commentators and politicians
felt empowered to tell Black people and Black youth in particular that it was now
time to stop the “whining” because they had no more excuses (Cohen 2011: 200,

13

emphasis mine).
Similarly, by the 1990s, with women’s growing achievements in higher education and
employment, a related gendered backlash questioned whether feminism had accomplished its
major goals, and become irrelevant (Anderson 2015; McRobbie 2004; McRobbie 2011; Munford
and Waters 2014; Coppock et al. 2014). As noted by Anderson (2015: xi), American women’s
current progress in the realms of education and workplace participation indicate to many
members of U.S. society that gender equality is a present reality.
From this point of view, women, regardless of their race, social class, sexual
orientation, or geography, have achieved equality in most meaningful respects.
Feminism is now merely a history lesson. In fact, the argument goes, women have
been so successful in achieving equality, it is now men who are the victims of
gender discrimination. These sentiments make up modern misogyny (Anderson
2015: xi)
In similar fashion to post-racialism, Ortner (2014: 545) conceptualizes “post-feminism” as
growing disinterest among young women in the title “feminist,” or discussions of gender equality
in social, political, and economic arenas – as egalitarian gender relations have allegedly already
been attained. In this view, feminism is no longer needed; we are “post-” feminism in the U.S.
There is a double entanglement, across the socio-political universe, as feminism is
taken into account in order that it can be understood as having passed away. What
once may have had some role to play on the historical stage is no longer
needed….A sophisticated anti-feminism has become a recurring feature across the
landscape of both popular and political culture. It upholds the principles of gender
equality, while denigrating the figure of the feminist….Post-feminism registers,
time and again, the seeming gains and successes of the second wave of the
women’s movement, implying that “things have changed,” so feminism is now
irrelevant (McRobbie 2011: 179-180).
As such, anti-feminist activist groups, such as “Women against Feminism,” have gained
popularity, denying that women’s contemporary experiences are influenced by gender
discrimination. In essence, like the U.S. is post-racial, to a large portion of the population, it has
also supposedly entered a “post-feminist” era, as well.

14

Yet, the limited accomplishments of a few are not evidence that the U.S. is “post-racial,”
“post-feminist” or that race or gender are now insignificant. In fact, during the Obama First
Family’s occupancy of the White House, none of the Obamas were safe from scrutiny,
discrimination, and being associated with longstanding stereotypes about Blackness. President
Obama suffered immense disrespect – even from numerous government officials, as well as a
400% increase in death threats, following his ascension to Executive Office (Anderson 2016).
Moreover, Winfrey Harris (2015: 79) notes ways that even former First Lady Michelle Obama
was subject to media and political framing as a bestial, angry Black woman – subject constantly
to anti-Black stereotypes, despite ways her actual appearance and actions spoke constantly to the
contrary.
Further, as affirmed by Black feminist theoreticians, Black women’s experiences are
shaped by intersecting structures of racial, gender, and class oppression (Crenshaw 1991: 1242).
Similarly, the concepts “multiple jeopardies” (King 1993) and “matrix of domination” (Hill
Collins 2000) are demonstrative of the ways that multiple forces serve to maintain the oppression
of Black women simultaneously (Combahee River Collective [1978] 1982; Crenshaw 1991:
1242).
Economically, the neoliberal economic shift of the 1980s gradually situated a greater
concentration of the wealth and income into the hands of the richest 1%, eventually producing
income and wealth inequality today that is reminiscent of the depression-era in the U.S. (Harvey
2005; Kornbluth 2014; Martinez 2016). This is exceedingly troubling for Black women, who
must contend with intersecting structures of racial, class, and gender oppression (Crenshaw
1991). And despite tremendous post-civil rights era economic and educational accomplishments,
Black women continue to report incomes lower than White women, and White and Black men;

15

they earn sixty-two cents for every White male dollar (Morris and Muhammad 2014: 146; U.S.
Census 2010).
What does this mean for the supposed post-racial future of America? Contemporarily,
intersecting structures of racial, class, and gender oppression continue to shape life, opportunity,
and experience for groups in U.S. society, as has been discussed by multiple scholars of Black
feminism using different metaphors and theories (Crenshaw 1991; King 1993). However, these
structures are masked, reinforced, and perpetuated by post-racial, post-feminist ideologies –
worldviews, ways of thinking about, explaining, and understanding racism and sexism, which
currently dominate in the U.S. These are ways the public is conditioned to think about race and
other types of inequality that justify, support, reinforce and perpetuate extant stratification.
Today, these ideologies perpetuate the overall oppression, by justifying inequality through
abstract liberalism (Bonilla-Silva 2006), and explanations that demonize the victimized
themselves.
Moreover, in tandem with subtle, ideological, and microaggressive forms of oppression,
recently, instances of outright discrimination have returned and increased, as there seems to be
more rhetorical freedom to be discriminatory following the 2016 election of Donald Trump.
What has become apparent following the election is that certain White members of the public
feel more at liberty to act on the principles Trump upholds – the outright racial hatred, sexual
oppression, class inequity, violence against women and non-Whites which secured his office.
Since the election, people of color, in general, have been increasingly subject to, not only
the subtle marginalization that seemed to dominate in the post-civil rights era. There has also
been a recent increase in reports of outright discrimination, violence, and directly racialized acts
against non-Whites. Ultimately, not even a decade after post-racialism dominated discussions on

16

U.S. racial attitudes, overtly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Black affect presently
coincides with anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black legislation. Thus, the 2016
election was not a mundane event in the history of the U.S., but instead has implications for the
maintenance of racial/ethnic, gender, sexual, and economic inequity in the country. This is
particularly true for the ways these forms of oppression manifest in the everyday lives of
members of marginalized groups operating in the society.

17

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18

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1

Like Davis (1998), the project is not concerned with the artist, controversies surrounding her, or
her growing politicization – particularly because the poetry that underlays longer music video
scenes was written by Somali-British poet, Warsan Shire. Instead, the project centralizes the

27

music, images, and poetry, as cultural creations that align with earlier Black feminist intellectual
traditions by addressing and celebrating the complexity of Black womanhood and Black
women’s experiences.
2 Throughout

the paper, I categorize neoconservatism and neoliberalism in a similar fashion to
David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005). Here, Harvey argues that these tenets of
neoconservatism parallel those of neoliberalism, but in addition, American neoconservatism
espouses certain moralistic principles connected to the evangelical church.
3

The terms “colorblind” and “post-racial” are used interchangeably throughout the project. As
race and skin color are often associated with one another, the notion of a society that dismisses
the significance of color can also be connected to the notion of a society that ignores race.

28

ARTICLE ONE:
SYMBOLIC FORMS OF RACISM AND SEXISM IN NEWS MEDIA

29

ABSTRACT
This project interrogates news media treatment of two Black women killed by police: Rekia
Boyd and Korryn Gaines. The article addresses coded framing and silences surrounding these
victims of police violence. I focus on the overall erasure/invisibility of Black women, (except for
in particular, hypervisible, and often stereotypical fashions), as means of continuing their
oppression (Mowatt et al. 2013; Neely 2015). I argue that despite their premature deaths, news
coverage and mentions of these individuals in three of the top digitally circulating U.S. news
sites will be far lower than these figures for two Black men killed at roughly the same times
through police/vigilante intervention (Collins 2000; Harris Perry 2011; Jiwani 2006; Neely
2015). Secondly, I argue that despite their premature deaths, analysis of the subtle framing
suggestions in some articles about Gaines and Boyd may demonstrate stereotypical tropes, and
subtly racialized and gendered representations of Black women (Collins 2000; Harris Perry
2011; Jiwani 2006; Neely 2015). I analyze ways certain representations of Boyd and Gaines
harken back to historical stereotypes and pejorative tropes about Black women (Hill-Collins
2000; Hill-Collins 2004; Harris-Perry 2011). Ultimately, these disparities in coverage speaks to a
tendency of media to overlook, erase, disregard, and make invisible the varied manifestations of
intersecting oppression in the lives of Black women (Neely 2015).

30

INTRODUCTION
Mowatt et al. (2013) note when Black women are discussed in media, they are often
hypervisible in problematic ways that harken back to historical stereotypes about Black women’s
oversexuality, attitudinality, rebelliousness, and lack of femininity. Members of this group have
historically been inaccurately framed in news, scholarly, and popular discourses as bestial,
stronger, less feminine, more capable of withstanding pain, and overall less human than the
oppositionally-positioned, normative, unspoken, frail, dependent stereotypical conjurings of
“true White womanhood” (Harris-Perry 2011; Winfrey Harris 2015). Further, according to
Mowatt et al. (2013), when they are not represented in these fashions, Black women are
otherwise systemically erased and invisible in larger society.
Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality (Epstein et al. 2017; Finley 2017)
found that Black girls are perceived by others to be less innocent than White girls by age five. In
line with longstanding stereotypes about Black women’s “hardness,” “criminality,” and/or
“toughness,” Black girls tend to be punished more severely in schools; treated harshly in
interactions with police (Morris and Muhammad 2014). When compared to other girls, Black
girls are more likely to experience “negative school, economic, and criminal justice outcomes”
(Morris and Muhammad 2014: 141). Further, the suspension rate is higher for Black girls than
other races (Morris and Muhammad 2014: 140). They are imprisoned at almost three times the
rate of White girls, and represent “fastest growing segment of juvenile justice population in
secure confinement” (Morris and Muhammad 2014: 148).
In 2017, videos and accounts of numerous violent attacks by police against Black
women, have continued to circulate social media. These include images of frail thirty-eight yearold Katie McCrary being beaten on the ground in Dekalb County, Georgia by a larger male

31

police officer for more than a minute (Miller 2017). Similarly, nineteen year-old Tatyana
Hargrove was punched, attacked by a police dog, and arrested in Bakersfield, California in June
(Wang 2017). Police supposedly mistook the five-foot-two-inch 115-pound teenager for a thirtyyear-old man, outweighing her by nearly sixty pounds (Wang 2017). Moreover, thirty-year-old
Charleena Lyles, a pregnant mother of four, was killed by the same police from whom she
sought help after a robbery in Seattle, Washington (Goff and Buchanan 2017).
Recently, instances of White-on-Black police and vigilante violence against unarmed
Black victims have captured significant national attention. 1 Yet, much of the media attention has
centered Black men. Facing similar types of police violence in marked Black bodies, the police
killings of Black women like Charleena Lyles, Tanisha Anderson, Renisha McBride, Rekia
Boyd, and Korryn Gaines are also of consequence. Yet, the persistent killings and non-fatal
brutal treatment of Black women are largely overlooked by major news media outlets.
Rather than an interrogation of their killings, this article investigates online news media
treatment of these women, the framing of their stories, and the erasures, indirect silencing, and
lack of media attention to the violence they experienced. 2 In this chapter, I argue that these
silences serve to continue Black women’s oppressions by masking, erasing and ultimately
making invisible the raced and gendered forms of state-sponsored violence (Bonilla Silva 2006;
Mowatt et al. 2013; Neely 2015).
That is, the media silences surrounding these women fail to bring attention to the
concrete vulnerabilities to police violence they experience because they are Black women, while
at the same time bringing attention (in some ways) to the systemic violence experienced by
Black men. The latter form aligns more directly with the longstanding stereotypical trope of the
Black brute, used to justify earlier raced lynching and brutality against Black men as means of

32

social control. Yet, in failing to discuss, name, or humanize Black women who are victimized by
police, certain national news publishers are complicit in erasing racialized police treatment of
Black women, as well as the concrete violence and marginalization to which they remain
vulnerable.
This disparity between the remembrance of Boyd and those of the others reflects a
popular conception that racial discrimination and violence in America, past and
present, are almost exclusively aimed at men: When we talk about lynching,
police brutality and mass incarceration, we are almost always talking about
African-American men, not women. Being a target of racism is seen as patrilineal,
a social and political disadvantage that black fathers unwillingly bequeath to their
sons but not their daughters. The result is a dyad of vulnerability and invisibility
that most African-American women, including me, learn to navigate at an early
age (Tillet 2015).
Consequently, such media erasure results in the invisibility of Black women’s vulnerability to
police violence.
To this end, I compare rates of coverage of Korryn Gaines’ and Rekia Boyd’s killings to
those of Black men who died at police hands, Ramarley Graham and Alton Sterling. These
subjects were selected because Graham’s and Sterling’s deaths were publicized under similar
circumstances (e.g., video streaming), and during the same years of Gaines’s and Boyd’s deaths.
I investigate the coverage of these individuals by searching their names for articles
published in three of the highest circulating digital news sites, CNN, Fox News Brand, and The
New York Times Brand. I argue that despite their premature deaths, news article coverage of
these individuals is far lower than these figures for two Black men killed at roughly the same
times through police/vigilante intervention (Collins 2000; Harris Perry 2011; Jiwani 2006; Neely
2015).
Similarly, to interrogate the intersection of gender with race, I compare rates of coverage
for Boyd and Gaines, two Black women, to digital circulation rates for Justine Ruszczyk’s death,

33

a White woman killed by a Black Somali American police officer. Ultimately, these disparities in
coverage speaks to a tendency of media to overlook, erase, disregard, and make invisible the
varied manifestations of intersecting oppression in the lives of Black women (Neely 2015). Yet,
as is evinced by the disparities in coverage between Black and White women of state-sponsored
violence, when White women die at police hands, it is officially time to report on, and resolve
the issue (Hill 2016).
To be clear, this article does not attempt to minimize very real threat of violence
experienced by Black men. Black men are subject to a unique history of lynching and being
viewed through the controlling image of the Black brute, used to justify violence exacted on
them as means of social control in the early 1900s and beyond (Bay 2010). Instead, the aim of
the article is to highlight the similar, yet unique racialized and gendered victimization to which
Black women are vulnerable. To reference my previous example, although it receives scant
attention comparably, Black women were also subject to rape and lynching as forms of racial
violence in the Jim Crow south.
As a primary goal, the article argues media disregard and erasure of Black women’s
vulnerability to police violence speaks to the overall tendency to overlook Black women’s
oppression in the society (Neely 2015). Furthermore, problematic media framing of details
surrounding their killings can also guide audiences to believe these victims of police violence are
culpable for their deaths.
As a secondary aim, I also address coded framing surrounding these victims of police
violence. I argue that despite their premature deaths, analysis of the subtle framing suggestions in
some articles about Gaines and Boyd may demonstrate stereotypical tropes, and subtly racialized
and gendered representations of Black women (Collins 2000; Harris Perry 2011; Jiwani 2006;

34

Neely 2015). In application of the concepts of the crooked room (Harris-Perry 2011), and
controlling images (Hill Collins 2000; Winfrey Harris 2015; Neely 2015), these articles present
Boyd and Gaines in fashions that harken back to historical stereotypes and pejorative tropes
about Black women, in order to, even subtly, make them responsible for the violence exacted on
them.
Through a directed qualitative content analysis (Hsieh and Shannon 2005) of twenty-two
online news articles, I focus on these symbolic and strategic forms of racism and sexism that
mark media representations of Boyd and Gaines. I analyze the articles for justifications of
victimization through repeated references to the victim’s unruliness, vocalness, or attitudinality
(Hill Collins 2000; Winfrey Harris 2015). These articles include strategic namings of identity –
to suggest pejorative readings of the victim, direct audience readings of her, and/or normalize,
naturalize, justify, or make her somehow blameworthy for her death (Collins 2000; Collins 2004;
Harris-Perry 2011; Jiwani 2006; Neely 2015).
Finally, contemporary media – particularly due to technological advances and the
popularity and accessibility of social media to millions of Americans – function as dialectical
spaces. Major news publications included, media serve as contestation of meanings, for critiques
of the social status quo, and for unearthing systemic forms of racism and sexism. Media serve as
spaces for the reinforcement of social structures, as well as for those structures’ destabilization.
Within these spaces occur the contestation of racial meanings and their significance (Brown et al.
2012; Campbell et al. 2012; Cole and Jenkins 2012; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Gandy 1996;
Gross and D’Ambrosio 2004; Iyengar 1990; Markovitz 2011; Meyers 2004).
Growing access of members of the American public to social media (including Instagram
and Facebook Live, SnapChat, and Twitter), and cellphones with video capability, has meant that

35

individuals can not only capture, but share everyday microaggressions, differential, and
obviously racialized treatment online. While racist and sexist ideas about Blacks are reinforced
through various media, these media allow also for the unadulterated display of live streamed and
videoed police violence against Blacks – as occurred with the deaths of Philando Castile, Eric
Garner, and Korryn Gaines. These videos are shared with millions of users, untainted by
intentional misremembering or intentionally/unintentionally falsified reports (e.g., the killing of
Freddie Gray). Often these recordings facilitate the generation of ire against, and protest of these
killings (Hill 2016).
The utility of such social media sites for the capture and dissemination of instances of
fatal and non-fatal police violence is becoming clear. The video of Eric Garner’s strangling by a
New York City police officer generated ire, heavily through circulation online. The murder of
Philando Castile, in front of his fiancé and four-year-old daughter, also gained attention after
being livestreamed on Facebook. Similarly, Facebook confirmed terminating Korryn Gaines’
Facebook Live stream of her attempted arrest, and later police murder; Baltimore City Police
requested that Facebook shut down the life feed prior to storming her apartment.
Further, the reaches of White privilege, and the differential treatment Blacks receive
become apparent when similar situations are compared by race. That is, the police murders of
these armed and unarmed Black victims contrast the slow, deliberate response of authorities to
violent murderers like Dylann Roof, James Holmes, 1 or to the armed Oregon Bundy family
militia. (Urquhart 2016). After killing nine Black servicegoers at UAME Church in Charleston,
South Carolina, targeted by the killer because of their race, Roof was apprehended alive by
police. Officers reportedly took Rook to Burger King, prior to booking him on charges. Further,

1

In 2012, Holmes killed twelve people in an Aurora, Colorado theater.
36

like Korryn Gaines and Philando Castile, the militia was armed, yet remained in occupation of a
federal wildlife refuge on Native American Paiute land for forty-one days. All but one of the
seventeen-member group were apprehended alive and members of the militia were later
acquitted of trespassing and occupation charges (Urquhart 2016).
In national news, a number of journalists also discuss the deaths of Boyd and Gaines,
critiquing the disproportionate vulnerability to police violence experienced by Blacks in the U.S.
Often when referenced in connection with Black Lives Matter, or other victims of police
violence, Gaines and Boyd are depicted as human, sufferers of unjust actions that should not
have occurred.
As a final goal, this article also intends to highlight this voice, as well: articles which
frame Boyd and Gaines as subjects of protest, as human victims, and/or, as victims of police
violence. I discuss counterframes and representations that connect these women to larger issues
of race and gender inequity that precipitated their deaths. I interrogate such representations in
framing suggestions in the articles, which, evinced by the growing tide of protest in the country,
illustrate ways media also serve as spaces of contestation of representations, unequal treatment,
gender and racial oppression.

37

THEORY AND LITERATURE
Media and Framing
Numerous scholars argue that critical interrogations of mass media’s packaging of events
and issues, demonstrate that how mass media present a message can contain ideas and
suggestions that may influence audience reactions (Brown et al. 2012; Campbell et al. 2012;
Cole and Jenkins 2012; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Gandy 1996; Gross and D’Ambrosio
2004; Iyengar 1990; Meyers 2004).
Framing is the process by which media gatekeepers define and construct issues or
events...When journalists frame information, they organize the concepts that
reside in texts and public discourse and provide the reference points which
viewers make sense of issues like crime, natural disasters, and ideological
debates. (Cole and Jenkins 2012: 182)
Additionally, the series of connective ideas surrounding the presentation of a media
message may incorporate subtle clues, words, and phrases that may suggest the way an audience
should see that message (Brown et al. 2012; Campbell et al. 2012; Cole and Jenkins 2012;
Entman 2003; Gamson and Modigliani 1989; Gandy 1996; Gross and D’Ambrosio 2004; Iyengar
1990; Meyers 2004). Further, these ideas and messages are less likely to encounter resistance and
critique when drawing on culturally resonant frames, which “use words and images highly
salient in the culture, which is to say noticeable, understandable, memorable” (Entman 2003:
417, emphasis in original).
By highlighting some aspects of media stories, framing makes connections amongst the
ideas in a message, “so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation and/or solution…”
(Entman 2003: 417, emphasis in original). For instance, Entman (2003) uses former President
Bush’s framing of 9/11 as an act of “evil” and “war” to show that elite framing of a topic often
tells how the public should see an issue. Further, according to Entman, this filters down to the

38

public from administration, elites, news organizations (Entman 2003: 419). As responses of
audiences are often linked to how issues are framed, it is important to interrogate the latent
content, and messages contained within media messages.
According to Reid-Brinkley (2012: 82) framing analysis is also useful to analyzing race
in both print and news media. This method enables researchers to trace the themes that are
repeatedly drawn on by various media, and presented to readers to make sense of message
content (Reid-Brinkley 2012: 82). Further, this method is useful for helping to uncover subtle,
perhaps unintended messages in the presentation of media information that may influence larger
discourses about race, sex, class, and groups who are multiply privileged and marginalized by
these structures of oppression.
With specific regard to race and gender in media representations, framing theorists
highlight the frames that often surround media messages with people of color as subjects.
Framing theorists note that the ideas surrounding representations of “othered” racial groups are
marked by longstanding racial stereotypes and ideologies that were created to justify their
position within a racist and sexist social order, and continue to do that discursive work today
(Campbell et al. 2012; Cole and Jenkins 2012; Meyers 2004; Jiwani and Young 2006; ReidBrinkley 2012). These scholars assert that media representations of minority groups often
maintain longstanding White/Other and superior/inferior racial dichotomies through the framing
of people of color. That is,
Racism does not consist only of White supremacist ideologies of race, or only of
aggressive or overt blatant discriminatory acts, the forms of racism as it is
currently understood in informal conversations, in the media, or in much of the
social sciences. Racism involves the everyday, mundane, negative opinions,
attitudes, and ideologies and the seemingly subtle acts and conditions of
discrimination against minorities, namely those social cognitions, social acts,
processes, structures, or institutions that directly or indirectly contribute to the

39

dominance of the white group and the subordinate position of minorities (van
Dijk 1993: 5, emphasis mine).
I highlight studies of framing theory below. Meyers (2004) applies content analysis to
news that covered rape of Black women during the mid-1990s Freaknik college student
celebration in Atlanta. Overall, Meyers found that Black women were framed in connection to
the controlling image of the Jezebel (Hill Collins 2000). Essentially, the rape survivors’
oversexuality (manifested in revealing dress, and “suggestive” dancing), were among forces at
fault for the brutality they suffered – a semantic move which demonizes victims of violence,
assigns survivors responsibility for violence against them (which suggests they, rather than the
perpetrators, should have prevented it), and links Black women to longstanding tropes that
justify, minimize, normalize, or excuse brutality against them (Hill Collins 2000; Meyers 2004).
Campbell et al. (2012) found similar racialized myths in the 1995 coverage of the
holiday, reproduced fifteen years later, as January 2009 also marked the inauguration of
President Barack Obama, the first Black-identified U.S. president. In like fashion to 1995, the
authors found local television news constructs simultaneous and contradictory myths of
difference and assimilation. The myth of assimilation asserts that Black people are fully
assimilated into the society, and racism has been transcended, as legalized discrimination is no
longer a factor in the country. Alongside the myth of assimilation, is the myth of difference, “in
which African Americans (as well as other people of color) are routinely cast as different, as
dangerous, as amoral perpetrators of violent acts” (Campbell et al. 2012: 13).
Even when lived realities contradict dominant framing, and even when journalists are
appearing to represent progress, some continue to rely on existing racialized, sexed, and classed
themes, making the framing of media messages a significant way that racial and gender
hierarchies are upheld and reproduced (Campbell et al. 2012; Jiwani and Young 2006; Meyers

40

2004; Reid-Brinkley 2012).
Reid-Brinkley (2012) analyzes news media representations of youths involved in a nonprofit debate education program. The presentations of the participants, including the author, were
confined to dominant media frames surrounding Black urban youth, including poverty, familial,
dysfunction, and criminal offspring (Reid-Brinkley 2012: 79). Even when these frames
contradicted participants’ lived realities (as was the case with the author/former program
participant), journalists still aimed to connect participants’ stories with social deviance, risk of
becoming socially deviant, and survival against odds narratives (Reid-Brinkley 2012: 79). News
that presented the story scripted the youths in this way, left little space for more complex
representations of the participants, better rooted in their lived realities.
In similar fashion, with a specific focus on news, Neely (2015) notes that even when
Black women are victims of violence, they are often presented in ways that reference and
covertly trigger details about them that make them seem responsible for their deaths. Neely
(2015) conducts case studies of White and Black women victims of violence. As compared to
White women, Neely (2015) illustrates that Black women are treated differently by police,
presented less favorably than White women by news outlets, and discussed in ways that
reference and covertly trigger details about them that make them seem responsible for their
deaths. This justifies or at least anesthetizes audiences to the violence the victims experienced.
As a final example, Jiwani and Young (2006) conducted frame analyses of 128 articles
from The Vancouver Sun between 2001 and 2006, centering on violence against women of color
(Jiwani and Young 2006: 898). To draw their sample, the authors searched for the terms
“missing women” along with location and newspaper publication, and analyzed the articles in
terms of dominant frames and counterframes (Jiwani and Young 2006: 902). To be clearer, in

41

their analysis, Jiwani and Young (2006) note the portrayal of the women contained strategic
naming and silences in their presentation (i.e., specifying Aboriginality), semantically marking
them as “Other,” and situating them outside of boundaries of hegemonic White femininity.
According to the authors,
a frame that recurs throughout the coverage is that of the missing women being
mostly Aboriginal, drug-addicted sex-trade workers. Counterframes were also
embedded in… prevailing representations that re-enacted gendered, racialized,
and class- based understandings of the missing women case (Jiwani and Yougn
2006: 903).
By marking the victims as “other,” pejorative, bad, the violence against them seems more
justified, and less significant.
This is of course in stark contrast to how members of the dominant society are
portrayed – as reasonable, law-abiding, rational, and above all, benevolent…What
needs to be emphasized is the interlocking nature of these representations. Just as
the ‘good’ woman is contrasted with the ‘bad’ woman, so the racialized body is
contrasted with the dominant, White body. (Jiwani and Young 2006: 898-902)
By strategically naming race, by subtly drawing on coded themes that link people of
color to longstanding stereotypes of oversexuality, social deviance, and violence, by journalistic
constraints that confine news to soundbites, and brief episodes, rather than those who address the
larger sociohistorical context that contributes to black/white inequality (Gamson and Modigliani
1989; Iyengar 1990; Davis and Gandy 1999; Entman and Rojecki 2000; Jiwani 2006; Jiwani and
Young 2006; Reid-Brinkley 2012).
According to Jiwani (2006: 14), this provides an example of framing racial difference
situate nonwhites, and racial “others” as distinct from the norm, and separate from the
normalized majority, via “the categorization of racism as something other than what it is….and
the conversion of racial difference into categories that demonize, trivialize, compartmentalize,

42

exoticize, erase, or contain that difference in ways that suit the interests of a dominant,
hegemonic power.”

Discourse
Ultimately, framing theorists note that specific types of framing can influence entire
discourses, or ways of connecting language to non-language symbols, in order to give those
symbols social meaning, to recognize identities, and to assign power and privilege to specific
groups based on the recognition of those identities (Gee 1999: 13). Gee (1999) notes that it is not
just connecting the language to the symbol, but the symbol must be recognized (consciously or
unconsciously) by audiences as being connected to a specific identity within the discourse.
According to discourse scholars, the society is constrained by structures of race, class and
gender oppression that are partially upheld by work the common-sense-making media does in
presenting people of color and Whites in ways that bespeak and normalize the racial and gender
stratification of society. Media representations of people of color are constrained by power
relationships that have historically influenced the development and presentations of media
images, particularly regarding people of African descent in the U.S. Consequently, packages of
ideas that surround the presentation of media messages about or including women of color may
be connected to longstanding racial stereotypes and ideologies that were created to justify their
position within a racist and sexist social order, and continue to do that discursive work today
(Meyers 2004; Jiwani 2006; Jiwani and Young 2006; Van Dijk 1993).
These theorists highlight 1) historical structures of racism, sexism, and classism that have
continued to influence options for representation of nonwhite, nonmale groups, especially
women of color; 2) the ownership of institutions of cultural production by a predominately

43

White, wealthy class of men (Semmes 1992); 3) strategic naming and silences that may harken to
historical and stereotypical tropes, and reinforce the normalcy, universal nature of whiteness and
maleness, alongside the othering, abnormality, and naming of difference, (e.g., nonwhiteness,
youth, “urbannness”) (Jiwani and Young 2006; Jiwani 2006: 4; Reid-Brinkley 2012). The way
this normalization reinforces and reproduces White supremacy is by distorting its presence and
making whiteness the unnamed universal. Further, these scholars unearth the semantic moves
that frequently, though now subtly, mark women and people of color as problematic, different,
other, and subordinate (Entman and Rojecki 2000; Davis and Gandy 1999; Meyers 2006; ReidBrinkley 2012; Semmes 1993; Gandy 1996; Van Dijk 1993).
The strengths of this approach are in its ability to capture historically problematic
representations of nonwhite groups, their connections to the maintenance of racial, gender, and
class inequality through media representations. Additionally, the hegemonic approach does
capture the disproportionate representation in ownership of modes of cultural production by
White male elites, and the historical use of media, by those elites, to secure their positions at the
type of a racially and sexually stratified social hierarchy.

Gender, Silencing, “Symbolic Annihilation”
Shifting to gender marginalization in media, Tuchman (1997: 12) addresses the
marginality and underrepresentation of women in media, noting that
the very underrepresentation of women, including their stereotypic portrayal, may
symbolically capture the position of women in American society – their real lack
of power. It bespeaks their “symbolic annihilation” by the media…just as
representation in the media signifies social existence, so too underrepresentation
and (by extension) trivialization and condemnation indicate symbolic
annihilation.

44

Lazar (2005) and Tuchman (1997) highlight similar processes, and provide feminist
contributions critical discourse theory. Lazar (2005: 1) addresses the increasingly subtle nature
of gendered power relationships and their production, reproduction, and resistance through text
and talk. Further, Lazar identifies concrete manifestations of these subtle hegemonic
relationships in work and political life. Lazar’s (2005: 19) “marked inclusion” critiques the
“benevolent inclusion of critical and/or feminist discourse studies from non-Western
geographical regions in international for a, but marked as ‘other’ instead of mainstreamed.”
This project also rests heavily on Black feminist theoretical traditions. Commonalities
among Black feminist theorists of intersectionality also include approach to structures of race,
class, and gender oppression as intersecting/interlocking, mutually-reinforced social structures
(Combahee River Collective [1978] 1982; Crenshaw 1991: 1242; Hill Collins 1998: 204). They
experience membership in a racial minority differently than Black men, who have access to the
privilege of gender majority status. Similarly, White women have access to many privileges of
being a part of the dominant racial group in the society, though they are members of a gender
minority (Crenshaw 1991: 1252).
A number of Black feminist and other feminist researchers have advanced new metaphors
and lenses to address the silencing, dismissal, and disregard that Black women navigate, often
reinforced and perpetuated in media. Interstices, for instance, interrogates symbolic
representations of Black women, highlighting intentional discursive silences that foster feelings
of non-belonging, marginalization, and invisibility for members of the group (Spillers 1984;
Lorde 2007; Harris-Perry 2011; Mowatt et al. 2015; Winfrey Harris 2015). Such silences may
symbolically overlook Black women, negate their belonging in certain spaces, and minimize
existence as complex beings. Similarly, Harris-Perry (2011) developed the concept of the

45

crooked room, to describe the constant struggle against a longstanding history of racial and
gender stereotypes with which Black women must contend.
When they confront race and gender stereotypes, Black women are standing in a
crooked room, and they have to figure out which way is up. Bombarded with
warped images of their humanity, some Black women tilt and bend themselves to
fit the distortion….To understand why Black women’s public actions and political
strategies sometimes seem tilted in ways that accommodate the degrading
stereotypes about them, it is important to appreciate the structural constraints that
influence their behavior. It can be hard to stand up straight in a crooked room
(Harris-Perry 2011: 29).
Other researchers help illustrate the ways “standing in a crooked room” becomes
especially difficult, when Black women are represented in media. Specifically, regarding news
stories, the overt identification of marginalized racial, gender, or sexual characteristics to ensure
an individual’s or group’s classification as non-White, non-male, non-heterosexual, nonmainstream – that is, other – alongside the failure to name powerful, privileged groups, thereby
mainstreaming, and universalizing, the latter identities as normal, and their perspectives as
representative of the taken-for-granted knowledge of the society.
Consequently, when popular culture repeatedly omits Black women, or draws on
controlling images of Black womanhood, the larger consequence is the reproduction of Black
women’s oppression. The erasure, invisibility, and marked representations of Black women
victims of police violence contributes to their symbolic annihilation (Mowatt et al. 2013;
Tuchman 1997). However, not only are women marginalized and symbolically annihilated in
media, but race, gender, and class oppression are mutually constructed. Black women, trying to
stand in a crooked room, experience various types of symbolic annihilation simultaneously. And
with that symbolic annihilation, they are erased, and their oppressions, particularly their
vulnerability to state-sponsored violence, are largely invisible in mass media. This critical
feminist discourse conceptual tool can be expanded and applied with Black feminist theory.

46

METHODS
Methods – Coverage
Each individual’s name was used as a search term in three of the most highly-circulating
digital news sites in the U.S.: The CNN Network, Fox News Digital Network, and The New York
Times Brand.3 These were selected for the availability of verification resources for rates of
coverage, including search engines for the publication sites themselves, as well as Google’s
News Search Engine, which was used to compare numbers.
I included articles published from the date of death to November 18, 2017. I excluded
videos and articles that did not actually mention subjects’ full names in the article content.
Searches were conducted for exact hits on individual names (e.g., “Korryn Gaines”) specifically
mentioned within the titles and/or written content of articles.
1. Rekia Boyd – Black woman, 22, unarmed, killed 21-Mar-12 by off-duty police
officer in Chicago, IL
2. Korryn Gaines – Black woman, 23, armed, killed 1-Aug-16 by police barricaded
in home in Baltimore, MD – videos of police entry
3. Ramarley Graham – Black man, 18, unarmed, killed 2-Feb-12 by police in home
without warrant in New York, NY
4. Alton Sterling – Black man, unarmed, 37, shot point blank 5-Jul-16 by police in
Baton Rouge, LA selling CDs– video of shooting
5. Justine Ruszczyk – White woman, 40, unarmed, killed in front of home by
Minneapolis, MN police on 17-Jul-17
Methods – Framing Content
Table 1: Framing Articles

Rekia Boyd

Number of Articles Included in Framing
Section of Study
#1 – 11

Korryn Gaines

#12-22

Article Groups

N =22

47

The second section employs directed qualitative content analysis. Quantitative
approaches to content analysis rest upon identifying trends in the frequency of terms, phrases,
descriptors, used in articles, television shows, and other forms of media content. Contrarily,
qualitative content analysis is instead concerned with the description of latent, or hidden content
contained within various forms of communication (Schreier 2014: 173). That is, while
quantitative approaches to content analysis focus on how many times particular words might be
used in a news article, qualitative approaches focus, instead, on the hidden meaning of words and
phrases used in that article.
According to Berg and Lune (2012: 352), through directed content analysis, researchers
immerse themselves in raw data, in search of analytic codes and categories derived from existing
theories. “Working in a concept-driven way means basing the categories on previous knowledge:
a theory, prior research, everyday knowledge, logic, or an interview guide” (Schreier 2014: 176).
Specifically, framing theory, discourse theory, and the concept of the “crooked room” have
informed the approach to the data, as well.
Each population of articles was gathered and given a number. Then, a total of twenty-two
articles were selected from the group. As this is a secondary aim of the article, such a sample size
is appropriate. This is especially true for a study involving qualitative content analysis, as
qualitative approaches, in general, employ small sample sizes in order to deeply interrogate the
data and provide rich detail about its contents (Berg and Lune 2012). As this approach is focused
on providing rich detail of the latent content found in news, a small sample is appropriate. 4
I thoroughly analyzed content pieces (words, sentences, and paragraphs) for connections
to existing theory discussed above; to provide rich detail about the themes uncovered in the

48

analysis. This provides a lens into ways the subjects were framed, discussed, and presented to
national audiences.
Data analysis began with the development of a coding frame, wherein I detailed the main,
concept-based categories and of study, which were developed from theories and knowledge
discussed above (Berg and Lune 2012; Harris-Perry 2011; Hill Collins 2000; Schreier 2014).
Subcategories were also generated from themes found in the data (Schreier 2014: 176). Concepts
and themes that emerged in the data were compared to one another for similarities, and
categorized according to their commonality.

49

FINDINGS
Comparing Rates of Coverage – Gender
Table 2: Online News Coverage of Black Women Killed by Police

21-Mar-12
17-Nov-17
(5 Years)

Korryn
Gaines5
1-Aug-16
17-Nov-17
(1+ Year)

7

6

13

25

13

38

7

14

21

39
Boyd

33
Gaines

72
Boyd & Gaines

Rekia Boyd
Date of Death
News Date Coverage
End
CNN
(Source: CNN.COM)
The New York Times
Brand
(NYTIMES.COM)
Fox News Digital
Network
(Foxnews.com)
Total Number of
Articles Published

Total Article Coverage
of Black Women

Table 3: Online News Coverage of Black Men Killed by Police
Ramarley Graham

Alton Sterling

Date of Death
News Date Coverage
End
CNN
(Source: CNN.COM)
The New York Times
Brand
(NYTIMES.COM)
Fox News Digital
Network
(Foxnews.com)

2-Feb-12
17-Nov-17
(5 Years)

5-Jul-16
17-Nov-17
(1+ Year)

6

173

179

54

122

176

13

151

164

Total Number of
Articles Published

73
Graham

446
Sterling

519
Graham &
Sterling

Total Article
Coverage of
Black Men

First, I compared rates of coverage of Black men and women who were victims of police
violence. Focusing on national audiences provides a lens into levels of national attention to each

50

death, as compared to the police-related deaths of two Black men, Ramarley Graham and Alton
Sterling. This was done to illustrate that, as compared to Black men killed by police under
similar circumstances, Black women are often ignored, overlooked, and dismissed as victims of
racialized state-sponsored violence although they are vulnerable to it (Hill 2016).
Across three of the major digital news sites, there were obvious disparities in the number
of articles published online for Korryn Gaines and Rekia Boyd, as compared to Alton Sterling
and Ramarley Graham. Between 2012 and 2017, CNN, The New York Times Brand, and Fox
News, published thirty-nine articles on the killing of Rekia Boyd, and accompanying
adjudication. Ramarley Graham, an eighteen-year-old killed by New York Police, received a
total of seventy-three article hits over the course of the same five years. Similarly, in 2017, these
publishers issued thirty-three articles on the death of Korryn Gaines. The same year, Alton
Sterling was discussed in roughly 519 articles.
I expected to find significant national coverage of Gaines, as police both killed her, and
injured her five-year-old son in failing to nonviolently deescalate their interaction. Put simply,
police shooting a five-year-old child did not garner significant attention or sympathy. Black
children’s ages do not negate the disposability of their lives because of their color. In 2010, the
killing of seven-year-old Ayanna Jones during a Detroit Police raid, along with the 2014 murder
of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, killed by Cleveland Police while playing with a toy gun in a park,
both serve as evidence of the overt disposability of young Black lives in the U.S.
To continue, prior to her murder, Gaines allegedly threatened police with her gun. This is
likely why Facebook granted The Baltimore Police Department’s request deactivated her attempt
at live streaming the police and counter and her later death. And moreso, it is perhaps why
national news sites have failed to adequately cover her police-related murder. Police encounters

51

with armed Whites have illustrated ability to deescalate volatile encounters, though Gaines was
not extended the same liberty.
Moreover, as shown by the rates of coverage in news, Black women’s deaths generated
far less media response than those of Black men. Updates, information, and discussions about the
experiences of Graham and Sterling collectively far exceeded those of Boyd and Gaines, largely
because of the number of articles on Sterling. This is not to say that Black men’s deaths should
receive less attention. Neither Black men nor Black women should suffer such violence and
vulnerability as they often do in this society. However, it is also to say that the silencing,
disregard, or lack of attention to these killings serves to erase, and thereby make invisible, the
atrocity and systemic nature of these crimes. Even when Black women died under similar
conditions, and during similar time periods, they were still not given similar attention to Black
men by news media.
Comparing Rates of Coverage – Race
Table 4: Online News Coverage of White Woman Killed by Police
Total Article Coverage
of White Woman

Justine Ruszczyk/Damond
Date of Death

17-Jul-17
17-Nov-17
(4 Months)

News Date Coverage End
CNN
(Source: CNN.COM)
The New York Times Brand
(NYTIMES.COM)
Fox News Digital Network
(Foxnews.com)
Total Number of Articles Published

286

28

21 / 5

26

21

21
75 Damond Alone

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Further, in the four months following death of a White Australian woman, Justine
Ruszczy, the former received more coverage than both Gaines and Boyd in the years that
followed their deaths. Ruszczy was discussed in seventy-five articles by CNN, Fox News, and
The New York Times. This, in four months, is more coverage than Gaines and Boyd combined,
year and five years following their deaths, respectively.
Such a finding is not surprising, as Neely (2015) and Jiwani and Young (2006)
highlighted similar results in their comparisons of coverage of White and Black women victims
of violence.

Framing Content
Two major themes resonated throughout the articles that specifically mentioned Rekia
Boyd’s and Korryn Gaines’ names: culpability, and protest. The first, culpability, highlights
ways the wording in the articles situated a specific party or parties as responsible for the killings.
For instance, repeatedly highlighting and/or omitting events that led to the deaths, or invoking
imagery of earlier unrelated deviant behavior, serve as examples of this. The second, protest,
discusses ways Boyd’s and Gaines’ names are linked to protests across the country in response to
police killings.

Culpability (Boyd)
Often when Boyd was given focused attention, it was often to provide brief snippets
about the nature or status of the case against her killer. For Boyd, in these discussions,
culpability is a major theme. Collectively, the articles mentioned Boyd’s age, twenty-two, and
that she was unarmed when she was killed.

53

On the whole, Fox News referenced or included quotes to illustrate the officer’s poor
decision making. Admitting some wrongdoing on the officer’s part illustrates a move towards a
fair approach towards the articles, at least on the surface. However, highlighting the state’s
failure to prove the officer’s recklessness; vaguely noting “discipline” against the officer as
opposed to specifying his termination; and including his affirmation that he fired his gun after
feeling threatened, are all discursive moves that shift the framing of the article to justify his
actions. Fox News articles repeatedly invoked these discursive moves.
Similarly, centering the officer’s fear, feelings of threat, and assertion that a gun was
present are discursive moves that reinforce just actions of self-defense on the part of a fearful
public servant. This does not situate blame on Boyd outright, particularly because she was
unarmed. But it does shift some of the article’s blame for Boyd’s death away from the officer,
almost framing it as a faultless accident or mistake.
Other articles by The New York Times and CNN specify the officer’s later termination. In
some, the dismissal of charges is framed as faulty legal work on behalf of the prosecutor,
including a judge’s note that the offender should have been charged with murder. For instance,
“Illinois: Board Says Police Officer Who Killed Woman Should Be Fired” (The New York Times
2015) states,
Officer Servin, who was off-duty, struck Rekia Boyd, 22, in the head when he
fired into a group of people because he said he believed one of them had a gun.
No gun was found. Involuntary manslaughter charges against Officer Servin were
dismissed by Judge Dennis J. Porter of Cook County Circuit Court, who ruled the
officer was improperly charged and hinted that he should have been charged with
murder. The city in 2013 settled a lawsuit with the Boyd family for $4.5 million.
The active literary voice employed in the article indicates directly that Servin committed
the acts that led to Boyd’s death. Further, these articles specifically and repeatedly included
terms to affirm the officer’s actions and poor decision making. Such frames include claims he

54

saw a gun, but only a cell phone was recovered from the scene. Additionally, the author’s
reference to the judge’s allusion to murder as a more appropriate charge for Servin further
indicates the culpability of the officer. These articles, which were the bulk of the sample, aimed
to highlight the wrongdoing of Boyd’s killer.

Culpability (Gaines)
A distinction between the framing of Gaines and Boyd is also clear. Regarding
culpability and Gaines, the results were complex. Often, it was noted that officers fired first. But
undoubtedly, Gaines was heavily framed as responsible for her death. To begin, she is framed as
unstable and uncompliant.
[Gaines] was originally pulled over for driving without a license plate. In place of
a tag, she had a cardboard sign with a handwritten message warning government
officials not to compromise her right to travel, he said (McLaughlin et al. 2016).
The warrant being served by police was connected to driving with a “free traveler” plate, which
is highlighted by a number of articles, regardless of publisher. In “Woman Killed in Standoff
with Baltimore County Police was Live-Streaming,” the authors call the tag a “warning” to
police (McLaughlin et al. 2016).
As implied by many authors, Gaines endangered herself and her children by engaging
police while they were in the apartment. One article speculates that Gaines coached her son to
say that police were there to kill them – a discursive move that further devalues Gaines’ parental
decision-making.
In the other video, Gaines talks to the boy, who gives halting answers, which
raises the possibility the boy might have been coached. Gaines is heard asking the
boy what the police are trying to do. He answers, "They're trying to kill us”
(McLaughlin et al. 2016, emphasis mine).

55

Moreover, sentiments of “threat” felt by police are more heavily articulated in
discussions of Gaines than Boyd. For instance, violence against police are centralized in Fox
News (2016) article, “Chief Won't Identify Officer Who Shot Woman in Barricade.”
Citing an "unprecedented number" of threats against his department, Baltimore
County's police chief says he will not identify the officer who fatally shot a
woman after an hourslong standoff at her apartment. A department news release
on Thursday says Jim Johnson also cited the recent killings of police officers in
Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as a factor in his decision. Police say
23-year-old Korryn Gaines was fatally shot Monday in her Randallstown
apartment when she pointed a shotgun directly at an officer. Gaines' 5-year-old
son, who was in the apartment, was injured (Fox News 2016).
It is either implied or directly stated that she coached her son’s responses to police.
Further, it is repeatedly mentioned that she had her son while holding a shotgun, and engaging
police. In one of the final sentences of the previous section, the author highlights that Gaines was
fatally shot after pointing a shotgun directly at an officer.
These are clear examples of problematic framing; culpability for Gaines’ death is placed
on the victim throughout the sample. Gaines’ obvious resistance to the existing rules of social
order exemplify the unending unruliness of Black women. To many journalists, Gaines’ death
was not truly a question of officers’ inability to quell a volatile situation. Nor was it a question of
the distinction in fashions police tend to engage Whites and Blacks in those vulnerable
situations. Instead, in the framing of most articles, Gaines was completely at fault as she engaged
in a seven-hour standoff with the five-year-old child in the house; she is the one who pointed the
gun at the police.
Only one article included a reference to Gaines saying she would come out of her
apartment if police put down their guns and backed away from her door. This was among very
slim minority of articles that seemed to lay blame on the officers for the civilian death.

56

Protest
Gaines and Boyd were most frequently mentioned in reference to other Black victims of
state-sponsored violence (Hill 2016). For instance, growing public frustrations with these deaths
are addressed in the articles that mention Rekia Boyd, specifically protests in Chicago in 2015,
targeting both her killer’s acquittal and the police killing of 17-year-old LaQuan McDonald.
CNN article, “Marchers Supporting Baltimore Protests Take to the Streets across U.S.” (Ellis
2015) notes,
In Chicago, hundreds of protesters marched Tuesday from police headquarters at
35th and Michigan through the Southside, CNN affiliate WGN reported. Police
made one arrest, for reckless conduct. WGN said protesters spoke about police
violence and the death of Rekia Boyd, who was killed by an off-duty officer in
2012. That officer was acquitted last week. The group plans to gather Wednesday
night at the DePaul Law School.
In like fashion, these articles mentioned Boyd and Gaines secondarily. Their names are among a
list that Blacks and supporters of Black lives are apt to say, as their cases are especially wellknown, or the outcomes especially egregious.
A very limited number address the invariably raced nature of their deaths. Aware of the
historical institutional oppressions that have contributed to contemporary levels of statesponsored violence against Blacks, these articles provide assessments of the treatment of Black
victims of such violence, and often authors’ perspectives on their own vulnerability in Black
bodies.
However, also common among the articles that link protest and the loss of Black lives at
police hands, were framings of angry protesters throwing things at police vehicles, people
blocking traffic, circling police vehicles, and public officials quickly wrapping investigations up.
These articles (primarily with the exception of Fox News) like protests to anger about the deaths,

57

and the larger issue of police violence against Black people. Yet, some also frame protesters
slightly problematically, as well.

58

DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION
What I expected to find at the outset of the project was the maintenance of subordination
through an abundance of problematic representations of Black women. I expected to find
significantly high levels of coded framing in the representations of Black women victims of
violence. Those were my initial areas of foci at the outset of this project.
Instead, the most starling finding I encountered was disregard. I found erasure. I found
invisibility. I found silences – the lack of representation, the lack of discussion, and a lack of
attention to Black women who died in connection to interactions with police under similar
conditions to Black men.
Other scholars have investigated the media treatment of Black women and women of
color who are victims of violence (Jiwani and Young 2006; Neely 2015). This article is unique
as other studies have not compared rates of coverage for Black women to that of Black men, in
order to access their erasure and invisibility in that fashion.
Ultimately, there are a number of reasons these women’s deaths are heavily overlooked.
One major impetus for the erasure and subsequent invisibly of these women’s is because they do
not resonate well with the violent black man trope that helped to justify lynching at the turn of
the 20th century, and continues to accomplish the same discursive work today.
One other major reason Black women’s deaths are not covered because Black women's
suffering in the country tends to be overlooked, silenced, minimized, and disregarded. As noted
by Mowatt et al. (2013), Tuchman (1997), and others, their underrepresentation is hegemonic,
and symbolic of a larger lack of power within systems of marginalization in the country. That a
mother was killed by police in front of her child, and that those police injured that five-year-old

59

during the altercation, resonated less with media outlets and the American public than the fact
that she brandished a weapon, and barricaded herself in her apartment against police.
There is also a significant distinction between the framing of Gaines and Boyd. Boyd is
often framed as another Black woman killed by police. Typically, she is not framed as culpable,
though the officer’s actions are justified by the wording in some articles. Contrarily, Gaines is
obviously framed as being fully at fault for her death. She is implicitly discussed as a bad
mother, for involving her children in the volatile situation. As noted above, in only a limited
number of the articles is it noted that officers might have employed other tactics, particularly
given the presence of children. In this way, the results also show the tendency to frame Black
women who have engaged police, as Korryn Gaines, as responsible for their killings. This is
especially true if their behaviors, in any way, align with controlling images and stereotypes that
presume Black women’s over-aggressiveness.
Otherwise, when Boyd and Gaines are discussed, often, their names have become
taglines. Taglines that need to be mentioned, of course. But taglines, nonetheless. They are not
always discussed as humans, as people whose families will miss them. They are typically
discussed as one of a collection of people killed by police, parts in the complex puzzles of cases
that are investigated or not, pursued to some form of vindication (e.g., Renisha McBride) or not.
People whose families may receive settlements, and that, in some way, is supposed to
compensate for the immense loss and immeasurable psychological trauma inflicted on them at
the killing of their loved ones.

60

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1

In 2012, Jordan Davis, an unarmed teenager, was murdered by a White gas station patron over
an altercation regarding loud music (Alvarez 2012). In early August 2014, Eric Garner was also
killed by an illegal chokehold from a New York City police office, stemming from a dispute over
the sale of illegal cigarettes (Fitzgerald 2014). He was unarmed. That same month, a recent high
school graduate, 18 year-old Michael Brown, was also killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri
(Associated Press and Huffington Post 2014). He was also unarmed. Similarly, Ezell Ford was
murdered by police on August 13, after an altercation with the LAPD during an “investigative
stop” (Sieczkowski 2014). The list continues. Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Ramarley
Graham, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Akai Gurley, twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, killed by Chicago
police while playing with a toy gun in the park (Davis and Quah 2015).
2

As she sought help for a late-night car accident, Theodore Wafer shot Renisha McBride in the
face, killing her on his porch because he claimed to have felt threatened (Berman 2014). One of
the subjects of this article, Rekia Boyd, was killed by Dante Servin, an off-duty Chicago police
officer. Late on the evening of March 21, 2012, Boyd was attending a social event with friends.
After ordering the group Boyd was with to quiet down, Servin fired into the crowd. One of
Servin’s bullets hit Boyd in the head, and she died two days later from her injuries. Over one
year later, Servin was charged, and acquitted of involuntary manslaughter (Hutcherson and
Burnside 2015). Three years later, Servin was fired (Chicago Sun Times 2016). Servin, similarly,
justified his actions through allegations of feeling threatened. The second subject, Korryn
Gaines, was murdered in her apartment by Baltimore Police in front of her five-year-old son.
Gaines was shot, after brandishing a legal shotgun, as police executed an arrest warrant at her
apartment for a traffic violation (Knezevich and Rector 2016).
3

These publishers were also selected due to the availability of resources. These sites permitted
the use of their own search engines, along with multiple other sources, including Google News
and MSU Libraries to confirm publication rates. However, in the “Content” section, articles from
USA Today were also included. Because USA Today’s search engine does not allow users to limit
results to articles alone, given the availability of time and resources, it was nearly impossible to
confirm all results for larger returns (e.g., Alton Sterling), were of the same type of content (e.g.,
articles alone).
4

Other studies employing qualitative content analysis have also drawn similar sample sizes
(Martin et al. 2014).
5

Searches included both “Korryn Gaines” and “Korryn Shandawn Gaines.” CNN was the only
source to include Gaines’ middle name in their stories.
6 All

13 CNN stories that were “hits” for “Justine Damond” also contained “Justine Ruszczyk” in
the content. All would have been “hits” in the original search of “Justine Ruszczyk.” However,
Fox News exclusively referred to “Justine Damond” – the name the victim would have chosen
had she lived until her wedding. New York Times articles referred to “Justine Damond” in most
of the articles, and Justine Ruszczyk in a select few.

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ARTICLE TWO:
BEYONCÉ’S LEMONADE, BRINGING “WRECK,” AND BLACK FEMINIST
INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

78

ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I employ Black feminist theory to highlight ways Black women continue to
employ music and other cultural forms to celebrate their identities as Black women, and to
discuss, critique, and resist the oppression and marginalization they experience contemporarily.
Lemonade’s (Knowles-Carter 2016) song lyrics and imagery celebrate African Diasporal
cultures; highlight the beauty of the varying shades and colors of African-descended women; and
even affirm diverse Black U.S. religious and food traditions. As opposed to the one-dimensional
and often stereotypical representations of Black women circulated through popular media,
Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) articulates themes of complicated love relationships, women’s
independence, multifaceted Blackness and Black women’s beauty, motherhood, and multigenerational Black families. Additionally, the album was released at a time when Black bodies
are tremendously vulnerable to police violence; when Black women’s beauty and personhood
continues to experience subtle denigration in public and private spaces. Indeed, this article
argues that through the inclusion and visibility of its content, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016)
works to articulate symbolic resistance to contemporary forms of racial and gender oppression
experienced by Blacks in the U.S. I employ content analysis and cultural studies to illustrate
ways Lemonade is a part of a larger tradition of employing public spaces to articulate Black
women’s unique experiences with intersecting oppressions in contemporary society (Pough
2004).

79

The interpreters of black diasporal cultures not only assume control of the
language and subject of the discourse, but they, along with the creators and
practitioners of black diasporal arts, must operate from an a priori position of
cultural wholeness, conscious historicity, and inherent and unapologetic
humanity. (Powell 2002: 22)
INTRODUCTION
In this article, I illustrate ways Black women maintain Black feminist intellectual,
cultural, artistic, and in particular, musical traditions through analysis of Beyoncé KnowlesCarter’s video album, Lemonade (2016).1 From the use of oration and public spaces, to the
employment of stardom and popular music, Black women continue to employ these vehicles to
celebrate their identities as Black women; to articulate, critique, and resist the oppression they
experience in a society marked by overt and subtle forms of racial, gender, and economic
inequity.
Lemonade’s (Knowles-Carter 2016) song lyrics and imagery celebrate African Diasporal
cultures; highlight the beauty of the varying shades and colors of African-descended women; and
even affirm diverse Black U.S. religious and food traditions. As opposed to the one-dimensional
and often stereotypical representations of Black women circulated through popular media,
Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) articulates themes of complicated love relationships, women’s
independence, multifaceted Blackness and Black women’s beauty, motherhood, and multigenerational Black families.
Additionally, the album was released at a time when Black bodies are tremendously
vulnerable to police violence; when Black women’s beauty and personhood continues to
experience subtle denigration in public and private spaces. Indeed, this article argues that
through the inclusion and visibility of its content, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) works to

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articulate symbolic resistance to contemporary forms of racial and gender oppression
experienced by Blacks in the U.S.
For instance, the album’s images and content also highlight a critique of racialized police
violence. Lemonade’s “Formation,”
has references to Black Lives Matter and Katrina that are clear; it includes an
image of Beyoncé on top of a sinking police car, walls strewn with "Stop
Shooting Us" graffiti, and a young African American boy in a hoodie dancing in
front of police officers (Zaru 2016).
Additionally, Knowles’ National Football League Superbowl 50 halftime performance of this
song contained costumes and dance with nods to the militant Black Panther Party. The Panthers
championed resistance to White supremacy, and promoted armed self-defense for Blacks in the
mid-twentieth century (Joseph 2006; Ogbar 2005). Indeed, throughout Lemonade (KnowlesCarter 2016), allusions to militant and vocal critiques of racism are clear. The songs, videos, and
performances of Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) serve as highly-visible critiques of a racially
unequal social structure, as well as the racialized violence to which Black bodies are subject.
I begin with examples that typify contemporary subtle types of marginalization and
oppression to which Black women are subject. I continue with an exploration of foundations
Black feminist intellectual, musical, and cultural traditions. My aim is to discuss a selection of
musical and oratory Black feminist thought, to help illustrate connections between early Black
feminist thinkers and contemporary writers, musicians, and artists – to situate the contemporary
in the canon alongside the historical. To this end, I also briefly note Black use of public spaces to
resist marginalization through shifting discourses with presence, visibility, and challenges to
racist stereotypes and gender norms (Davis 1999).
Methodologically, I employ cultural studies and content analysis of lyrics, poetry,
stylistic, and visual choices included in Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016). I explore ways this

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particular musical and visual work serves to humanize Black women; centralizes Black lives,
cultures, and experiences; and militantly bucks racial and gender oppression. Using
methodological frameworks based in qualitative content analysis, I employ audio and visual
analysis of selected vignettes from the album. Further, I use Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black
Feminism (Davis 1999) to focus on the musical and artistic content of Lemonade (KnowlesCarter 2016), rather than centralizing the political and social leanings of the artist. My concern is
with the piece of material and the messages about Black womanhood held in its content.

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BACKGROUND
Subtle and Overt Attacks on Black Women in the U.S.
Crunk Feminist Collective originator, Brittney C. Cooper, highlights the discursive world
of hip hop and popular culture occupied by Black women – one in which
… bitch trumps beautiful, ho trumps human, and gold-digger trumps golden.
#EveryDamnTime. A world, incidentally, in which Beyoncé’s ass provides the
inspiration for a group of Australian scientists looking to name a new species of
insect with a golden posterior. They call it the “Beyoncé Fly”….The legacy of
Saartjie Baartman lives. In this world, the global desirability of a Black girl’s ass
excuses her allegedly less desirable dark complexion, full lips, and kinky
hair….This is a world where disrespectability politics reign, a world where Black
women’s bodies and lives become the load-bearing wall in the house that race
built, a world where the tacit disrespect of Black women is as American as apple
pie, as global as Nike…In this world, Black women have moved from “fly girls to
bitches and hoes” and back again to just, well, flies. Insects. Pests. (Cooper et al.
2017: 183)
Similarly, Angela Helm (2017) of The Root, an online newspaper on contemporary issues
in Black America, writes “All over the world, black girls have their bodies, words and,
increasingly, hair policed by those who have no clue.” This section provides examples of the
subtle forms of destabilization, critique, attack, and challenges to their personhoods, and
appearances, experienced by Black women in the U.S. contemporarily.
In 2011, Psychology Today published an article about women’s attractiveness by Satoshi
Kanazawa of the London School of Economics (Lyubansky 2011). Aside from the misogyny
inherent in the aims of the article, in it, the author wished to prove that Black women were the
least physically attractive amongst races of women. The author cited Black women’s supposedly
higher levels of testosterone as culpable for their lowly position of desirability. In actuality, such
pseudoscientific claims are reminiscent of biological justifications for racial difference, in their
early configurations, aimed at explaining nature, evolution, and the history of species
(Bernasconi and Lott 2000: 13).

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To continue, in 2017, “Black Women Are Trash” tee-shirts became available for
purchase on Teespring, a digital line that allows users to create their own shirts (Greaves 2017).
The shirts were created in response to a similar shirt stating “Men Are Trash.” The
advertisements circulated via social media, along with the creator’s, attempts to get non-Black
women to purchase the shirts (Greaves 2017). Uniquely, the creator of the shirts is a Black man 2,
indicative of the intra-racial sexism to which Black women are often subject. Ultimately, once
Teespring received backlash, the company was forced to remove the item from sale (Greaves
2017).
Additionally, during a recent “Dogs and Cats” themed episode of French television show,
Quotidien, actress Alice Belaïdi informed the host she named her dog “Jill” because the animal
so closely resembled Black American soul singer, Jill Scott. To illustrate, producers showed a
split screen of Scott’s childhood photo, a cover for her Beautifully Human album – and the
actress’s dog. This was to lend credence to the actress’s claims that the pug and Scott have the
same nose (Blavity 2017).
In another instance, “Good Day DC” a morning news show on the Washington D.C.
area’s Fox 5 channel, featured a segment on the world’s “Most Desirable Face” (Workneh 2016).
The findings come from Dr. Julian De Silva, a cosmetic surgeon at the Centre for
Advanced Facial Cosmetic and Plastic Surgery in London, who for 10 years has
reportedly kept track of the female celebrities nearly 1,000 clients have said they
most want to emulate. As a result, Silva and his team say they have discovered the
nine most desired facial features, which include Kate Middleton’s
“mathematically perfect” nose, Miley Cyrus’ forehead, Angelina Jolie’s cheeks
and Reese Witherspoon’s skin. And surprise! None of the features represented
reflect those of black stars. (Workneh 2016)
The report implies that the most aesthetically pleasing women globally, the most beautiful,
resemble White women, and align with Eurocentric standards of beauty.

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This is further evidence that Eurocentric standards of beauty are privileged and
normalized in every virtually aspect of society. From infancy, children’s books innocuously
circulate images of Snow White (Disney 2003), blonde-haired blue-eyed Goldilocks (Brett 2002)
and Cinderella (Disney and Dias 2005). These are means of indirectly socializing children to
abide by “golden rules” of appropriate treatment of others. Similar socialization occurs via these
mediums towards the standardization, and centralization of Whiteness, White images, White
appearances as the unspoken norm (Van Dijk 1993). 3
To continue, throughout the U.S., Black girls and women have been punished for wearing
braid extensions, Afros, and other styles rooted in African cultures, that Black women employ to
protect their hair from the damage of chemical treatment. 4 Recently, in Massachusetts, twin
middle-schoolers Deanna and Mya Cook “had been kicked off school sports teams, banished
from prom and received hours of detention for refusing to change their professionally braided
hair” (Mettler 2017). And currently, Jenesis Johnson in Florida faces a choice between keeping
her Afro, or being expelled from her senior year of high school (Helm 2017). Her hair, according
to the school, is among the untidy, un-clean, faddish, and/or extreme styles prohibited by the
student handbook (Helm 2017).
Furthermore, in September 2016, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided to allow
employers to dismiss employees for wearing dreadlocks (Finley 2016).5 Although the court
affirmed hairstyles to be linked to race, the changeability of Black hair in its unchemicallytreated state is not a concept the court understood. Though I do not imply Black people should
choose one style or another, I am highlighting the presence of legislation against Black hair, that
permits discrimination against overtly representing African heritage in one’s appearance.

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What is the crux of the issue I describe? Such beliefs, acts, are indicative of, and help
continue the destabilization of Black women’s natural appearances and personhood, particularly
if they overtly resemble or represent Africanness. Yet, this anti-Black-woman-affect is rooted in
an earlier history of racism.
For instance, Francois Bernier aimed to establish “a major division of humanity
displaying a distinctive combination of physical traits transmitted through lines of descent”
(Bernier [1684] 2000: viii). While describing the various races of women (which, itself, reeks of
sexist objectification), the beauty of White women, is so immense and well known that Bernier
finds no reason to discuss it deeply in his essay (Bernier [1684] 2000: 3). He notes, however, that
he has encountered a few Africans whose appearance is appreciable – those who lack the “squat
nose and fat lips” that mark most other members of the group (Bernier [1684] 2000: 3). Later,
philosopher, Immanuel Kant, reproduces this Eurocentric and problematic analysis in explaining
the division of races. Kant links the body’s response to the heat Africa’s continental climate to
the development of “oily” Black skin, and situates the blood’s response to the heat as a cause for
why “all Negros stink” (Kant [1777] 2000: 17). Further, Africa’s abundant natural resources also
explain why Negroes are “lazy, ignorant, and dawdling” (Kant [1777] 2000: 17).
Ultimately, these acts against Black women and their personhood are less severe than the
enslavement and disenfranchisement characteristic of earlier Black oppression in the U.S. Yet,
these stand as representative of the residue of structured racial hatred, perpetrated and continued
on symbolic levels. These examples only serve as a window into the continued manifestations of
the unequal treatment Black women experience in the U.S., and the constantly oppressive ideas
about their humanity and personhood that confine discursive worlds they are forced to occupy.

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Bringing “Wreck,” Contemporary Celebrities, & Artistic Acts of Resistance
As noted by Cooper et al. (2017: 170), “The lives of women and femmes of color are
summarily hard in these twenty-first-century streets. We need music, culture, art, and politics
that speaks to all of it.” Currently, marginalized groups continue longstanding traditions of
employing music, art, scholarship, journalism, popular, and now social media to synthesize
contemporary Black consciousnesses, to resist this oppression, to highlight discrimination and
microaggressions, and to publicize instances of police brutality.
For example, in 2017, director and comedian, Jordan Peele, released the immensely
successful horror film, Get Out (Peele 2017). In fact, the $250 billion grossing film led to the
actor’s later induction into The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Ali 2017; Mohr
2017).
Get Out speaks in several voices on several themes. It subverts the horror genre itself
— which has the well-documented habit of killing off black characters first. It
comments on the re-emergence of white supremacy at the highest levels of American
politics. It lampoons the easy listening racism that so often lies behind the liberal smile
in the “postracial” United States. And it probes the systematic devaluation of black life
that killed people like Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner. The
film is a disquisition on the continuing impact of slavery in American life. Among other
things, it argues that present-day race relations are heavily determined by the myths that
were created to justify enslavement — particularly the notion that black people were
never fully human. (Staples 2017)
Following the police-perpetrated choking death of Eric Garner in 2014 over loose
cigarette sales, NBA player, Derrick Rose wore a black tee shirt with the words “I CAN’T
BREATHE” across his chest in white. LeBron James and Deron Williams also later wore similar
protest shirts during their nationally-televised games (Cacciola 2014). 6 Similarly, former San
Francisco 49’ers player, Colin Kaepernick, encountered both fame and hatred during his protests
of police brutality. At the start of games, during the playing of the national anthem, Kaepernick
knelt, later stating,

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I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black
people and people of color…To me, this is bigger than football and it would be
selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people
getting paid leave and getting away with murder. (Wyche 2016)
Currently, Kaepernick lingers in free agency, a contract for the 2017-2018 season left uncertain –
many teams are clearly rebuffed by his willingness to enact this form of resistance, which also
speaks to the economic risk of publically addressing racism for these figures.
In similar fashion, Black women continue to employ the same media, literature, lectures,
and art that reinforce their oppression through stereotypical representations, as vehicles for the
celebration of their identities as Black women – for their personhood to be displayed on a global
scale, in a world that continues to deny their humanity. “There have always been Black women
activists….who had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial
identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggle unique”
(Combahee River Collective [1978] 1982: 14).
Examples from the U.S. antebellum era include activist speeches and slave narratives,
such as the work of Sojourner Truth ([1851; 1867] 1995), who critiqued the notion that her
Blackness precluded humanness and womanhood. Similarly, Harriet Jacobs’ memoir ([1861]
2003), discussed raced experiences with bondage, agency, and resistance, placing them alongside
gendered themes of sexual oppression, rape, and (other)motherhood. These serve as ways Black
women have also used media to bring wreck, or to use discourses to “disrupt dominant masculine
discourses, break into the public sphere, and in some way impact or influence the United States
imaginary” (Pough 2004: 12). That is,
Bringing wreck, for Black participants in the public sphere historically, has meant
reshaping the public gaze in such a way as to be recognized as human beings – as
functioning and worthwhile members of society – and no tot be shut out of or
pushed away from the public sphere. (Pough 2004: 17)

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Similarly, in 2016, singer Solange Knowles released “Don’t Touch My Hair,” (Knowles
2016), a bold anthem reinforcing Black women’s ownership of their hair, bodies, and beauty
from her #1 Billboard 200 charting album, Seat at the Table. The entire album addresses race,
including excerpts from Knowles’ parents, addressing experiences with segregation, and their
aims at reinforcing the value of Blackness to their daughters. The example of interest to this
article, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016), a recent visual album by her sister, popular artist,
Beyoncé, accomplishes similar goals, as will be discussed below. 7
These instances speak to the reach and capacity of varied forms of challenging inequity
and communicating feminist consciousness. In particular, the global visibility of celebrities, pop
stars, and artists means that they are one force influencing many members of the public,
particularly youth, who gravitate towards popular culture in forming their identities. It also
means that their voices are highly visible to broad audiences, allowing them to both publically
ignore, or publically challenge, the problems they see.

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THEORY AND LITERATURE
Black Feminisms
Black women have articulated experiences navigating multiple and simultaneous
structures of oppression – as Blacks in a White-dominated, and women in a male-dominated
society – since the time of their enslavement (Combahee River Collective [1978] 1982; Davis
1981; hooks 2015; Truth [1851; 1867] 1995). According to Patricia Hill Collins (2000: 4),
the convergence of race, class and gender oppression characteristic of U.S.
slavery shaped all subsequent relationships that women of African descent had
within Black American families and communities, with employers and among one
another. It also created the political context for Black women's intellectual work.
Black women, as producers of knowledge about these experiences, have historically and
do continue to articulate both antisexist consciousnesses and critical perspectives on race,
sexuality, gender, and class. To do so, they have employed oral traditions, music, literature,
essays, and following greater access to the academy in the mid-20th century, academic
scholarship (Cooper [1892] 1995; Cade 1970; Hull, Scott and Smith 1982; Smith 1983; Lorde
1984; Guy-Sheftall 1995; James, Foster, and Guy-Shelftall 2009). Of this, Pough (2004: 42)
writes the “cipher is in constant motion, created throughout U.S. history whenever Black women
– whether expressing themselves through writing, public oratory, music, or club activities –
come together to discuss issues of importance to themselves and the Black community.”
Black feminist oratory, scholarly, and musical productions serve to validate collective
experiential knowledge of Black American women, as well as methods by which this knowledge
is produced and expressed (Cooper et al 2017; Davis 1999; Hill Collins 2000: 251; hooks 2015;
Pough 2004). Further, the productions, methods, and later theorizing about them are all a part of
the longstanding Black feminist intellectual, musical, and cultural tradition.

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As an historically oppressed group, U.S. Black women have produced social
thought designed to opposed oppression. Not only does the form assumed by this
thought diverge from standard academic theory – it can take the form of poetry,
music, essays and the like – but the purpose of Black women’s collective thought
is distinctly different. Social theories emerging from and/or on behalf of
historically oppressed groups aim to find ways to escape from, survive in, and/or
opposed prevailing social and economic injustice (Hill Collins 2000: 9).
Black feminists legitimate intellectual production that is often marginalized by the
academic community, though it is valued by the subjects to, and about which it speaks. Pough
(2004: 35) argues that given Blacks’ history in the country, the use of subaltern counterpublic
spheres have been necessary components of Black political activism – these are “parallel
discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate
counterdiscourses, so as to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities and needs”
(Pough 2004: 35). Consequently, Black women’s articulations of their lived experiences –
whether synthesized in literature and music, or empirical social science research – are similarly
validated and centralized within Black feminist thought.
By highlighting knowledge and expression of Black women's experiences that are valued
by members of the group themselves, Black feminist theorists classify intellectuals previously
excluded from positions of academic authority as a part of this tradition for their struggle for the
liberation of Black women, and the explication and representation of their experiences. That is,
Blues singers, poets, autobiographers, storytellers and orators are situated among Black feminist
intellectuals (Hill Collins 2000: 15-16; hooks 2015; Davis 1999). Black feminist thought urges
the centralization of the value systems, interpretations, and knowledge-validation processes of its
subjects of study (Hill Collins 2000; hooks 2015; Davis 1999).
That is, in connection with Smith and Hill Collins, Stone Mediatore (2007: 59-61),
critiques the valorization of “objectivity” and empiricism as the standards for knowledge claims

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in the social sciences. To paraphrase Stone-Mediatore (2007: 59), when we treat empirical data,
not as one type of knowledge, but as the hallmark of objectivity, we favor perspectives of those
who more often have their concerns documented in data and their worldviews institutionalized in
the frameworks that structure data. That is, these authors find it problematic to privilege
empirical data as the only means by which knowledge claims may be validated. Consequently,
Black feminist theorists heavily critique and/or reject the notion of objectivity, arguing that it has
been shaped by the ways of truth-validation employed by white males at the exclusion of other
perspectives and ways of knowing (Hill Collins 1986).
Black feminist thought incorporates the means by which Black women, and members of
Black culture in general, ascertain truths (Hill Collins 2000: 256). What is required to
substantiate knowledge about Black women to Black women are experience, accountability,
dialogue and advocacy, not necessarily a detached, objectified view of a “subject” from without
(Hill Collins 2000: 258). Using lived experiences as criteria for meaning, acknowledges the value
of wisdom gained about racial and gender oppression from simply living through it; The
knowledge of the wise and experienced that is valued within traditional Black cultures (Hill
Collins 2000: 256).

Black Feminist Thinkers & Musicians
Though specific discussions and subjects discussed differ with time period, foundational
aspects of contemporary Black feminist theory, addressed by activists and speakers such as Anna
Julia Cooper in the nineteenth century, articulate a clear “understanding about the difficulties
facing them because of their race and gender” (Guy-Sheftall 1995: 24). These women thought,
wrote and lectured about Black women’s lives during social movements for the abolition of

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slavery, and women’s and Black suffrage. Moreover, their orations, literature and music
provided foundations for a longer history of Black feminist thought that articulates the unique
experiences navigating racism and sexism for Black women today.
Sojourner Truth employed orations and public speeches to highlight the horrors of Black
enslavement, to address to White audiences the particular gendered oppressions Black women
faced as enslaved people, and to distinguish White female abolitionists’ racial privilege from
Black women’s lived experiences (Truth [1867] 1995: 37). One of the most well-known speakers
to correlate oppressions of race and gender, Guy-Sheftall (1995: 35) situates Sojourner Truth as
“the person most responsible during the nineteenth century for linking abolition and women’s
rights, and demonstrating the reality of Black women’s race and gender identities.” As stated by
Truth ([1867] 1995: 37-38),
I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the
rights of the colored woman. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is
broken….You men know that you get as much again as women when you write,
or for what you do. When we get our rights, we shall not have to come to you for
money…You have been having our right so long, you think, like a slaveholder,
that you own us….Now colored men have a right to vote; and what I want is to
have colored women have the right to vote. There ought to be equal rights more
than ever, since colored people have got their freedom.
Here, Truth addressed Black male abolitionists’ silences surrounding women’s suffrage.
Similarly, the orator discussed the unique forms of economic oppression many free Black
women faced via their relegation to domestic and service work (Truth [1867] 1995: 37).
As another example, the author of the first book-length Black feminist text, Anna Julia
Cooper also addresses the multiple “problems and questions” faced by Black women in
connection with their racial and gender identities. Cooper ([1892] 1995: 43-45) affirms that
Black women faced both a race problem and a woman question, “and is as yet an unknown or
unacknowledged factor in both.” Cooper also addresses the generative power of racial difference

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and conflict, as a force in understanding racial problems, and the source of America’s diversity
(Fernheimer 2007).
Moreover, Black women faced gendered marginalization and silencing efforts by Black
men, as well. Maria Stewart was “the first African American woman to speak in public about
women’s rights, particularly the plight of the ‘daughters of Africa’” (Guy-Sheftall 1995: 25).
Like other Black feminist theorists, Stewart ([1832] 1995: 31) critiques the domestic work to
which many free Black women were confined. She highlights the racial and gender
discrimination that limited economic opportunities outside of that field, advocating Black women
gain independence through the attainment of education, and pursuit of stronger economic
opportunities (Stewart [1832] 1995: 27-29). Stewart’s experience, however, exemplifies the
gendered oppression Black women encountered when advocating for gender rights within Black
struggles. Due to Stewart’s violation of conventional gender roles, and outspokenness about
gender inequality, her lecturing career was prematurely cut short; she was censured by Black
clergymen into silence (Guy-Sheftall 1995: 25).
And these were the particular interlocking struggles against the racism and sexism
patterning the social relations during these women’s lives. This discussion could continue, but
for want of space, these examples provide a brief illustration of early syntheses of Black feminist
thought – the sources from which contemporary Black feminists and their productions draw
history (Guy Sheftall 1995; Davis 1983; Davis 1990; Waters and Conaway 2007). With
particular regard to the cultural medium discussed in this article, music, Black women in the 20 th
and 21st centuries have continued these musical and artistic traditions, addressing their
temporally located experiences as Black women.
In the 1910s and ‘20s, for example, blues singers like Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and
Bessie Smith had crossover appeal among black and white consumers of “race

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records.” They sang about issues of importance to black women – men who
mistreated them, the pleasures of good sex, and the challenges that working-class
African American migrants from the rural South faced in the urban North.
(Feldstein 2013: 16, emphasis mine).
Further, Davis (1999) highlights the Black feminist and working-class consciousness in the
music of Blues women. Early 20th century blues women addressed specific issues particular to
Black women’s collective experiences as a marginalized racial and gender group in the U.S.
Live blues performances, as well as the widely distributed recordings of the
1920s, facilitated among black working-class women recognition of the social
sources of ideas and experiences they encountered in their own lives. But this
music accomplished much more. It permitted the women’s blues community –
performances and audiences alike – to engage aesthetically with ideas and
experiences that were not accessible to them in real life. The imaginary was as
important to the women’s blues community and to its challenges to male
dominance as real life experiences. (Davis 1999: 66)
For the women of the blues age, the genre gifted them with a means to express tendencies
towards self-reliance and feminism when the mainstream culture endeavored to confine them to
domesticity and dependence on men (Davis 1999). Though the women did not label themselves
“Black feminists,” Davis (1999, xi) highlights feminist underpinnings present in their music
“through fissures of patriarchal discourses,” including Smith’s and Rainey’s mockery of
mainstream ideology surrounding women’s roles.
The popular song formulas of the period demanded saccharine and idealized
nonsexual depictions of heterosexual love relationships. Those aspects of lived
love relationships that were not compatible with the dominant, etherealized
ideology of love – such as extramarital relationships, domestic violence, and the
ephemerality of many sexual partnerships – were largely banished from the
established popular musical culture. Yet these very themes pervade the blues.
What is even more striking is the fact that initially the professional performers of
this music – the most widely heard individual purveyors of the blues – were
women. (Davis 1999: 3-4)
In particular, blues songs and performances provided broader audiences with commentary on
happenings in Black life. As evinced by blues music, the personal experiences addressed in the

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songs are framed by larger sociopolitical structure of the segregated, agrarian, Jim Crow
Southern U.S. in the 1920s (e.g., agricultural work/sharecropping, economic strife, racism and
lynching) (Davis 1999).
For instance, in “Bo-Weevil Blues” (Davis 1999: 267), a song written by Rainey and
recorded by Smith, the latter sings,
Hey, bo-weevil, don’t sing them blues no more
Hey bo-weevil, don’t sing them blues no more
Bo-weevils here, bo-wheevils everywhere you go.
The boll weevil infestation of the early 20th century devastated cotton-related agriculture
throughout the south (Lange et al. 2008). These references to the boll weevil beetle, which kills
cotton plants, are a clear connection to the agricultural work dominant during and just prior to
the blues women’s performances in the 1920s and 1930s. Moreover, the abundance of the boll
weevil, and corresponding destruction of one of the major agricultural bases of the South, cotton,
are also connected to changes in population connected to the Great Migrations (Davis 1999;
Lange et al. 2008).
Blues women address mistreatment, infidelity, and economic instability connected to
living in a society of legalized discrimination in employment. Though they also clearly address
the economic oppression associated with being segregated into the society’s least lucrative jobs,
Rainey and Smith highlight working and having access to some level of financial independence
in their songs. Such independence is a rejection of traditional gender roles that mandated male
breadwinning-households (Davis 1999).
Blues women also pushed boundaries in the themes and topics of their songs, particularly
with regard to gender roles, sex and infidelity. Regarding sex and infidelity, Smith’s recording
“Kitchen Man” is laden with sexual innuendo; the song is rife with food-informed sexual

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metaphors of sausage meat, clams, jelly roll, and hams (Davis 1999: 305). In “Big Boy Blues”
(Davis 1999: 201), Rainey sings about extramarital relationships.
There’s two things I can’t understand/
There’s two things I can’t understand/
Why these married women crazy ‘bout the back door man.
Similarly, in “Shave ‘Em Dry,” Rainey states (Davis 1999: 242),
Come here, daddy, lay in my arms/
When your wife comes, tell her I don’t mean no harm/
That is, the blues women sang about infidelity, complicated love and relationships. Yet, they did
so in ways that pushed the boundaries of acceptability, and also challenged traditional gender
norms of women’s chastity, purity, and frailty (Davis 1999).
The willingness to defend oneself, or end problematic relationship is also a theme
discussed in blues women’s music. Rainey’s “Cellbound Blues” (Davis 1999: 210) is an example
of this.
I walked in my room the other night/
My man walked in and begin to fight/…
When he did that, hit me ‘cross my head/
First shot I fired, my man fell dead/
Though they address domestic abuse, mistreatment and infidelity, which also was considered
problematic at the time, in many songs like this, blues women do not appear to be passive
recipients of this treatment.
To continue, Davis (1999: 181) gives attention to Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording, noting
that “her performance of ‘Strange Fruit’ firmly established her as a pivotal figure in a new
tendency in black musical culture that directly addressed issues of racial injustice.” That is, New
Negro soldiers returned from WWII too conscious of the possibilities of greater freedoms
experienced while serving throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The lyrics employ the

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symbol of fruit hanging from poplar trees, in similar fashion to Black bodies that were lynched
by whites as a means of social control and racialized terrorism directed at growing Black
communities and wealth.
Southern trees bear a strange fruit /
Blood on the leaves, blood at the root /
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze /
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees/ (Davis 1999: 181)
Ultimately, this section provides examples of Black women employing public spaces to
articulate lived experiences, and also address racism, sexism, and forms of oppression. Though
the blues women did not necessarily see themselves as political, their recordings illustrate a
particular consciousness informed by their positions as members of groups who face intersecting
oppressions. Obviously, for want of space and time, these are simply a few instances. At the
same time, they are noted to show ways Black women have performed, spoken, talked, preached,
sung, and written, in ways that bring attention to these experiences, while also using their
visibility to reify the humanness of Black people, note the complexity of Black life, and to bring
attention to the unique nature of the oppression existing during their times.

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METHODS
Within the field of sociology, this article employs the methodology of cultural studies,
along with the analytical approach of content analysis.
To study culture historically, then, involves the identification of some cultural
patterns or artifacts, either material or symbolic. These may be traced as to their
origins, their consequences, their creation and incorporation into unfolding,
contingent interaction, and other aspects that involve temporally emergent
qualities (Hall 1990: 19-21).
In particular, I highlight symbols present in the imagery, visual, and lyrical content of Lemonade
(Knowles-Carter 2016). In the project, I also unearth the meaning of symbols tied to people and
cultures of African descent, and the global African Diaspora that are present throughout
Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016). In the analysis of culture, Hall (1990: 21-22) affirms that
Culture may be latent, and difficult to bring to light. But often culture obtains an
explicit character over time through the repetitive actions of those who enact,
display, or use it. Under these conditions, the possibility of tracking culture
historically differs little from the possibility of tracking "social structure."
As its major analytical tool, this project employs directed qualitative media content
analysis. The focus of this approach is to uncover the latent meaning held in the content of
various forms of media communication. Directed content analysis develops themes and
categories that are informed by existing theory, exploring other major trends and subcategories
that emerge in the analysis (Fields 1988; Schrier 2014). This type of qualitative content analysis
may be applied to visual and auditory materials (e.g., television, films, music, and print and
digital images), as well as text (e.g., song lyrics and poetry) (Fields 1988).
Rather than a verbatim retelling of the album’s contents, in the following section, I
employ textual and visual content analysis. For the textual analysis, I interrogate the text of the
song lyrics and poetry, with units of analysis ranging from one line to a multi-line stanza. With
each camera shot/shift standing as a unit of analysis, I also investigate salient themes in the

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visual and stylistic choices employed throughout Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016). Visual
analysis will focus on the meaning and significance of costumes, hair, and scenery choices,
focusing heavily on the cultural significance of the symbols therein.8

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FINDINGS
Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) is comprised of three-to-seven-minute music video
vignettes that correspond with audio tracks from the album. Each full music video is preceded by
a shorter, interim video, roughly one to two minutes. During the interim videos, scenes Beyoncé
recites poems by Somali-British poet, Warsan Shire. Knowles-Carter’s voice quotes Shire in the
background, as scenes shift to different locations on the large southern property where much of
the video is set, and the football field of Levi’s Stadium, where the artist performed for
Superbowl 50. Prior to the start of the shorter interim videos, single-word italicized themes flash
across the center of the screen in white, vanishing after a few moments. The themes describe the
sentiment of the upcoming song and/or poem.
Analysis of Lemonade’s lyrical and visual contents illustrates four major themes:
1)
2)
3)
4)

Affirmative References to African Diasporal Populations and Cultures;
Black Women’s Anger and Strength;
Women’s Independence and Agency;
Institutional Racial Oppression and Police Brutality.

The first theme centers on ways the lyrics, poetry, and stylistic choices, (in terms of
hairstyles, costuming, and scenery), make reference to African Diasporal cultures in the U.S.,
Caribbean, Latin America, and the African content.
Secondly, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) shows that Black women experience the
same range of emotions as many other humans, thereby debunking stereotypes regarding Black
women’s anger and supposedly organic overabundance of strength. That is, often, Black women
report hiding justified anger, exhaustion, and other emotions for fear of being viewed through
lenses of stereotypes, particularly that of the “angry Black woman” (Hill-Collins 2000;
Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009; Winfrey Harris 2015). Yet, rather than shying away from the concept

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of the angry Black woman for fear of reinforcing longstanding stereotypes, the range of emotions
she experiences in the album includes anger.
The third theme addresses independency and agency. Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016)
contains references to female economic independence, bucking traditional gender stereotypes of
female dependence on male provision in heterosexual relationships. With the final theme, I
discuss references to police brutality and contemporary forms of oppression. Images of Mothers
of Slain Sons, police cars sinking in flood waters referent to Hurricane Katrina, are images and
meanings discussed in this category.

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Lemonade and Daughters of the Dust: Affirmative References to African Diasporal Populations
and Cultures
While Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) fits squarely within a larger Black feminist
intellectual and musical tradition, it also fits within a larger Black Diasporal cultural tradition as
well. It references cultural retentions, including music, food, body adornment, dance, and
religions that both voluntary and involuntary African immigrants to the U.S. have brought to the
country, and melded with Native American and European cultures (Thompson 1984). 9 Such
influences obviously appear throughout the visual art, costumes, body paint, hair braiding, and
dance employed in Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) and live performances of the album’s
songs.
Moreover, much of the imagery parallels that of Julie Dash’s (1991) Daughters of the
Dust. The stylistic choices are significant, as they are overt stretches to align Lemonade
(Knowles-Carter 2016) with the earlier film.
The core narrative in Daughters of the Dust (Dash 1991) concerned a large, turnof-the-century black family, living on one of the isolated Sea Islands off the coast
of South Carolina, and struggling with the decision by several of its members to
migrate to the mainland and eventually north. (Powell 2002: 217)
The film centers on a matriarch’s attempts to maintain her family’s Gullah cultural heritage, one
which is uniquely rife with African cultural and linguistic retentions due to the isolated nature of
the enslaved Africans on the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands. In Daughters of the Dust
(Dash 1991), the progeny of enslaved Africans reckons with preserving their cultural heritage
and pursuing economic survival in a growing industrial economy at the start of the 20 th century.
Further, akin to Daughters of the Dust (Dash 1991), the bulk of Lemonade (KnowlesCarter 2016) is set on a large, water-adjacent, plot of land in the south. Foliage covers the area,
with fields of high grass, and small wooden cabins similar to those occupied by enslaved

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populations in the antebellum era. The property is blanketed with willow trees, with branches
both shading the dusty-brown ground and covering the sky. The background is a ground-level
black-and-white shot of a small wooden shack or outhouse with the roots and bulky trunk of an
enormous tree in the foreground.
Moreover, beyond the setting, the interplay of the metaphysical, humans, and nature are
present throughout Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016), in similar fashion to Daughters of the
Dust (Dash 1991).
Interestingly, there was a visual subtext running through Daughters of the Dust
that came through more strongly. This dealt with black modes of selfpresentations and metaphysical perspectives on the natural environment,
articulated from a black feminist perspective that had not before encountered in
such scale in film. (Powell 2002: 218)
In Daughters of the Dust (Dash 1991), the protagonist communicates with the spirit world
through nature. In fact, throughout the film, there is a tension between the imposition of EuroAmerican Christianity from without, and the maintenance of African-influenced religious
practices through and after generations of enslavement.
Rather than a monotheistic approach, the mosaic-like characteristics of the religions of
the African Diaspora are represented in the imagery and lyrical content of Lemonade (KnowlesCarter 2016). These include references to Christianity, baptism, blood, water, the Nation of
Islam’s Fruit of Islam, Yoruba religious practices and deities, as well as the creole culture of
New Orleans, Louisiana.
For instance, in a moment-long shot in the video for “Formation” a suit-clad preacher
leads an active Black Christian worship service, complete with congregational participation in
the form of hand-clapping, foot-stomping, and hand-waiving.

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Additionally, in “Love You Like I Love You,” donning a flowing yellow dress, bright
gold bangles and earrings, Beyoncé emerges through the doors of a large building, an enormous
wave of water gushing through the doorway as she enters. She is dressed to represent Oshun, the
Yoruba goddess of love, water, fertility, sexuality (Thompson 1984).
The Yoruba, black Africa’s largest population, creators of one of the premier
cultures in the world. The Yoruba believe themselves descended from goddesses
and gods, from an ancient spiritual capital, Ile-Ile. They show their special
concern for the properties of right living through their worship of major goddesses
and gods, each essentially a unique manifestation of àshe, the power-to-makethings-happen, a key to futurity and self-realization in Yoruba terms (Thompson
1984, xv).
This is an overt reference to both African religious practices and the diversity of religions
amongst African descendants in the U.S. birthed in the territories of the New World during the
era of African enslavement, and more recently, during the immigration waves of the 20 th century
(Thompson 1984; Berlin 2010).

Hair/Colorism
Uniquely, the imagery of Daughters of the Dust (Dash 1991) contains a beautifullyrepresented variety of Black skin tones, and natural/protective hair styles, including dreadlocks.
Like Daughters of the Dust (Dash 1991), Lemonade’s (Knowles-Carter 2016) imagery also
bucks colorism by centering Black models of all skin tones with varying styles and textures of
hair, naturally-textured curls, Afros, straight styles, and braids.
For instance, “Sorry Not Sorry,” contains costuming references to the body painting
practices of the Nuba society of East Africa (Powell 2002: 196-197). Beyoncé, with long,
blondish-back individual plaits, is surrounded on a schoolbus by her professional dancers.
Wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers, riding a school bus, and braided hair are symbols that connect

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with Black American girlhood. The dancers’ brown bodies are covered in white paint that darts
diagonally, creating a skin-layer of criss-crossing brown-and-white angles.
Further, in the first two lines of “Formation,” Beyoncé notes the Southern Black
American and Creole roots from which her family derives.
My daddy Alabama/ Mama Louisiana/
You mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas ‘Bama/
I like my baby’s hair with baby hair and Afros/
I like my Negro’s nose with Jackson 5 nostrils/
In the next two lines, she expresses appreciation of physical features of African descendants’
usually derided wide noses. And in response to critics who mocked her toddling daughter, Blue
Ivy, for wearing her hair freely, she affirms love of the child’s natural hair through the reference
to “baby hair and Afros.”
As litigation exists in 2017 that permits discrimination against typically Black hairstyles,
that Lemonade showcases the diversity of Black hair is important. In centering Black models and
dancers of various shades, hair textures, and colors, the images in the video capture the rainbows
of Blackness that occupy Black lives, rather than symbolically reinforcing Eurocentric standards
of beauty by centering models with only the latter features. This stylistic choice also resists
trends in popular music videos (particularly in Hip-Hop and R&B) to center darker shades nearer
to blue and indigo far less than lighter ones.
It is empowering for Black women to see that the range of their hair textures and styles
are not only acceptable, professional, and wonderful – they are all these things without the
automatic equation of Blackness with deficiency. The aforementioned lyrics and the images that
populate the albums videos affirm Afros, and the braids, straightened hair, and curly twists –
styles that Black women may choose or not. But this move affirms that Black women can choose
any and be beautiful.

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Moreover, the aforementioned references serve as outright linkages to African and
African Diasporal cultures. They illustrate, also, that Black Americans derive identities from rich
heritages connected to the African continent and the African Diaspora. As these cultures and
heritages have been heavily ignored or denigrated, such broadly visible affirmations of African
Diasporal cultures are indeed significant. Given the increasing and persistent vulnerability of
Black bodies to subtle and institutional racism, police violence, and various forms of oppression,
the reinforcement of valid African cultural traits is paramount.

Anger
Like many other albums of the contemporary rhythm and blues genre, Lemonade
(Knowles-Carter 2016) centers on a love relationship, specifically the experience of encountering
a partner’s infidelity. In the opening scenes, Beyoncé recites the following lines from Shire’s
“Intuition” poem.
You remind me of my father, a magician/
Able to exist in two places at once/
In the tradition of men in my blood/
You come home at 3AM and lie to me/
Throughout the album there are discussions of hurt, justified anger, healing, reciprocity, and
recompense. Though these elements are the focus of the album, the way they are discussed is rife
with symbols, messages, and meaning. Rather than a focus on the manifest content alone, this
section elucidates meaning unearthed through analysis of the lyrics, images, and poetry
throughout the video album.
Among its major themes, Lemonade contributes to Black women allowing themselves to
be and feel in public spaces – not just to be represented by others, through essentialized lenses of
stereotype. Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) shows Black women as human, brokenhearted,

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vulnerable, healed, powerful, independent, lovers, mothers, daughters, sisters – able to be angry,
broken, and recover, without concern for the invisible weight of stereotypes (Harris Perry 2011).
That is, in various media (from news and television to captioned pictures on social media,
called “memes”), Black women encounter linkages to longstanding stereotypes, such as “the
Angry Black Woman” that diminish valid feelings of anger, exhaustion, and emotion by
justifying them as part of Black women’s unending rage, and not consequences of centuries of
exploitation and oppression in the American social system (Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009; Cooper et
al. 2017). Black women are often framed as constantly attitudinal, oversexed, excessively
aggressive – individuals who fail to fit the problematic cult of true womanhood, which embodies
silence, docility, and fragility once expected of the idealized middle-class White woman (Cooper
et al. 2017; hooks 2015; Winfrey-Harris 2015). They are viewed as those who are simply strong
enough to handle the many burdens of the world, and serve as its bosom, too (BeauboufLafontant 2009; Harris-Perry 2011).
Two major stereotypes with which Black women are often forced to contend include the
angry Black woman, and the strong Black woman (Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009). Lemonade
(Knowles-Carter 2016) pushes against both, and does so in different fashions.
With regard to the angry Black woman, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) displays an
individual’s just anger at being betrayed by a lover. Instead of shying away from the idea of
Black women being angry, as they are often problematically framed as being so, Lemonade
(Knowles-Carter 2016) embraces the anger as another aspect of human emotion and feeling.
Through such a display, the project helps humanize Black women by displaying the complex
layers of emotion they experience as human beings. For instance, the lyrics in “Don’t Hurt
Yourself,” she asserts,

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Who the fuck do you think I is?
You ain't married to no average bitch, boy
Similarly, “Love You Like I Love You,” questions the state of the relationship post-infidelity,
finding evidence of a partner being romantically unfaithful, and experiencing justified frustration
at having one’s trust broken.
How did it come down to this?/ Scrolling through your call list/
I don't wanna lose my pride/ but I'mma fuck me up a bitch….
What's worse, lookin' jealous or crazy? Jealous or crazy?/
Or like being walked all over lately, walked all over lately
I'd rather be crazy/
Another striking example of anger emerges during the video representation of the song.
Beyoncé, dressed as Oshun, walks down a busy sidewalk, people with all shades of black,
brown, Afros, fades, and braids sitting outside at storefront tables. Black children dance and play
in the summer street.
As she walks the street, Beyoncé smiles happily, as she swings her bat from side to side,
swishing it through the flowing yellow ruffles of her dress. Then she smashes the bat, on it
written “Hot Sauce,” into cars, shattering windows, denting roofs, and dinging doors parked
alongside. She later drives a monster truck over a row of empty cars, bouncing gladly along the
way.
The maintenance of the smile is important. As she exorcises her anger on inanimate
objects, there is something in her comfort with her anger. She is unafraid of being characterized
as an angry Black woman – her anger is justified. And she otherwise does not care to be
restricted by politics of respectability and good behavior often employed by Blacks to avoid the
stereotypes that inaccurately characterize the group. She is at liberty to feel. She has been hurt.
And she is releasing the anger and hurt any human might feel during a broken relationship. She

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is rejecting the stereotype of the angry Black woman through her display of being a human who
is upset at being betrayed.
Further, the costuming is of significance. In this scene, Beyoncé is dressed to represent
Oshun, the Yoruba goddess of love, water, fertility, sexuality (Thompson 2002). And as the
goddess of love has been wronged, there must be recompense. She is using Ashe, the religion's
power to make things happen, to take that recompense, and to respond to the violation of love
with justified angry emotion (Thompson 2002). The inclusion of this symbol is further
affirmative reference to the diversity of Black Diasporal religious practices.
As noted above, Black women have been problematically associated with stereotypically
being too assertive, too aggressive, and too angry. Consequently, as noted by BeauboufLafontant (2009), Jones and Shorter-Gooden (2003) and others, some Black women discuss
silencing themselves, hiding feelings of justified anger at being mistreated, which can result in
greater stress and larger health issues later. And so, in Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016),
Beyoncé’s open display of anger is important.

Strength
With regard to the strong Black woman, Beaubouf-Lafontant (2009) does not
characterize “strength,” as an honorable and organic toughness held by Black women, drawn
from legacies of perseverance against slavery, segregation and racial and gender inequality.
Instead, the author exposes the physical and emotional damage exacted on Black women's bodies
through their attempts to, and external expectations that they meet the lofty requirements of
strong, Black womanhood (Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009).

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That is, the notion of strength, by appearing to accurately represent Black women's
reality, masks the inequality and mistreatment the group experiences in a society plagued with
racial, gender- and class-based inequality (Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009: 2). Forcing Black women
to be strong “during slavery, segregation, or contemporary institutional racism and intra-racial
sexism is to maintain a reassuring conviction that personal actions and agency trump all manner
of social abuses.” (Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009: 3). In this regard, the requirements of “strength”
ultimately sustain the socially stratified status quo, while wreaking havoc on the minds and
bodies of Black women (Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009: 1).
Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) destabilizes the idea that Black women are inherently
and necessarily “strong” in its illustration of love, loss, betrayal, hurt, vulnerability, pain, and
reconciliation. For instance, in “Love Drought” (Knowles-Carter 2016) articulates love-related
pain.
Are you aware you're my lifeline, are you tryna kill me?/
If I wasn't me, would you still feel me?/
Like on my worst day? Or am I not thirsty, enough?/
Another example emerges in the song “Sandcastles.”
Pictures snatched out the frame/
Bitch, I scratched out your name and your face/
What is it about you that I can't erase, baby?/
When every promise don't work out that way/
Stylistically, this is one of the most visually simplistic moments of the album. Beyoncé,
sits on the floor, singing behind a small keyboard, microphone, and what appears to be simple
recording equipment. Her sadness is evident – there are tears visible on her face as she sings and
plays. Additionally, her voice strains singing these, the most emotional parts of the song,
obviously holding back weeping through vocalization.

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At the end of “Sandcastles,” Beyoncé chooses to reconnect with partner, Jay-Z. What is
made clear throughout the album, however, is that this choice was hers. In the “Forgiveness”
poem, she reads, “Baptize me ... now that reconciliation is possible/ If we're gonna heal, let it be
glorious” (Knowles-Carter 2016).
Initially, his entry is alluded to, as the audience sees only shadows of his face. This is
followed by images of the couple embracing, clips of videos from their wedding, and the two
parents playing with daughter, Blue Ivy. Though the album began with his just anger at his
indiscretions, healing, recovery, and restoration are major themes that conclude the video.
Counter to the strong Black superwoman subspecies, this video illustrates that Black women are
human; feel; can be hurt; can have complicated love relationships; can choose to forgive or not
forgive; and can recover – much like the other humans operating in the world.
While the notion of Black women’s inherent strength is challenged by representations of
Black women feeling, personal strength is also required to recover from these experiences, and to
heal, as is illustrated at the end of the song. I am not arguing that Beyoncé is embodying
weakness, quite the contrary. She is simply showing the multiple layers of human experience,
and further, that Black women are fully human.

Independence and Agency
Other salient themes, wholly characteristic of Beyoncé’s later career, include economic
independence and agency. In particular, traditional gender roles that dictate men occupy
positions as breadwinners are challenged throughout Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016). In
“Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Knowles-Carter sings,
And keep your money, I got my own/
Keep a bigger smile on my face being alone/

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Bad motherfucker, God complex/
Motivate your ass, call me Malcolm X.
Similarly, the lyrics of “Formation” articulate a similar sentiment.
When he fuck me good, I take his ass to Red Lobster/
If he hit it right, I might take him on a ride in my chopper/
Might take him to the mall/
Let him buy some J’s/
Let him shop-ah/….
He just might be a Black Bill Gates in the making/
I just might be a Black Bill Gates in the making.
A number of symbols emerge from these particular lyrics, and have unique significance
in Black cultures. For instance, her economic status is alluded to in references to Red Lobster, a
somewhat costly restaurant, and buying a partner Jordan-brand sneakers, a status symbol in
Black American cultures, typically retailing at $200/pair. Similarly, having disposable shopping
funds; taking someone else on a shopping spree or for a ride in her helicopter. Independently, she
has the means to procure these status symbols; to decide what to do with her money; and to
splurge on a partner, if desired.
Moreover, Knowles-Carter references Bill Gates, the billionaire behind the success of
Microsoft. Obviously, with the popularity of Jay-Z’s album sales, his procurement of the
Brooklyn Nets basketball franchise, his growing economic status may be common knowledge.
At the same time, not only might her partner be a Black Bill Gates in the making, bucking the
statuses assigned to him via systems of racial oppression in the country. But also, and more
importantly, she is just as capable of occupying that economic space as well. Such a move bucks
gender roles of dependence on male economic provision, as well.

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Institutional Oppression
The continued vulnerability to which Black bodies are subject at the hands of institutional
oppression and police are addressed in Lemonade, as well. The “Forward” interlude is comprised
of images of mothers and family members of slain victims of police violence. This is a direct
statement. As the camera flashes to each woman or girl, they sit silently in a large chair, in the
setting reminiscent of Daughters of the Dust (Dash 1991). The mothers and family members
hold pictures of the slain Black men, women and children, while a male voice hauntingly sings
“Forward” in the background. In one brief shot, a single tear rolls down Leslie McFadden’s, 10
face. She shakes her head, purses her lips, and wipes it away. Her pain is evident.
As another example, in “Formation,” a small Black boy dances alone, yet emphatically in
black hooded sweatshirt in front of armed police. The latter are wearing helmets, holding shields,
guns, and riot gear. At one point, the boy stops dancing and opens his arms. The police then put
their hands up. This is a second obvious reference to racialized police killings, particularly the
murder of Trayvon Martin, killed by a neighborhood watch vigilante in 2012 at seventeen,
wearing a hooded sweatshirt.
To continue, with familial ties that reach New Orleans, Alabama, and Texas, the impact
of Hurricane Katrina is an important discussion in the album, as well. Not only was Hurricane
Katrina devastating to life and property throughout the Gulf Coast (Dyson 2007). The interplay
of race, class, and government idleness, allowed for Katrina's disproportionately devastating
impact on the impoverished Black communities of New Orleans (Dyson 2007.) For five days
after Katrina's destruction, the poorest citizens of the Gulf Coast were left with little to no aid, to
wallow in the summer heat in hunger, toxic water, and soggy filth (Dyson 2007).

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The “Formation” music video opens, panning to various neighborhoods in New Orleans.
The scenery resembles that of the lower wards of New Orleans, with small, closely-built row
houses in the background. In one brief shot, police lights flash in bright blues and reds, as Black
children ride their bikes down an unnamed New Orleans street in the night. Later in
“Formation,” Beyoncé stands atop a sinking police squad car, with the houses seemingly also
submerged, in the rising water. By the end of the video, both Beyoncé and the squad car are fully
submerged in Katrina-like flood waters.
With these and similar images, the album critiques the intersecting economic and raced
oppressions surrounding government response to Hurricane Katrina. These symbols highlight the
disregard for poor Blacks evinced by the failed government response to Katrina, and continued
slow rebuilding of areas devastated by the storm. Further, with the inclusion of references to
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and other victims of police violence, the critiques offered by
the symbolism in the Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) video album clearly target present
manifestations of racial oppression to which Black bodies are subject.

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DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION
Like earlier works of Black feminist artistry, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016)
synthesizes a particular type of Black consciousness, rooted in Black women’s experiences. In
this article, I aimed to highlight the major themes emergent in Lemonade to illustrate connections
to other Black feminist intellectual, scholarly, and musical works, for its aims to capture Black
women’s experiences living, being, hurting, healing, loving, being human, and also resisting,
challenging, and addressing our lived oppression to global audiences.
Lemonade does contain overt feminist messages and linkages to Black Diasporal
religions, cultural, and artistic traditions. At the same time, it is not without its flaws nor above
critique. First, it is both unfortunate and telling that musical forms, such as Hip-Hop, and R&B,
employed to synthesize Black women’s experiences, also package and sell these commodities
along with Black women’s pain (Rose 2008).
Throughout Lemonade, Warsan Shire’s poetry calls out the repeated devaluation,
depreciation, overwork, exploitation, abuse and intra-racial gender oppression experienced by
Black women. There is a particular focus on injury caused to Black women by Black men, who
are shaped in their own ways by patriarchal and hegemonic structures. However, other writers
and scholars have argued that abuse via infidelity should be challenged rather than equated to
reconcilable love. In 2014, when Knowles-Carter sampled a portion of Chimamanda Adichie’s
TED talk on feminism, the latter made sure to mention the discontinuities between Beyoncé’s
type of feminism and her own (Driscoll 2016). Similarly, as noted by renown Black feminist
theorist, bell hooks (2016),
Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators daringly offer
multidimensional images of black female life, much of the album stays within a
conventional stereotypical framework, where the black woman is always a
victim.

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Despite the celebrations of their beauty and wholeness throughout the video album, Black
women’s pain is yet again packaged and sold as a musical commodity in Lemonade (KnowlesCarter 2016). This is pain many Black women experience in abusive relationships, as evinced by
the disproportionate rates of intimate partner violence and abuse against Black women, as
compared to women of other races (Morris and Muhammad 2014; Winfrey Harris 2015). Why
must Black women, even when they are presented beautifully, also remain framed going through,
and/or overcoming pain? Even when old narratives are broken, old tropes of recycling and
selling Black women’s pain also permeate Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016).
hooks (2016) notes that the video album is also complicit in, and reinforces problematic
sexist elements, including the commodification and objectification of women’s bodies, namely
that of the artist, to boost album sales. Much of Knowles’ career has been propelled by the
connection between her vocal strengths; alignment with Eurocentric standards of physical
attractiveness (e.g., blond, straight hair) to be marketable across races; the use of/focus on her
physical attributes (e.g., Destiny Child’s 2004 hit, “Bootyliscious”); and continued reinforcement
of the narrative of Black women in perpetually broken relationships – staying with partners who
mistreat them due to the lack of available and bachelors for eligible Black women.
Moreover, notwithstanding the diversity of images of Black womanhood, the models,
dancers, and virtually all images of Black womanhood (aside from interviews) are fairly svelte
and slim-figured. Although the album contains its revolutionary elements, it is also constrained
by adherence to dominant beauty norms in terms of body size and ability. That is, the video
album contains a diversity of images of Black womanhood. However, it fails to do the same for
the full diversity of Black women’s bodies. Physically, the dancers and majority of the images

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feature models that are fairly fit, slim, and not of body types that are visibly overweight or
disabled.
Nonetheless, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) is important because it provides a highly
visible rejection of longstanding stereotypes, problematic depictions, and racialized framings that
strip the humanness from Black women, and prohibit them from being and being recognized as
their full selves. To this end, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) accomplishes a number of goals.
Songs and images included in Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) discuss the distinctive
inequities many Blacks in the U.S. encounter and witness contemporarily (e.g., police brutality).
The video album also features Black women actors, models, and dancers who vary in shade from
cream to coffee. Further, the varied stylistic choices in terms of hair are significant, highlighting
the diversity of Black beauty, and hair textures. Moreover, Lemonade is overflowing with visual
references to African cultures, Black American food traditions (e.g., the double entendre, “Hot
Sauce in my bag”) – often, traditions that, in public, have been hidden behind napkins and closed
purses, for the desire to adhere to politics of respectability.
As shown in the introduction, in contemporary American society, Black women are
subject to racialized attacks on their personhood, appearances, and beings. In media, they are
often discussed pejoratively, and their humanity minimized or erased. However, Black
Americans, both in the public sphere, and in everyday lives, use their agency, power, to navigate
these forms of oppression, to resist dehumanization and erasure, and to expose and give voice to
their experiences.
Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016) is an example of Black women artists, writers, and
thinkers continuing their boldness in talking about what they do, see, and experience in Black
female bodies operating in the country. The video album is an instance of artists and celebrities

118

affirming Black personhood on a global scale. Further, it is also an example of bringing “wreck,”
as noted by Pough (2004): when Black women employ public spaces to challenge historical
processes of racial and gender subordination and dehumanization.
This does not mean that the cultural and artistic productions that link Black life and
address the myriad of experiences should or will be perfect. Blues women’s music addressed
themes that were taboo at the time, including same-gender-loving relationships, infidelity,
domestic abuse, and female economic independence. Perhaps the album is indeed imperfect.
Still, it possesses overt messages of positive, beautiful aspects of Black culture and womanhood.
Like similar works, it is flawed, but it is also connected to and produced within the structures
that make a resounding cry of Black women’s beauty necessary right now.

119

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120

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1

Here, my concern is not necessarily with an artist and her growing politicization. I am not
arguing that Beyoncé is or is not a Black feminist. Nor, am I overtly situating the mantle of
feminism or Black feminism on the shoulders of this artist through her work. Instead, I am
highlighting the symbolically Black feminist work that Lemonade and similar pieces accomplish
through their centralization of Black women, discussions of impediments of racism and sexism,
affirmations of Black women’s beauty, and Black motherhood.
2

Race is solely noted to highlight the fact that Black women are not safe from hatred –
regardless of the identity of the source.

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3

In fact, such a paucity of Black children’s book characters exists, books that center Black
children, such as Penny and the Magic Puffballs (Williams and Goshay 2013), Jaden Toussaint
(Dumas and Muravski 2015), Nelson Beats the Odds (Sidney et al. 2015), Big Hair Don’t Care
(Swain-Bates and Bair 2013), Chocolate Me! (Diggs and Evans 2015) and Mixed Me! continue
to grow in popularity. Eager audiences wish to see themselves, their hair, their appearances,
represented in the images of their children’s dreaming and conscious worlds.
4

This is not to say that Black women should choose one style or another to reinforce or establish
their Blackness. But it is to say that they should not be confined solely to styles that literally may
destroy their hair, in order to appear more respectable, and more acceptable in predominately
White society.
5

The movie, Good Hair (Stilson 2010), contained a scene wherein an aluminum Coca-Cola can
was dissolved in the same chemical contained in the perms used to straighten Black women’s
hair. Though I do not imply Black women should choose one style or another, I am highlighting
the presence of legislation that permits discrimination against making Black hair choices that are
overtly connected to African heritage, and for some, that are a healthier option. It is evidence of
continued anti-Black affect (Lee and Bean 2012), and administrative infringement on the rights
of Black women, people of color, and other vulnerable groups in the society.
6

These were the final words of Mr. Garner, a father and grandfather, who was killed by a
member of the New York Police, using an illegal chokehold over the sale of loose cigarettes.
7

Lemonade also reached #1 on the Billboards, allowing the Knowles sisters, Beyoncé and
Solange, to set another record for siblings whose albums reached #1 simultaneously.
8

Although vocal and audio analysis are not significantly employed here, I note that Lemonade is
unique in that it spans a series of genres, including country – a musical in which Black
Americans have been scarcely represented. In fact, the remix of “Daddy Lessons” featured
popular country stars, The Dixie Chicks. Though Beyoncé was nominated for a Country Music
Award, fears of reprisal from the seemingly all-White, heavily conservative audience against
Beyoncé, someone who had called out the abuses of police on Black bodies, cancelled the
performance before it began. Though I do not employ much audio analysis, this would be a good
area for additional research, as it also shows the diversity of music and influences that Black
women enjoy, employ, and sing – it is another example of Lemonade showing that Black women
are not monolithic.
9

Specifically, Thompson links the Kongo, Yoruba, Ejagham and Mande civilizations to Blacks
in Haiti, Cuba, and other parts of the New World. Brazil, especially, provides an interesting case
study in the amalgamation of novel articles of faith (e.g., Yoruba deities and Roman Catholic
Saints) and ancestral philosophies. For instance, Thompson (1984, 77). finds that modern Blacks
of Rio de Janeiro link the Catholic Virgin Mary to Yemáya, Yoruba goddess of the sea, as the
two spiritual relics “share qualities of sacred love, faith and purity.” A point of alignment,
however, between Thompson (1984) and Mintz and Price (1998) occurs in their discussions of
New World Blacks and religious orientations. Both argue that Africans in the Americas absorbed

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and readjusted the novel religions to accommodate preexisting traditional ones. This is clear in
the content of Lemonade.
10

Leslie McFadden is the mother of Michael Brown, Jr. Eighteen-year-old Brown was unarmed
when he was shot by police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri.

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ARTICLE THREE:
POST-TRUMP INTERSECTIONS & “POST-RACIAL” REFLECTIONS: BLACK
WOMEN, RACISM, SEXISM & CLASSISM IN THE U.S.

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ABSTRACT
Instances of overt racial violence, discrimination, and verbal attacks circulate via news and social
media, affirming growing levels of xenophobia, anti-immigrantism, and non-White hatred in the
country. The growing visibility of racially discriminatory attitudes and attacks on minorities; tax
plans that entrench wealth for the richest in the country; along with anti-woman legislation,
collectively have unique consequences for groups vulnerable to multiple intersecting forms of
oppression. This project centers on Black women, whose raced experiences are uniquely colored
by gender, ethnicity, class, ability, and sexuality. In this chapter, I employ a total of twenty-one
semi-structured interviews with Black American women aged 22-50 drawn in 2011 and 2016. I
centralize vulnerabilities to which Black women see themselves being subject to illustrate ways
covert and outright racism, economic oppression, and sexism intersect to remain factors in their
everyday lives. I also highlight Black women’s strategies of navigation, and responses to new
media that are affirmative of Black appearances and identities.

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INTRODUCTION
Presently, obvious and covert unequal treatment for marginalized racial, ethnic, and
gender groups is sanctioned by law, and justified rhetorically by the nation’s elected officials.
Instances of overt racialized violence, and discrimination circulate news and social media, in
affirmation of growing levels of xenophobia and non-White hatred in the country. In tandem,
covert racial and gender oppression, and growing economic inequality, both heavily ascendant
after the neoliberal economic and political shift of the 1980s, persists simultaneously.
Further, in the U.S., Black people are subject to particular vulnerabilities, as members of
a racial minority, that are uniquely shaped by class, sexuality, ability, body, and gender
(Crenshaw 1991). In this chapter, I employ a total of twenty-one semi-structured interviews with
Black American women aged 22-50 drawn in 2011 and 2016. Like Crenshaw (1991), I argue that
Black women are subject to, and yet contend with intersecting structures of oppression. 1
However, the weight of navigating U.S. society as a potentially non-wealthy, a woman, nonheterosexual, and/or a Black woman – has made the manifestations of these intersections in
everyday life even more of a concern under the present oppressive administration.
In the chapter, I illustrate ways covert and outright racism, economic oppression, and
sexism intersect to remain factors in Black women’s everyday lives, as a multiply-oppressed
group in a White supremacist, patriarchal society. I engage six interviews collected in 2016,
along with fifteen interviews collected during my M.A. studies in 2011.
Investigating earlier interview data drawn from Black women prior to the 2012 election,
and just after the 2016 election, helps demonstrate continuities and differences in perspectives on
Black women’s lives during the sociopolitical changes occurring during this short period

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between the Obama and Trump administrations. I also highlight continuities in experiences with
racism and sexism, that have remained present regardless of the U.S. Executive Official.
Moreover, a burgeoning natural hair movement and the growing media visibility of
affirmative representations of Black adults and children, has begun to emerge more significantly
on television. The popularity of Black-led, or –centered shows like, Scandal (2012), Insecure
(2016), and How to Get Away with Murder (2015) serve as evidence of this. Similarly, music by
Black artists, like Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016), DAMN! (Lamar 2017) and Seat at the
Table (Knowles 2016) affirm Black beauty, Black womanhood, and critique racialized police
brutality. I discuss reactions to the increasing visibility of Black women of varied colors and hair
textures on television and social media.
In all, I engage data rooted in lived experiences contending with oppression in a society
which that oppression appears to be growing. I also address strategies of resistance and
navigation – both those that they employ, and those that the participants witness in media.
Many of these themes are discussed from the perspectives of Black women below. What
follows is an exploration of primarily middle class Black women’s views and experiences.
Participants discuss perspectives on the Obama and Trump administrations. Interviewees address
daily sufferings with microaggressions, including negations, destabilizations, disproportionately
high levels of scrutiny, and other subtle, minute, tiny, often deniable forms of oppression. Their
interviews provide lenses into emotional and professional weight of being perceived through the
lens of marked raced and gendered bodies. Participants also note ways they reject and resist these
oppressions, and connect/disconnect from media that affirm/deny their humanity.
Ultimately, this project is not to stand as the universal synthesis of Black women’s
consciousness. Instead, Black women, their voices, and their experiences, are varied. Subject to

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time, and financial constraints, I focus on accessing and synthesizing a specific consciousness
drawn primarily from middle-class women, whose occupations range from engineers and artists,
to students, office workers, and professors.

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BACKGROUND
Black Women in Trump’s America
Just nine years ago, the election of President Barack Obama propelled questions about
whether the U.S. had transcended its racially oppressive history through the election of a political
centrist of African descent. At the same time, during the Obama Presidency, the number of hate
groups in the U.S. increased dramatically, in response to the symbolism of a Black man in
Executive Office (Morris and Muhammad 2014). While the Obama presidency continues to
erroneously stand as a marker of American racial transcendence, during the Obama First
Family’s occupancy of the White House, none of the Obamas were safe from being associated
with longstanding stereotypes about Blackness, scrutiny, discrimination, and unequal treatment
based on identity. 2
The premature celebrations of racial transcendence in 2008 and 2012 were followed
shortly thereafter by the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency in 2016. The latter was
accomplished by riding a tide of racialized and gendered political backlash to the prior
administration. Ironically, Trump had earlier propelled race-based “birther” charges questioning
President Obama’s country of origin, and the legitimacy of his presidency.
Trump, a real estate billionaire and TV personality, was able to attain the nation’s highest
office by using coded and direct language to play on xenophobic, anti-immigrant fears of some
Americans who are witnessing as racial minority groups expand in population, and immigrant
groups from Mexico, Latin America, The Caribbean, African and Asian countries continue to
culturally, politically, racially, and ethnically diversify the nation (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Gold
2004; Lee and Bean 2012; Treitler 2013). Contrary to beliefs that racial transcendence had been
reached in the 1970s (Blauner 1989), or even by the first decade of the 2000s, an overtly racist,

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sexist, classist attitudinal tide has reemerged in the society. Videos and news stories shared,
labeled “viral” for the extension of their visibility to millions on social media, circulate and
publicize acts of overt racism against Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, and other racial, ethnic, and
religious minority groups. 3
As examples, a couple from Georgia received a collective thirty-five-year sentence for
terrorizing an eight-year-old Black child’s birthday party with Confederate flags, racial slurs,
threats, and guns. Following the Muslim Ban, in January 2017, two Texas mosque were burned
down. Both events occurred within two weeks of the Islamic Center of Eastside in Belleview,
Washington suffering a similar fate (Samaha and Ansari 2017). Further, “in May [2017],
two men on a Portland train were stabbed to death trying to stop a White supremacist's antiMuslim tirade against two teenagers” (Dastagir 2017). And in August 2017, 22-year-old Heather
Heyer was killed, and dozens others injured, after they were run over by a neo-Nazi terrorist
driver while protesting a White supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. 4
Indeed, the U.S. President is even facing suit for inciting violence at campaign rallies.
Kashiya Nwanguma, Molly Shah and Henry Brousseau attended the March 1,
2016, Louisville rally for the purpose of "peacefully protesting Trump," the ruling
says. Nwanguma was carrying a sign with Trump's head on a pig's body,
according to multiple news reports. At some point during his remarks at the
Kentucky International Convention Center, the ruling states, the candidate said,
"Get 'em out of here." Matthew Heimbach, who was representing the White
Nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party, and Alvin Bamberger attacked the
protesters, according to the ruling. Nwanguma, Shah and Brousseau accuse
Heimbach and Bamberger of assault and battery. They further level charges of
incitement to riot, negligence, gross negligence and recklessness against the
Trump campaign. (McLaughlin 2017)
By the fall of 2017, in the midst of a climate of racialized terror and police brutality, Donald
Trump later encouraged the use of additional force during police arrests (Blake 2017). This,

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despite the deaths of Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Korryn Gaines, Sandra Bland, and other Black
members of the society whose encounters with police resulted in their deaths.
Alongside increasing outright discrimination, forms of subtle oppression characteristic of
the post-civil-rights era also persist. As evinced by the recent issuance of several Executive
Orders, legislative moves towards social and political regression – in civil and human rights
surrounding race, class, sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and gender – have already begun. That
is, Donald Trump’s legislative beginnings deny citizenship based on nationality and religion 5;
repeat violent histories of violating U.S./Native American treaties to advance U.S. economic
interests (in this case, oil pipelines)6; and limit sexual assault protections for students, and
reproductive options for women.
In January 2017, a directive known as the “Muslim Ban,” was issued by the President,
barring immigration from Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Libya, and Sudan – Muslim
countries – for at least ninety days (Diamond 2017). The aim of the measure was to prevent
“radical Islamic terrorists” from entry into the U.S. (Diamond 2017). Another executive order
was issued in preparation for the building of a wall between Mexico and the U.S. to impede
immigration (Davis 2017). And in September 2017, Trump announced his plan to repeal
President Obama’s Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) order. DACA “protects
undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children from deportation and allows them the
ability to work and study” (Kopan 2017).
Further, in January 2017, a rash of legislation was introduced to limit reproductive
choices, especially for low income women (Levintova 2017). A Republican-directed Congress
and Executive Office have begun targeting funding of Planned Parenthood, an organization that
provides cancer screenings and other services to women without regard for ability to pay.

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Additionally, a recent executive order prevents U.S. funding from providing family planning
services internationally, and reinstates the Mexico City Gag Order. This mandate prohibits
clinics who provide women’s health services from discussing abortion options with patients
(Redden 2017). This, only a few days in office, and marked by the irony of a room of White men
signing legislation to determine the fate of women’s bodies (Terkel 2017). Further, newlyappointed Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, plans to remove Title IX protections for sexual
assault reporting at colleges and universities (Bolger and Brodsky 2017).
To an invitation-only audience at George Mason University, closed to the students
who protested her expected announcement outside, [DeVos] declared that the
Obama administration had gone too far, protecting student survivors to the
detriment of the accused. The Education Department, she indicated, will reverse
course through a technical process called “notice-and-comment.” If that sounds
innocuous, it’s not. Rather, it’s a signal that the Trump administration will make
way for what is nothing less than an all-out attack on survivors. (Bolger and
Brodsky 2017)
Economically, Trump has also enticed millions of poor, working, and middle class White
Americans to vote against their best economic interests, in aligning with a campaign to dismantle
America’s only major system of publically subsidized healthcare, without an adequate
replacement (Kaplan 2017). Bills aimed at repealing the Affordable Care Act are under presently
debate, some of which have included such deep cuts to Medicaid funding, and by extension,
services to seniors and those unable to afford medical care.
Ultimately, not even a decade after post-racialism dominated discussions on U.S. racial
attitudes, overtly anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Black affect presently coincides with
anti-woman, anti-poor, anti-immigrant, and anti-Black legislation. Thus, the 2016 election was
not a mundane event in the history of the U.S., but instead has implications for the maintenance
of racial/ethnic, gender, sexual, and economic inequity in the country. This is particularly true for

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the ways these forms of oppression manifest in the everyday lives of members of marginalized
groups operating in the society.
Given a president that verbally champions violence against bodies of color, and moves
legislatively to disenfranchise minority groups, it is no wonder that instances of racial violence
reported by news and circulated in social media videos have increased. It is no wonder many
members of marginalized groups feel unsafe, and as though they are increasingly subject to
vulnerabilities in racialized interactions, as well as in policy moves.
Furthermore, the present administration’s directives illustrate the relevance of
intersectional approaches to inequality; to the maintenance of oppression; and to the
manifestations of oppressions in the everyday lives of marginalized groups. That is, not only are
overt and active hatred factors in the lives of marginalized groups existing within racially,
sexually, economically, and gender-oppressive regimes. The aforementioned legislation
disproportionately affects vulnerable groups in the society, doing so in compounded fashions for
those whose racial, gender, and/or class minority status is complicated by membership in
additional minority groups. Investigating the lives of those whose experiences are shaped by
intersecting structures that support multiple forms of oppression can be paramount to supporting
these groups, and destabilizing the persistent and Herculean inequities with which they contend.

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THEORY AND LITERATURE
Neoliberal Post-Racialism – A Precursor to Trump
Yet, to comprehend the contemporary social, political, and economic context into which
Black women are situated, and to understand the backlash with which they currently contend,
this section highlights structural changes in the U.S. beginning in the 1960s that have helped
precipitate the current situation.
During the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the gains of the modern civil rights movement
included the elimination of the legalized system of “Jim Crow” racism (Omi and Winant 1989;
Winant 2001; Bonilla-Silva 2010). Within this system, “segregation was legal and racial
classification determined where one sat or drank or worked or lived or went to school” (Brown et
al. 2003: 3). Violation of this system, or simply being non-White in this system, could precipitate
legal penalty and/or violence. The passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 guaranteed non-Whites voting rights, protection under the law, access
to public accommodation/employment and aspects of citizenship. Consequently, Jim Crow social
order of overt legal discrimination was largely dismantled (Brown et al. 2003).
Further, these sociopolitical transitions also preceded major changes in the global
political and economic arena. By the 1980s, the political and economic ideology of
Keynesianism, wherein social good was connected to social welfare and safety nets, was
replaced by the neoliberal project (Harvey 2007: 3; Martinez 2016). The implementation of
neoliberalism in the 1980s precipitated the removal of social welfare programs, in tandem with a
growing concentration of the global wealth amongst the top-earning 1% of the population.
Monetarism [emphasized by neoliberalism] arose as a response to socialism and
to Keynesian economics, which had difficulties addressing the problems of
stagnation and inflation, or the stagflation that occurred in the early
1970s….Government is solely involved in the maintenance of the conditions for

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the accumulation of capital, including a strong military, while emphasizing
limited social programs and government services to the citizenry…. Limited
government is promoted through privatization of government services and
through deregulation of the economy. Liberalization of the market, it is argued,
allows individuals to be free from the restraints of market regulations, which is
the cornerstone of neoliberalism (Martinez 2016: 14-16).
This also served as a major backlash to the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. That is,
the implementation of neoliberalism generated significant economic inequality in the society.
Further, the neoliberal ideological project shifted public understandings of the relationship
between the individual and the social and economic structure of society (Harvey 2007; Martinez
2016). This shift in thinking influenced thinking on race, as well, precipitating the emergence of
early colorblind and later post-racial ideologies (Brown et al. 2003; Bonilla-Silva 2010; Martinez
2016).
The discursive work of neoliberalism within colorblindness asserts if minorities engaged
in greater amounts of personal responsibility, they too would have social and economic
advancements similar to their White counterparts, even though this is a misnomer (Bonilla-Silva
2010; Brown et al. 2003).
With regard to racial domination and oppression, it is assumed that racism no
longer exists and that all individuals are free to pursue their own well-being.
There is even speculation of having entered a post-racial period, a view based
mostly on the election of President Obama. In recent years, the emphasis has been
on promoting color-blind approaches that circumvent intergroup issues. Indeed,
from the neoliberal perspective, groups do not exist; they do not have an objective
existence, only individuals exist. Thus, within the neoliberal framework,
structural inequalities also are assumed to not exist. Supposedly, we live in an
open society in which structural barriers such as institutional racism do not exist
(Martinez 2016: 16-17).
The assertion of meritocracy creates normative assumptions and narratives that posit
groups with lower socioeconomic statuses are ill equipped and have pathological cultures that
lead to their failures both economically and socially (Harvey 2007; Bonilla-Silva 2010). That is,

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neoliberal ideology assumes that the creation/exacerbation of inequality is neither inherent in the
neoliberal project nor worsened by the loss of social welfare protections; each individual is
presumed to encounter the same types of impediments, and therefore, to have equal opportunity
to succeed or fail (Harvey 2007; Martinez 2016).
By separating inequalities from the structural features of society and assigning
them to the private sphere, the issue of racism itself is removed from the public
sphere. The displacement of racism from the public sphere diminishes the spaces
of public discourses in which its elimination can be framed and discussed. The
result is the intensification of racial oppression both by making it invisible and by
muting resistance by the oppressed (Martinez 2016: 18).
For example, Ronald Reagan, the major implementer of neoliberalism in the U.S.,
employed the symbolically raced and gendered image of the ‘welfare queen.” Her fictionalized
and inflated abuses of social welfare represented those of the larger “undeserving” Black poor.
Supposedly the owner of a taxpayer-funded pink Cadillac, the image was used to secure support
for the rolling back of the race-targeted policies of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, along with
welfare state policies of the Great Society, which ensured a social safety net for Americans
below the poverty line (Neubeck and Cazenave 2001). Further, this pejorative image helped
reinforce stereotypes about Black women’s as problematic mothers, dependent on, and
exploiting the social welfare system.
Similarly, then-Candidate Trump employed an “us/them” rhetoric that galvanized
racialized nationalism against the threat of immigrants – who supposedly posed threats to jobs,
Christianity, safety from terrorism, and the reach of the U.S. (Haney Lopez 2014). His aims to
“Make America Great Again” include removal and restriction of those historically framed as
“other,” and “undeserving.” And in similar fashion to earlier political backlashes against the
political, social, and economic dismantling of White supremacy, Trump later employed this
rhetoric, to progress racially, economically, sexually, and ethnically oppressive legislation.

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Black Feminisms
In all, Black American women are subject particular oppressions in U.S. society that have
been counted and recounted by Black feminist scholars innumerable (Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009;
Cooper et al. 2017; Crenshaw 1991; Foster et al. 2009; Guy-Sheftall 1995; Harris-Perry 2011;
Hill Collins 2000; Hull et al. 1982; Lorde 2007; Winfrey Harris 2015). This project rests
centrally Black feminist theoretical traditions, employing Crenshaw's (1991) approach,
intersectionality.
Commonalities among Black feminist theorists of intersectionality also include approach
to structures of race, class, and gender oppression as intersecting/interlocking, mutuallyreinforced social structures (Combahee River Collective [1978] 1982; Crenshaw 1991, 1242;
Hill Collins 1998: 204). That is, women of color's experiences are typically the product of
intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, not a homogenized women's or black experience
alone (Crenshaw 1991: 1242). Their race often causes them to experience gender differently than
White women; their gender causes them to experience race differently than Black men
(Crenshaw 1991: 1252).
In particular, Black women in the U.S. are yet subject to consequences of legacies of
enslavement; institutionalized segregation and discrimination; negative stereotypes and racial
attitudes; victim-blaming for racial disparities; disproportionate levels of vulnerability to police
and vigilante violence; material inequities in wealth and health; discrimination and segregation in
housing; and an abundance of symbolically coded media presentations that often draw on
stereotypical images of Blackness (Cooper et al. 2017; Harris 2015; Harris-Perry 2011; Hill
Collins 2000; Jones and Shorter-Gooden 2003; Lee and Bean 2012; Massey and Denton 1994;
Neely 2015). Black women’s oppression as members of their own minority outgroup (Combahee

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River Collective [1978] 1995; Lorde 2007) connects ways they are treated, and the reading of
their actions by others on a daily basis – the stereotypes that have been used to maintain their
oppression, that as noted by Harris-Perry (2011), shape the “crooked room” in which they
constantly try to stand straight.
For instance, the continued effects of the institutional inequity serve as persistent
economic impediments to many Black women’s progress, their success, and their feelings of
wholeness on the job and in personal spaces. A study by the Institute for Women’s Policy
Research found that Black women are
working more and getting less in return across all areas of American life. Black
women voted at higher rates than any other group in 2008 and 2012 (and in 2014,
more than any other group except White men and women)—but they remain
drastically underrepresented in both state and national politics. The share of Black
women with a college degree has increased by almost 24 percent since the early
2000s, but they graduated with more debt and worse prospects than White
students. And Black women participate in the workforce at higher rates than other
women, yet they're among the most likely to live in poverty, second only to
indigenous women (Caplan-Bricker and Goldber 2017).
According to Holmes and Frye (2016), the existing gender wage gap that records women earning
at significantly lower rates than men for similar work is further exacerbated by race.
Over a lifetime, the cumulative effect of the wage gap for African American
women is astronomical: For women overall, the average lifetime wage gap, as
measured over a 40-year career, is $430,480. For African American women, the
average lifetime wage gap is more than double that, totaling $877,480. (Holmes
and Frye 2016)
Yet, this is not necessarily a just consequence solely of existing discrimination (CaplanBricker and Goldber 2017; White 2017). These are consequences of neoliberalism, and earlier
economic oppression of Blacks, which collectively have financial consequences for Black/White
wealth and earning gaps today.
In part, this is because Black women have remained trapped in the worst-paying
sectors of the economy—caretaking and service jobs—while White women have

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ascended to better-compensated professions. This is no coincidence, as Alicia
Garza, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement and the special projects
director at the NDWA, writes in the forward to the report. “Without Black
women’s labor inside of white households, white women would not have been
able to break (some) of the barriers of sexism that relegated the value of women’s
contributions to the sphere of the home,” she writes. “The result is a racialized
economy where Black women are losing ground.” (Caplan-Bricker and Goldber
2017)
To continue, with a specific focus on Black women, Beaubouf-Lafontant (2009), Jones
and Shorter-Gooden (2003), Winfrey-Harris (2015), Harris-Perry (2011), Cooper et al. (2017)
and other Black feminist scholars have addressed the ways Black women navigate, resist, and
challenge racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and other forms of inequality in media, public
spaces, and their everyday lives. Harris-Perry (2011) conceptualizes Black women trying to
stand in the “crooked room” of longstanding stereotypes that diminish personhood. Jones and
Shorter-Gooden (2003) highlight ways Black women “shift,” police, silence, and restrict
themselves to avoid judgment, or alignment with stereotypes about their strength, attitudinally,
womanhood, and femininity. Further, Winfrey-Harris (2015) aims to challenge and reverse
dominant beliefs that associate Black women with pathology and brokenness – highlighting
Black women’s beauty, intellectual prowess, and rejecting the respectability politics that cause
Black people to overpolice their own behaviors for fear of reinforcing existing stereotypes about
the group.
In an effort to shake the weight of society’s biased expectations, some black
women hold their tongues when they are justified in raging, deny their sexuality
when they should be making love with abandon, give all their energy and care to
others while they get sicker, hate African features instead of loving black skin,
broad noses, and kinks. And they make decisions not based on their particular
needs and wants but to circumvent what society thinks of them (Winfrey Harris
2015: 9)
Winfrey Harris’ (2015) participants discuss hiding feelings of justified anger for fear of
being classified (and subsequently dismissed) as angry Black women by family members, work

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peers, and in other interpersonal contacts. “Black women do get angry. Everyone does. But the
angry black woman stereotype denies them their warranted rage” (Winfrey Harris 2015: 81). In
many instances, Winfrey Harris (2015: 82) argues that Black women are not allowed to feel, as
others’ expectations are confined to this stereotype – to the point that many Black women go to
extents of rejecting and silencing their own valid emotion in order to avoid being framed as such.

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METHODS & FINDINGS
Table 5: Interview Participants
Name

Age

Data Set

Name

Age

Data Set

Desiree

37

2016

Lilly

22

2011

Niara

32

2016

Rochelle

20

2011

Traci

35

2016

Yvette

19

2011

Aliyah

49

2016

Trisha

22

2011

Candace

32

2016

Ashley

19

2011

Toni

31

2016

Arianna

22

2011

Antoinette

41

2011

Erika

33

2011

Jackie

22

2011

Shante

45

2011

Teresa

26

2011

Lisa

50

2011

Brooklyn

26

2011

Victoria

48

2011

Tiana

23

2011

Convenience and snowball sampling were employed heavily, through volunteers from
professional/personal contacts, student organizations, religious/community groups, all gathered
throughout Eastern and Midwestern U.S. Included participants are women of African ancestry
who self-identify as cisgender Black women, including those identify as African-American, as
well as those who embody trans-national (e.g., Grenadian, Jamaican) and multi-racial (mixedraced and multi-raced) identities.7
The first set of interviews was collected in person, as a result of my Master’s Thesis data
collection efforts in 2011. The first set of interviewees (2011) varied in age from 18-50. The
second set of interviews were collected in the same areas, but were collected digitally via Skype
and phone. Interviewees in the second set of interviews ranged in age from 31-49.

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Interviews were recorded. Following the interviews, the recordings were transcribed.
Following transcription, interview data were coded by line and by paragraph for themes that
emerge across interviews. Each group of interview provided its own data set analyzed separately
for the presence of themes and theories in the interviews. Further, data were analyzed for its
adherence to or divergence from the theories that shaped the project at its outset.
In the interviews, I sought very detailed information from participants about how racism,
sexism, and class discrimination impact their home, work, and personal lives daily. Each of the
women offered a unique perspective on the experience, weight, struggles and joys of Black
womanhood in the contemporary U.S. Numerous themes emerged in the coding of data, though I
centralize three major themes below:
1) Intersecting Racial, Class, and Gender Oppressions
2) Stereotypes, Microaggressions, Strategies of Navigation
3) Post-Trump Developments – 2016 Data
The most prominent theme in the data is the women’s understandings of intersecting
systems of racial, gender, and class oppression. 8 Findings illustrate that daily instances of racial
discrimination and gender subordination are often constant. These often take the form of
microaggressions, subtle dismissals, covert attacks by students, coworkers, and acquaintances,
on their personhood, capability, credibility, and humanity, alongside linkages to longstanding
stereotypes that denigrate their beauty because of its Africanness.
Further, some participants noted their or their families’ contention with sustained
economic inequity (e.g., failing schools, food deserts), in neighborhoods that are particularly
marked by systemic racial oppression (i.e., as consequences of the continued racial segregation
of the U.S. despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, as noted by Massey and Denton

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1993). This illustrates not only the intersection of structures of racial and gender oppression
affect Black women’s lives, but introduces, also, the intersection of class inequality.
And supporting these patterned relations in the society are also ideas and stereotypes that
help justify minority group positions, or otherwise perpetuate their marginalization in the society.
Often, these ideas are circulated through various media, accepted by outsiders as at least partial
truths, and used to inform interactions with minorities with whom they typically have limited or
no interaction. As a second theme, I highlight ways the women see others’ stereotype-informed
expectations of their behavior shaping interactions. I also address Black women’s strategies of
navigation, as they provide for themselves and their families, maintain senses of self, humanity,
and aim to reject stereotypes that often shape how others view them.
Finally, the 2016 data brought forth more significant discussions of overt racism and
gender-related vulnerability, following the election of Donald Trump. To be clear, the 2011
interviews did highlight the presence of overt and covert forms of discrimination in the everyday
lives of the participants. 2011 participants confirmed an overall sentiment of some degree of
racial progress since the 1960s, though skepticism about achieved racial transcendence
abounded. 2011 participants discussed things being “better today” than earlier years, highlighting
the symbolic nature of the progress that achieving an Obama presidency twice would require. At
the same time, 2011 participants limited their optimism about post-racialism to just that, framing
the achievement of racial transcendence in the U.S. as a utopian goal.
2016 participants, however, discussed feelings of vulnerability, in a much stronger
fashion than 2011 participants. Although 2011 and 2016 participants discussed experiences with
varied forms of discrimination, 2016 participants highlight greater sentiments of economic

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vulnerability to political change in the country; increased witnessing of racialized violence; and
also a stronger visibility of pro-Black-woman creations on social media and television.

Findings: Intersecting Structures of Racial, Class, and Gender Oppression
In this section, I address the participants’ discussions of institutional discrimination,
excess scrutiny, and microaggressions. Often these are the invisible types of oppression that have
material consequences for the ways Black women navigate their everyday lives. That is,
participants discussed subtle attacks, microaggressions and differential treatment, often based on
class, race, and gender. Others address the institutional racism and economic oppression that
continues to manifest in their everyday lives.

Findings: Institutional Racism and Economic Oppression
A number of participants highlighted the economic effects of institutional racism in their
everyday lives. A number of participants discussed professional accomplishment or ambition,
juxtaposed with economic vulnerability from the student loan-debts that funded their education.
Some discussed the deleterious effects of economic oppression; the crack epidemic of the 1980s
(Kitwana 2003); and ways the growing prison industrial complex has funneled family, friends,
and loved ones into incarceration (Alexander 2012).
Candace9, a working mother in her 30s living in a large, predominately Black, urban area,
reflected on the raced nature of the class oppression in her community. Candace lives in a food
desert with failing schools. She expressed anger at the ways race and class intersect to limit
opportunities and life chances in her predominately Black community.
Candace (2016): But I think race is still gonna be a factor. And I think it’s
definitely still a factor in how our society is run. And how it was developed. And

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so you find institutional racism, or racism in how we live, what we have access to,
the food we have access to, the fact that our men are in and out of prisons. So
even if I can say I’ve never had an overt instance of racism, or that someone has
never discriminated against me directly to my face, I LIVE all of the racism that I
will ever need in my lifetime. Being stuck in this community where you don’t get
enough resources. Where our kids go to schools that are underfunded and failing
schools. Where I have to figure out how to move, where to move, where I can live
so my kids can get a proper education. Long as that’s still going on, racism is still
a big factor that I’ll have to contend with. Whether or not I’ll always have to, I’m
not sure. But as long as this country is broken and run the way it’s run, it always
gonna be what we have to deal with.
Referencing the “broken” country, and the “way it’s run,” Candace (2016) addresses the lack of
resources in her community as the extended effects of intersecting racial and class oppression
that manifest in her everyday life.
In similar fashion, Toni (2016), another working mother in her 30s, noted
This is why my neighborhood is all Black and you look around and you see forty
year olds walking around with a walker. And I remember going to a larger White
area and buying lettuce and my son being like, “Oh, they’re selling little trees!”
Because the lettuce in our neighborhood doesn’t look like that! Like I think that’s
racism too! I don’t know how to put what kind, but it is! They don’t bring good
things to our neighborhood.
That is, Toni (2016) endures a lack of fresh food so severe that her son was completely
unfamiliar with the unique varieties of fresh lettuce carried at more expensive grocery stores like
Whole Foods. To those with the economic and health-related privilege of easy access to healthy
foods, it may seem unfathomable a child finding lettuce unrecognizable. Though fresh foods are
necessary for healthy development, the lack to which Toni (2016) speaks is not uncommon in
other food deserts lacking easy access to fresh groceries throughout the U.S., many of which are
in predominately Black and poor areas. This speaks further to the extended effects of
institutional racism and economic oppression on Black lives. For some, continued racial
segregation remains a major factor that directly shapes their economic life chances.

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Findings: Intersecting Oppressions – Subtle Discrimination and Microaggressions
In 2011, participants cited the presence of a new type of racism. It is, what Lisa labeled,
“an undercover racism that's very much still alive and kicking.” Further, the subtleties of this
type of racism allow racist incidents to be overlooked, or “brushed under the rug,” as stated by
Rochelle. In their critiques of the notion that we are a colorblind, equal, or post-racial society, the
women identified specific sites of racial inequity that they have either witnessed or encountered
themselves.
Both women in 2011 and women in 2016 address experiencing both covert and overt
discrimination. This includes subtle attacks, excess scrutiny, problematic media representations
that often shape how Black women are perceived by others, and differential treatment – all of
which is leveled against them because of the membership in their racial and gender group.
Desiree (2016): College was my wide awakening because it was DAILY. It was
day in day out. This is my life now. And to me, it was a real dose of reality.
Other respondents also expressed the additive nature of vulnerability to racial and gender
discrimination and marginalization, as well as the need to work harder (read: be stronger) to fight
it. Most confirmed those to be constant features. As noted by Arianna (2011),
To be a Black woman is an experience that could only be made more difficult if I
was LGBT identified. Or non-Christian. In every other sort of discourse and
experience, being a Black woman is difficult. Because you're not only
disadvantaged because of your race, but also your gender. And within social
groups, you're ostracized by your Black male counterparts because of gender.
Similarly, although sometimes the impetus for discrimination is very clear, often, they are
unable to distinguish if the microaggression or differential treatment of the day, moment, or hour
was leveled because the recipient was Black, a woman, or both.
Further, for participants working in fields that are White- and/or male-dominated, covert
acts of discrimination were salient themes. In this instance, Traci (2016) discusses that white

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male students level strategic attacks against her authority and capability, often doing so when her
superior is nearby.
Traci (2016): But white male students have been giving me the worst problems
each semester. Literally being challenged in front of the Dean over little stuff in
class when he comes to visit. And I’m like, this is not that deep of a thing, but
you’re gonna try to show your backside in front of the Dean that’s in my class
right now? Really?
Similarly, a number of women noted that they are figuratively “under the spotlight” when
performing professionally. 10 Their actions are scrutinized more intensely than their peers, with a
far smaller margin for error. Further, because supervisors and bosses expect Black female
deficiency, some women address ways their work is subject to additional scrutiny that their
White and male peers do not suffer (Joseph and Hirschfield 2011).
Lisa (2011): Then when you're at work, if you and someone else are doing the
same level of work, it's not gonna be acceptable. You always have to do more.
My whole history says that they'll get a better rating than I am, so I've got to excel
to get the same rating that they do. My work was always criticized more. Same
level of work, you get rated lower. Your work product is criticized more. You
don't get the promotions others get. But the sense of having to achieve at higher
levels. Because there was this feeling that you have to do well, because you
represent the 2% that's here and most of that was self-imposed at that point.
These expectations tend to shape their interactions with others, and projections from others about
their behavior. Further, after being trained via surroundings and experience, often Black women
internalize the knowledge that their work must be twice as good to be considered half as
adequate.
Traci (2016): I feel at times you need to prove yourself, or be the supernegro, or
play the role that other people could probably get away with just being whatever,
but you have to make sure you’re top. You’re on it. Or else you’ll be penalized for
not being that supernegro.
Further, many women address being saddled with additional work, at home and on the
job, as they are expected to do it, or because no one else will, despite the need. Moreover, to
navigate these expectations and scrutiny, some women over-perform, take on additional work,

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and consistently push to exceed expectations. They know that a different set of scrutiny and rules
applies to their performances at work and in other spaces.
As another instance, Candace (2016) discussed the automatic assumptions of expertise
and authority and that accompany the mere presence of white co-workers. She contrasted
assumptions that mark her and other Black women's experiences on the job. She noted repeated
instances of customers assuming Whites were management and Blacks entry-level, though the
opposite was true.

Findings: Shifting/“The Mask”
As a strategy of navigation, some women discussed what Jones and Shorter Gooden
(2003) call “shifting” and Harlem Renaissance poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar called “wearing the
mask.” Participants discussed sexual harassment, bullying, and the additional work women were
expected to do at work in professional and home spaces.
“We wear the mask that grins and lies, /
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile…” (Dunbar [1895] 2009: 173)
Most operate, challenge, and even “put on the mask” of feigned pleasantness or indifference,
using that mask as an armor against the daily sting of microaggressions. They employ strategies
as means of self-protection. A major instance of shifting in 2011 came from Victoria, who dealt
with constant raced and gendered microaggressions, differential treatment and scrutiny working
in the male dominated field of engineering. She spoke specifically about feeling like she was
under a microscope, and having to “limit” who she is at work.
Victoria (2011): In order to fit in, I have to be less than who I am. I can't be my
total self. I can't respond the way I would normally respond, or react the way I'd
normally react. So, because I can't be all of me, they don't get 100%. They're not

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gonna get the best of me because they've put you into these little boxes. They
already have their preconceived ideas about who you are as a Black woman. And
because of that, you're always conscious of it. So, you play down the great person
you can be. You're always trying to maneuver – I better not say that. I shouldn't
do this. I won't motion like this. Gotta watch my facial expressions. You're
constantly doing that stuff when you really could be thinking about the issue at
hand and trying to solve the problem. And you do it because you're always
outnumbered, and it's always about their level of comfortability. The more
comfortable they are with you, the higher your pay check will be. For the most
part, you're the only Black woman in the room. They already think you're an
angry Black woman. And so, everything that you say offends everybody. You're
conscious of that all the time. You're second-guessing what you're gonna say.
Instead of saying what you need to say because it's a good idea.
Feeling outnumbered scrutinized, and assessed through the lens of stereotypes, the
participants reported overperforming, working to make sure their work is consistently perfect.

11

Though their White peers are not subject to similar critique, subtle attacks on their credibility and
authority are often leveled against them as means of discrimination. And often, they employ
layers of protection on the job, in particular, to sustain their livelihoods, and navigate the
discriminatory acts they often experience in predominately White spaces.
These women are aware of the fact that there are problematic expectations that shape the
ways others see them and interact with them. Further, they are aware that these images are often
far from the realities of their lives. Some respond by overworking. Others choose to live in racial
enclaves, as means of escape from everyday forms of racism. Though some who make this
choice wind up subject to severe levels of institutional oppression discussed above. And
moreover, as discussed in the next section, some “shift” (Jones and Shorter-Gooden 2003) or
“wear the mask” (Dunbar [1895] 2009).

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Findings: Post-Obama vs. Post-Trump Developments – 2011 vs. 2016 Data
As compared to the 2016 interviews, the 2011 data illustrated an optimism associated
with the symbolic gains of the Obama administrations. Although the participants rejected the
idea that the election had structurally changed the United States, or shifted positions for the
majority of Blacks in the society, the fact that the U.S. could elect a Black president represented
possibility and change – at least at a symbolic level – regarding possibilities for Black lives in
the U.S. Prior to 2008, Americans never witnessed Blacks represent the country as the First
Family. By 2016, many small children had only known the U.S. to have had a Black President
during their lifetimes.
Nonetheless, the 2011 participants characterized a colorblind/”post-racial society as a
utopia; a far-off, perfect world, but one that we cannot hope to reach in this lifetime. Brooklyn
humorously likened post-racialism to a promised land; one that we will not reach while alive.
She linked post-racialism to the dream of “flying cars,” and joked that she would have to “see
Jesus” before it became real. Further, Tiana (2011) noted,
It's a utopia. It's something we're striving to get to. And I'm not trying to be
pessimistic, but people are saying we're there now? Hell naw. But when you say
post-racial society, I think of heaven. Like, damn, I gotta die to see a post-racial
society. I'm gonna hafta straight up see Peter, Paul, God, and be like whatup. Like,
when you walk through the gates, there will be this waterfall that washes away all
your preconceived notions about race, and people, and it won't be no color.
In all, the interviews show that covert discrimination and institutional racism have gone
nowhere. Yet, an increasing tide of outright hatred is made clear by distinctions in the 2011 and
2016 interview results. While both sets of women reference outright attacks of racism, earlier
interviews discuss this as declining, less common, though still occurring. 2016 interviews, that is,
highlight and increase witnessing of Black bodies being vulnerable to, and taken by statesponsored, and/or police violence (Hill 2016). The 2016 interviews also highlight vulnerabilities

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experienced by other groups, and the sentiment that it is only a matter of time before Black
women are similarly at risk. In fact, many note, that they ARE at risk as women.
Additionally, the 2016 participants highlight stronger sentiments of economic
vulnerability associated with the new administration. Candace (2016) highlighted a feeling of
“uncertainty.” Similarly, Toni (2016) stated,
I have noticed some differences. As far as the atmosphere where I live, I live in a
predominately Black neighborhood. The area where I live, it causes there an
anxiety. When I hear people talk, they talk about the unknown. We don’t know
what’s gonna happen with our job or our healthcare. I hear a lot of unknowns.
There was even a white girl in one of my classes and she was crying. How she
was talking, she’s just overwhelmed by the thought of the things that could
happen.
Though many participants were current and future professionals, and some had access to
economic stability through their employment, they also recognize the precariousness of that
position; for many, Black net worth is so drastically limited by existing student loan debt, as is
the case for many Black professionals. In short, the 2016 interviews express a growing fear and
anxiety as associated with the presidency and its position towards oppressed groups.

Findings: New Media, and the “Natural Hair Movement”
In framing the positive aspects of being a Black woman, Victoria (2011) stated,
To be a Black woman is wonderful! I like being a Black woman. I celebrate my
Blackness! And I wouldn't change it! If I could change today – if somebody said,
if you could be White today, I wouldn't change. There's richness in my Blackness.
There's something that's unique about me and my ideas. And I believe that we're
the key. I'm not gon' change this. I'm happy being Black.
Similarly, Lilly (2011) beamed as she talked about the many strong Black women she knows.
She discussed their “flavor,” and also noted that her Black womanhood provides strength to,
“handle [her] business.” Tiana (2011) linked Black womanhood to “an extreme will to live

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against all odds.” In other words, as Black women, these women have an expectation that their
strength, whether drawn from struggling against legacies of oppression, and/or family and
friends, is a source of pride and motivation in their lives (Beaubouf-Lafontant).12
The accessibility of social media sites, such as Facebook, with live streaming capabilities,
mean that minority groups have taken to online and media spaces to disseminate information. As
noted by Van Dijk (1993), media spaces and other spaces where news, intellectual productions,
and other cultural creations have historically been spaces dominated by the most powerful
groups in the society (i.e., wealthy, White men). Yet, many minority groups employ these
vehicles that once disproportionality (and do continue in that direction) to positively represent
their identities. And in similar fashion to other historical examples, media spaces are used as
means to critique and destabilize the structures that oppress them – In small ways, like
representing the diversity of Black hair in media, and in broader ways, like circulating
microaggressions, unjust police stops, and acts of overt aggression via Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram.
2016 interviewees noted the continued circulation of recorded instances of police
violence as both evidence of persistence racial oppression, and increasing overt attacks of
discrimination. Moreover, the circulation of these videos is seen by some as resistance. They are
means Blacks are using to put their unequal treatment into a space that is visible to the masses. In
similar fashion to the ways Mrs. Mamie Till-Bradley used media to publicize the atrocious
murder of her fifteen-year-old son, Emmitt Till; or ways media were used to highlight
nonviolently marching children being attacked by police dogs and fire hoses in the 1960s,
multiple participants see the highlighting of these atrocities as a way of using media to confront
oppression.

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Additionally, 2016 interviewees report an increased witnessing of a diversity of images
of Blackness on TV and online as another means of resistance to White supremacy. This is not to
say these images are perfect, or that the problematic representations addressed above lack their
continued weight and effect. However, they address actors like Viola Davis and Taraji P.
Henson, and memorable moments on TV that serve to legitimize Black people,
accomplishments, hair, appearances, and lives. The participants note the increasing presence of
directors like Eva Duverney and Shonda Rhimes; they also highlight the growing accessibility of
online hair tutorials that allow Black women to make at home the products upon which the
collective spends millions (Morris and Muhammad 2014).
Niara (2016): Like some of the TV shows that star Black women, and some of the
characters are probably a little problematic for me and my taste, but they’re there.
And you see that they’re getting recognition for those roles, which is fine. I think
there’s definitely some positive inroads that we’re making. Both in real life and
on TV. In film. Some of the coolest things are just seeing Black women in
positions of power, or positions of being able to create content. Like, Insecure,
that show was cool. And Shonda Rhimes’ stuff, Scandal, How to Get Away with
Murder. I didn’t know that she was the writer for Grey’s Anatomy until Scandal
and How to Get Away with Murder got popular. So it’s like, this woman, she IS
ABC. So that’s cool.
Especially in 2016, the interviewees also highlight the burgeoning presence of Black
women represented in media in ways that affirm positive Blackness. In all, the interviewees note
the beauty of the variety of skin tones and hair textures in Black life, now being represented on
television and in media. When asked about Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016), Traci (2016)
noted,
It’s tapping into our ancestry, the different values that we’ve had instilled in us
that are overlooked and not viewed as pearls of wisdom. And really uniting them
together and saying we have a collective fabric that’s beautiful, strong and deep.
And it comes in many different flavors.
And all the emotions that she went through is what we all go through and we all
experience. And it’s okay because this is a part of life. Winter and summer

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seasons. They will come and go. And ultimately, stay beautiful and strong and
keep it moving. Because this is a part of process.
It’s about redemption, forgiving, allowing us to heal in proper spaces. So she
took it from all the elements. It was almost like, metaphorically or metaphysically
– working from the ground nature to the spiritual nature and taking it up. That’s
what it meant for me.
The whole Twitter thing. The democratized, or lack of democratized media, we’re
finding different ways to subvert that, and find our own voices, via social media.
Whether it be hair, or social activism. We are using this technology to connect
and unite. So that’s a beautiful thing when it works in a beautiful way.
Similarly, participants highlight a growing “Natural Hair Movement,” that has increased the
available images of Black hair, and accessible methods and products for styling Black hair, that
were not as readily available even two decades ago. Given that the Black hair industry is worth
millions, the presence of such resources is both personally affirmative and economically useful
to many Black women (Morris and Muhammad 2014).

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CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I assert that the structured and historical relations of patriarchy and racism
continue to shape everyday life for many Black women, and the reading of their actions in
interpersonal and public spheres. In line with earlier investigations of Black women’s lives
(Jones and Shorter Gooden 2003; Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009), this chapter discusses ways many
continue to shift, bend, twist, and contort themselves to accommodate maintaining their senses of
humanity despite the subtle and overt oppressions they constantly experience. I address ways
members of this group navigate, resist, and continue to affirm their personhood despite
continuous messages that work to destabilize, devalue, and destroy their humanity. I attend to the
agency of individuals, the multiplicity of transnational Black identities, understandings of Black
womanhood, and everyday strategies of negotiation, resistance, rejection, and adaptation to
discrimination, marginalization, and microagressions (Delgado and Stefanic 2012).
Women in 2011 articulate similar experiences, even despite presidencies that have
questioned the continued significance of race, and the latter 2016 election, which has centered
race as a divisive force in the voting population. However, 2016 participants discussed
increasing feelings of vulnerability and witnessing and/or experiencing verbal attacks, overt
racial violence, and/or racial profiling/police brutality. 2016 interviewees confirmed the
persistence of covert racism and sexism manifesting in their everyday lives through treatment by
others interpersonally, in similar fashion to 2011 participants.
But as some are first- and second-generation Americans from Jamaica or Panama, and
others are in already precarious economic positions as compared to other professionals by race,
the politicoeconomic uncertainty brought about by the Trump administration is a cause for their
expressed concern. This is a unique finding in the 2016 interviews exclusively – feelings of

161

vulnerability associated with operating in an oppressive society in a raced and gendered body,
that are heightened in the midst of a political backlash against anything non-wealthy, non-White,
and non-male. Ultimately, these interviews offer a lens into the weight of continued oppression
in Black women’s everyday lives; ways this oppression continues to manifest consequences; and
uniquely, with 2016, a growing sentiment of insecurity about the unknown changes occurring in
the political realm that may affect them.

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APPENDIX

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INTERVIEW QUESTIONS – ARTICLE THREE
General – Personal Experience
1. Age? Gender?
2. How do you identify yourself racially?
3. How does your racial identity shape the way you understand yourself, who you are?
4. Tell about where you grew up.
(a) What kind of neighborhood was it?
(b) What were the racial demographics of the area?
(c) What kinds friends did you have? And what did they look like? Exposure to other
races? Your own race?
5. What were your parents like? What was the makeup of your family? Income levels?
6. Where was your family from? Like your grandparents, were they from the U.S. If so,
whereabouts? What impact do you think that had on you and your understandings of the
way race operates in this society?
7. How did the women in your life shape how you understood yourself as a Black woman,
and what it means to be a Black woman?
Navigating Racism and Sexism
8. Can you recall moments in your life when your race had a significant impact on you?
Why or why not?
(a) Were you encouraged/discouraged from doing certain things because of your race and
gender?
i. Acceptable hair,
ii. Acceptable mates
iii. Appearance, clothing, speech?
(b) How did your family makeup impact your experiences?
i. Two-parent, two-income home?
ii. Parents' economic status?
iii. Siblings?
(c) What about (a & b) presently?
(d) What is that like? Give specific examples.
a. What about outside of your family? How often were you made aware of your race and gender
in social situations? (e.g., work, family, class, interactions with fellow students and teachers).
b. What about times you may have been mistreated/treated differently than others because of
your race? Gender?

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c. What about achievement? Job prospects? Opportunities? Future generations? Are you
expected to do more/less by peers/teachers/employers because of your RCG?
2) As a Black woman, do you feel like you've ever been made to choose between your race
and your gender in terms of what's important to you, or do you see them as inextricable?
3) What does it mean to be a Black woman in America today?
a. How might the experience of being a Black woman differ from that of Black
men?
b. Nonwhite?
c. White male?
d. White female?
4) What is the experience of being a Black woman in corporate America/college?
a. Are there many people of your RCG working/studying in your field? What is that
experience like?
b. Are Black women subject to additional scrutiny in everyday life? What obstacles
do Black women have to face in everyday life because of their racial and gender
identities?
c. How do you discuss those experiences with someone outside of your particular
group who might not believe that differential treatment is a serious problem?
5) How are Black women represented in media? Are Black women subject to additional
scrutiny when represented in media? How do you know?
6) Black women’s beauty? What is happening today? What do you see in media? Skin
color/colorism?
7) A lot of discussion has occurred about Beyonce’s Lemonade and Solange’s Seat At the
Table, their discussions of racism and Black womanhood. If those albums meant anything
to you, can you speak to that?
Race Today
1. How do you view race relations in the U.S. today?
2. How would you define racism? Do you believe it still exists?
3. Do you believe everyone has an equal chance of succeeding economically, professionally
and socially in the U.S.?
(a) What factors, beyond an individual's control, might influence his/her success? Race?
Gender? Class?
4. Who/what is at fault for the presence/absence of such success?

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5. If you were to randomly sample and survey the U.S. population, do you think we would
find that they're people overly sensitive, not sensitive enough, or about right on their
feelings about race and how it affects people of color?
6. How does racism affect your everyday life? How do you deal with those acts against
you? What do they make you feel? Give examples?
7. In what ways has sexism affected your everyday life? Do you experience acts of sexism
in your everyday life? How do you deal with those acts against you? What do they make
you feel?
Black Women in Trump’s America
8. What did the election of President Trump mean to you? What does it mean to Black
Americans? Black women?
9. In what ways have race and racism changed since the last presidential election? What are
your perspectives on the 2016 election? How did it make you feel? About the future of
the US?
10.Transition from Obama to Trump Presidencies affecting women and people of color?
11.How would you characterize the U.S.'s racial progress over the past fifty years?
12.What is a post-racial society?
(a) How do you define it?
(b) What characteristics does/doesn't it have?
13.If we define a post-racial society as one wherein race doesn't have a significant impact on
the lives or life-chances of individuals, have we come to the point where post-racialism is
a reality in the U.S.?
(a) Why/Why not? Give specific examples.
14.How close is the US to realizing that goal?
15.How do you think other members of the public (nonwoman, nonblack) understand racism
and race relations?

166

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1

That is, often the economic subordination experienced by these participants (e.g., food deserts)
is complicated or directly influenced by other factors, such as race (e.g., food deserts in
predominately Black, poor neighborhoods).
2

President Obama suffered immense disrespect – even from numerous elected and sworn
officials, as well as a 400% increase in death threats, following his ascension to Executive Office
(Anderson 2016). Winfrey Harris (2015, 79) notes ways that even former First Lady Michelle
Obama was subject to media and political framing as a bestial, angry Black woman – subject
constantly to anti-Black stereotypes, despite ways her actual appearance and actions spoke
constantly to the contrary.
3

“In June, a White man in a Chicago Starbucks was filmed calling a Black man a slave, and a
White woman in a New Jersey Sears was videotaped making bigoted comments against a family
she believed was Indian (they were not)” (Dastagir 2017). Similarly, a 7-11 clerk was caught on
video questioning a patron’s “papers,” asking if he was “here legally,” and asserting that he
should “speak English” (Gonzalez 2017). Similarly, in May 2017, a White woman in a Reston,
Virginia Trader Joe’s victimized a Muslim shopper, stating “‘I wish they didn’t let you in the
country’” (The Washington Post 2017). That same month, a White Walmart shopper in Arkansas
verbally attacked a Latina woman and a Black woman. The first woman, she told to “go back to
Mexico,” later calling the second woman, who had tried to confront her, the N-word (Herreria
2017). Further, also in May 2017, NBA basketball star, LeBron James’ house was spray-painted
with the word “NIGGER” in black letters (Bonesteel 2017).
4

Following Heather Heyer’s death, images of the smiling, young woman circulated media,
effectively triggering the pity of the nation for her untimely and undeserved death. This is
especially true as the images implied the insane and inexplicable tragedy of a young White
woman who died fighting a raced war from which White privilege allows many to disengage.
The subsequent public outrage caused Heyer’s cousin, Diana Ratcliff (2017) to inquire, “Why is
it that the death of a white woman at the hands of a white supremacist group has finally gotten
the attention of white folk? Why have we been turning our heads the other way for so long? How
many black families, Latino families, Asian families, Native-American families before us have
been left broken from this ugly vein of hatred in our country? Too many. And to my non-white
brothers and sisters, I am so sorry that many of us weren't paying attention before
Charlottesville.”
5

Later in 2017, the Trump administration ended a two-decade-long tradition of holding a White
House Eid dinner to close the Muslim Ramadan month of religious fasting (Hansler 2017).
6

For instance, the current president has lent government support to building the Dakota Access
pipeline, which dissects, and may contaminate water sources on treaty-protected Standing Rock
Sioux tribal lands (Jones et al 2017).
7 Although

transgender women were not included in the initial samples, this is because I worked
with the available participants who volunteered for inclusion in the study. As I continue to collect

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data in the future, I hope to further expand the sample to include transgender women.
8

At the same time, Black women are not a monolith. It is given that the life experience of
Michelle Obama might differ greatly from that of a fast-food worker in Philadelphia. That is,
Black women’s experiences differ greatly – both from one another and from those who are not as
vulnerable to the types of marginalization we experience. Our experiences are marked different
by varying levels of social capital and economic privilege.
9

Participants’ names have been replaced with pseudonyms to protect anonymity.

10

In terms of the consequences of notions of representativeness, scholarly literature asserts that
these individuals often encounter “cultural taxation” (Padilla 1994; Joseph and Hirschfield
2011). Drawing from the example of academe, Amado Padilla (1994) notes that faculty of color
are required to negotiate added burdens and barriers in connection to their respective races.
Professionals who are culturally taxed are given more work than their White counterparts and
may receive more critical scrutiny from professional superiors (Padilla 1994). According to
Padilla (1994), this is because they are presumed to be better “racially suited” to perform in
certain capacities or are the first “diversity” representatives of their race within those
professional spaces. Further, Joseph and Hirshfield (2011) find that faculty of color are subject to
claims that they were hired as affirmative action “tokens,” and therefore are unqualified for their
positions. Consequently, many of these individuals feel forced outperform White counterparts to
receive comparable credit, to prove that they are qualified i.e., not “diversity hires,” and to avoid
unfair scrutiny. These are all stressors to which their White fellows are not subject to the same
degree.
11

In terms of the consequences of notions of representativeness, scholarly literature asserts that
these individuals often encounter “cultural taxation” (Padilla 1994; Joseph and Hirschfield
2011). Drawing from the example of academe, Amado Padilla (1994) notes that faculty of color
are required to negotiate added burdens and barriers in connection to their respective races.
Professionals who are culturally taxed are given more work than their White counterparts, and
may receive more critical scrutiny from professional superiors (Padilla 1994). According to
Padilla (1994), this is because they are presumed to be better “racially suited” to perform in
certain capacities, or are the first “diversity” representatives of their race within those
professional spaces. Drawing from his experience, faculty of color.
Further, Joseph and Hirshfield (2011) find that faculty of color are subject to claims that they
were hired as affirmative action “tokens,” and are, therefore, unqualified for their positions.
Consequently, many of these individuals feel forced outperform White counterparts to receive
comparable credit, to prove that they are qualified i.e., not “diversity hires,” and to avoid unfair
scrutiny. These are all stressors to which their White fellows are not subject to the same degree.
12

For a detailed discussion of Black women and the many facets of their “strength,” see Tamara
Beaubouf-Lafontant’s (2009) Behind the Mask of the Strong Black Woman: Voice and the
Embodiment of a Costly Performance.

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CONCLUSION

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CONCLUSION
Scholars of race have investigated post-racialism and colorblind racial attitudes, and
continue to expand this field. Yet, Black feminist thought urges that the conditions for Black
women’s lives are generated from their position as Black women in a simultaneously patriarchal
and racially stratified society. In all, this dissertation is presented as a lens into the continued
structures of oppression with which Black women contend; ways these structures affect their life
chances, everyday lives, and the ways they are presented to others; and ways the ideologies used
to support these structures indeed to contribute to the perpetuation of oppression. Further, the
project provides lenses into the ways Black women navigate, maintain humanity, reject, and
resist, in an era when overt racism begins to reemerge, and the consequences of institutional
racism persist.
In the first article, I address the ways news media serve to reinforce the oppression of
Black women, using the example of the erasure and invisibility of racialized and gendered police
violence against them. In the second article, I discuss the ways Black women employ public
spaces to challenge these intersecting structures of oppression, using the example of Beyoncé
Knowles-Carter’s video album, Lemonade (2016). The final article interrogates ways everyday
discrimination affects Black women’s lives, along with the means they employ to respond to, and
navigate racial, gender, and class inequity.
Ultimately, from publicized instances of Black women and girls being penalized at work
and school for hairstyles; to presidential support for racialized violence against Black bodies; to
the infringement on reproductive rights of women; and Republican tax plans intended to provide
tax cuts for billionaires while shifting billions away from Medicaid and Medicare – it is clear that
racism, sexism, and classism continue to intersect and affect experiences, life chances, for

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minority groups in the U.S. The dissertation is further proof that intersectional approaches
maintain their utility in uncovering the myriad of ways inequality is structured into the social
relations of the country, and continues to uniquely affect groups subject to multiple forms of
oppression.
Alongside this, the project elucidates ways Black women navigate, maintain humanity,
reject, and resist, in an era when overt racism begins to reemerge, denials of inequality persist,
and the consequences of institutional racial, gender, and economic oppression also remain. That
is, along with forms of oppression, I became intrigued by the responses of everyday people (who
often employed Facebook Live and other forms of social media to record and publicize acts of
racism), as well as celebrities (e.g., Beyoncé), their growing politicization, and the unique artistic
and cultural materials they produced in resistance to oppression. In all, this project is a result of
my investigations in these areas.
Chapter One explores media treatment of victims of police violence, Rekia Boyd and
Korryn Gaines, to unearth the continuing subtle oppression of Black women in news media. The
findings for Chapter One illustrate a disparity in rates of coverage between Black women and
Black men victims of police violence. Further, to highlight the intersection of race, I address
Justine Ruszczyk, a white Minneapolis woman, killed by a Black Somali police officer. In the
months after her death in July 2017, she received more coverage than either Boyd or Gaines had
in the year(s) following their killings.
To situate this article amongst other research, Chapter One provided an exploration of an
earlier study conducted by Neely (2015). Neely found a similar disparity in coverage of White
and Black women who suffer murder, (reinforced by the findings on disparities in coverage
between Boyd, Gaines, and Ruszczyk). This article supports the earlier study, uncovering similar

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media disregard for Black women victims of police violence, as compared to Black men. Even
when they have died under similar circumstances and their deaths/altercations with police
similarly available online, there is still a dramatic lack of coverage for Black women as
compared to Black men.
A distinction between the framing of Gaines and Boyd is also clear. Results also show the
tendency to frame Black women who have engaged police, as Korryn Gaines, as responsible for
their killings. This is especially true if their behaviors, in any way, align with controlling images
and stereotypes that presume Black women’s over-aggressiveness.
Collectively, however, less attention is brought to Gaines’ and Boyd’s deaths, in part,
because Black women’s oppression is overlooked and disregarded and this society. Further, they
are not discussed because they fail to fit the stereotypical trope of the Black brute, centuries old,
and yet used to justify the continued jailing and killing of Black men (Alexander 2012). Still,
because stereotypes and tropes surrounding Black women have employed their “strength” and
“bestiality” to support their oppression, journalists and members of the public may overlook this
form of inequality. In their own ways, stereotypical tropes of Black womanhood may make this
violence against them less than news.
Chapter Two explores ways Black women continue intellectual and musical traditions to
highlight the oppressions they experience, and to disrupt dominant discourses. Like Davis’
(1999) analysis of Blues women’s lyrics, the cinematic and lyrical contents of Beyoncé’s video
album, Lemonade (Knowles-Carter 2016), affirm Black Diasporal cultures from the U.S., Africa
and the Caribbean, along with the diversity of Black women’s hair and appearances. Through
selection of love songs, videos, and poetry, Lemonade affirms that Black women, like other

181

humans, experience a range of emotions, not just those informed by “angry” or “strong” Black
woman tropes.
The final chapter in the dissertation addresses the ways intersecting oppressions continue
to affect Black women’s everyday lives. Chapter Three centers on Black women and their
discussions of their everyday dealings with racism and sexism as a members of marginalized
groups in U.S. society. Using twenty-two semi-structured interviews drawn in 2011 and 2016, I
discussed continued manifestations of racism, sexism, and classism in covert forms, including
microaggressions; subtle attacks on authority, credibility, and personhood; and excess work
scrutiny. I addressed ways some women “shift,” (Jones and Shorter-Gooden 2003), restrict, hide,
and shield themselves in predominately White spaces from the aforementioned covert forms of
discrimination. Others choose to live in racial enclaves, as means of escape from everyday forms
of racism. Though some who make this choice wind up subject to severe levels of economic
oppression.
While 2011 participants highlighted specific local racialized events, and discrimination
occurring throughout their lives, the participants in 2016 addressed an increased witnessing of
instances of violence via social and news media. Moreover, they address minority groups’ use of
media spaces as tools of resistance, employed in part to highlight the oppressions they
experience. Finally, 2016 interviewees expressed a growing sense of vulnerability, both as
women and as members of economically oppressed groups.
Such work is imperative at the present moment. As outlined in previous chapters,
contrary to beliefs that racial transcendence had been reached in the 1970s (Blauner 1989), or
even by the first decade of the 2000s, an overtly racist, sexist, classist attitudinal tide has
reemerged in the society.

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Specifically, this growing tide of racial hatred has unique consequences for groups
vulnerable to multiple intersecting forms of oppression – for instance, Black women, whose
raced experiences are colored by gender, class, ability, and sexuality. Ultimately, as women,
Black women are vulnerable to disproportionately high levels of intimate partner violence; work
place sexism and differential treatment; and underrepresentation the political sphere (Morris and
Muhammad 2014; Winfrey Harris 2015). As Black people, Black women watch in fear and
frustration as they, other adults, and Black children are experiencing a type of slow genocide –
via mass incarceration (Alexander 2012); via state-sponsored violence (Hill 2016; Taylor 2016);
via neoliberal economic restructuring (Harvey 2007; Martinez 2016; Morris and Muhammad
2014); and via political and corporate corruption resulting in damage to Black health (e.g., the
continuing lead crisis affecting thousands of children and adults in the predominately Black City
of Flint). And as Black women, they are more vulnerable to having their actions interpreted by
others as threatening, hardness, coldness, unfeeling, or stereotypical angry Black womanhood;
their bodies and emotions treated more harshly by others based on perceptions of their
“strength”; their motherhood framed pejoratively; their curly and kinky hair deemed
unprofessional and unacceptable for its lack of straightness; their intellect or authority questioned
unjustly; and their bodies sexualized, fetishized, or deemed tough enough to experience violence.

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Contributions of the Project
A growing body of research highlighting Black women’s contemporary experiences with
multiple forms of oppression continues to move in this direction (Beaubouf-Lafontant 2009;
Harris-Perry 2011; Jones and Shorter-Gooden 2004; Winfrey-Harris 2015). In all, through my
interviews, article data, and investigation of poetry and lyrics, it is indeed true that Black women
bend, shift, negotiate, and maneuver their lives around structures of racism and sexism, as shown
by Jones and Shorter-Gooden (2003). It does well to lend one’s imagination to the metaphor.
These are long-standing, structured relations between majority and minority groups in the society
– Blacks and Whites, men and women, wealthy and working people. The positions and
accompanying justifications, as hardened in the American psyche as steel, support semipermanent structured relationships. And the current U.S. political administration seeks to see
these structured relations reinforced through policy.
Further, although Black women know they cannot move or change the structures through
individual acts alone, they are aware that they exercise agency to shift small things in their
surroundings, challenge massive structures in small ways, or in the ways that are available to
them. My multi-article project was intended as an investigation of this, as well. The project also
aims to continue the Black feminist tradition of centralizing Black women in academic research.
This dissertation continues the tradition of speaking through Black women’s experiences into the
development of new Black feminist theory, and in contribution to longstanding Black feminist
intellectual traditions.
The project aims to employ Black women – a group who contends not just with racism or
sexism alone, but with multiple forms of marginalization – and their contemporary experiences
in “post-inequality” America to bridge the gap between these scholarly fields of colorblind

184

racism theory and Black feminist theory. Analyzing the subtle marginalization Black women
continue to experience, the project aims to paint a picture of the continued impacts of subtle
oppression on the lives of marginalized group members – even in an era when racism, sexism,
and all other –isms are supposedly dead.
Secondly, the project provides multiple snapshots into the experience of being a member
of a multiply-marginalized group in the U.S., having that marginalization reinforced in popular
media, and seeing members of one’s group employ those media and other historical forms to
respond to, and validate, the difficulty and beauty of that experience.
Finally, my aim through the dissertation is also highlighting the strategies of response of
Black women to these larger belief systems that deny the realities of multiple aspects of their
existences. Moreover, I am interested in the specific experiences, events, and instances that
continue to reinforce the significance of race and gender in a society stratified along those lines.
In all, the project aims to contribute to these areas of Black feminist, contemporary race, and
media/discourse scholarship.

185

REFERENCES

186

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