Ways in Which Race and Gender Bias Creates Dangerous Conditions for Black American Women
For most Black American women, racism and gender biasness stands as a source of psychological distress and chronic strain. For this reason, Kimberle Crenshaw who is a philosopher and an advocate of Civil Rights in the United States through a TED talk talks about intersectionality urgency in a bid to describe and define how gender-based violence and race affects the lives of many Black women in the United States. This essay discusses some of the ways through which race and gender biasness create dangerous conditions for the majority of the Black women in America, according to Crenshaw’s intersectionality TED talk.
According to Ms Crenshaw, many African-American women continually become victims of police violence or brutality. She attributes this to the overwhelming underrepresentation of brutality or violence against Black-women who are actively involved in politics, media and even activism. In the talk, Crenshaw mentions several women who have suffered as a result of physical or brutal abuse following the police’s violent actions. An example of these women includes media personalities and feminists such as Tanisha Anderson, Natasha McKenna, and Aura Rosser, among others (Crenshaw, 2016).
Secondly, Crenshaw states that many Black- American women continue to suffer because of their skin color or race. She says that a large number of Black women experiences more hurdles in obtaining an employment opportunity. They continuously encounter systematically increased unemployment rates, greater job instability and poorer benefits. These dangerous conditions are majorly as a result of discrimination or prejudice against Black women. Crenshaw gives an example of Emma DeGraffernreid’s case, a Black woman who went to seek justice in the court of law by suing a manufacturing firm which failed to hire her based on her gender and race. Crenshaw tells us that the jury di missed her case citing that the firm had hired people of her gender and skin color. According to Crenshaw, this was a manifest injustice which so many Black-American faces because of gender or racial discrimination (Crenshaw, 2016).
Another dangerous condition faced by a large number of Black-women described by Crenshaw resulting from racial and gender discrimination is sexual abuse. She says a good number of Black girls are usually sexually abused before they attain the age of majority. She further asserted that there many unreported cases of sexual assault against Black, whom she described as sexual assault neglected survivors. She says unless they created a cacophony as means to represent their intentions, African-American women would still remain unguarded against sexual violence because of intersectionality, which is a systematized oppression of African-American women relying upon their gender and race.
Although stress as a chronic condition can result into negative side impacts on all individual, the unique contextual factors and psycho-social, particularly the pervasive and common exposure to gender and racial discrimination, can create an added daily stressor for the majority of the Black-women (Savla et al., 2016). These inconsiderate daily stressors interfere with one’s well-being not only through experiencing direct and separate impacts on physical and emotional functioning but also through stockpiling over time which leads to frustrations, overloads, and irritations that may cause severe stress reactions such as mental and cardiovascular health problems.
In conclusion, it is unlawful, illegal, and selfish to discriminate persons because of their race or gender. Therefore, the Black women as a team should come up together and fight for their rights as a way of shaping their gender and race inequalities.
References
Crenshaw, K. (Director). (2016). The urgency of intersectionality [Motion Picture].
Savla, J., Roberto, K. A., Blieszner, R., Cox, M., & Gwazdauskas, F. (2016). Effects of Daily Stressors on the Psychological and Biological Well-being of Spouses of Persons With Mild Cognitive Impairment. The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 66B(6), 653-664.