Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE CONCEPTS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONS
- PART TWO THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PRACTICE OF RACISM
- PART THREE RACE, GENDER, BODY, BIOLOGY
- 11 Ambiguous Roles: The Racial Factor in American Womanhood
- 12 Citizenship Embodied: Racialized Gender and the Construction of Nationhood in the United States
- 13 Body Matters: Race, Gender, and Perceptions of Physical Ability from Goethe to Weininger
- 14 A Horse Breeders Perspective: Scientific Racism in Germany, 1870-1933
- 15 The Thin Line Between Eugenics and Preventive Medicine
- Index
11 - Ambiguous Roles: The Racial Factor in American Womanhood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE CONCEPTS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY AND THE SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONS
- PART TWO THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PRACTICE OF RACISM
- PART THREE RACE, GENDER, BODY, BIOLOGY
- 11 Ambiguous Roles: The Racial Factor in American Womanhood
- 12 Citizenship Embodied: Racialized Gender and the Construction of Nationhood in the United States
- 13 Body Matters: Race, Gender, and Perceptions of Physical Ability from Goethe to Weininger
- 14 A Horse Breeders Perspective: Scientific Racism in Germany, 1870-1933
- 15 The Thin Line Between Eugenics and Preventive Medicine
- Index
Summary
Writing about the attitude of black women toward the contemporary women's movement in its early phase in the United States, bell hooks observed: “Contemporary black women could not join together to fight for women's rights because we did not see 'womanhood' as an important aspect of our identity. Racist, sexist socialization had conditioned us to devalue our femaleness and to regard race as the only relevant label of identification.” The black woman's identity, she argued, had been “socialized out of existence.” In ordinary discourse “men” meant white men, “blacks” meant black men, and “women” meant white women. In the controversial and contested world of American sex roles and gender identification, how did the black woman's womanhood become submerged in her racial identity? The answer lies in the peculiar history of African Americans in the United States, in the roles African-American women played, and in the cultural justifications developed to explain the role of blacks in America. The “scientific,” cultural, and philosophical justifications of slavery constituted a dehumanization of African Americans in the white mind. As a part of this process, distinctions between different categories of African Americans were obscured or disappeared from view. Slaveholders often ignored the gender conventions Africans brought to America and considered slave women as well as men suited to hard labor.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Identity and IntoleranceNationalism, Racism, and Xenophobia in Germany and the United States, pp. 295 - 312Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998