Iconic: Decoding Images of the Revolutionary Black Woman

Notes

129 NOTES CHAPTER 1 1 Graham is a regular contributor to NewsBusters, a conservative blog. 2 Tim Graham, “Larry King Kept Asking Michelle Obama: ‘Attack Dog’ Palin Doesn’t Make You Mad?” Newsbusters.org, October 10, 2008, http:// newsbusters.org/blogs/tim-graham/2008/10/10/larry-king-kept-asking -michelle-obama-attack-dog-palin-doesnt-make-you-m. 3 In “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 21 (1992): 251–73, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham discusses the association of blacks by the American public with welfare and the drug problem (254). See also Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), as well as Jesse Carney Smith’s Images of Blacks in American Culture : A Reference Guide to Information Sources (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988). 4 Recall the dismissal of Anita Hill’s claim that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. Thomas and his supporters claimed that Hill was an angry woman scorned. See Toni Morrison’s collection of essays, Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), which includes Wahneema Lubiano’s “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels: Ideological War by Narrative Means,” 323–63. 5 See Kimberle Crenshaw’s “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory,andAntiracistPolitics,”inFeminismandPolitics,ed.A.Phillips(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 314–43, for an analysis of the ways that feminist, antiracist, and legal discourses obscure the experiences of 130 NOTES TO PP. 6–8 African American women. See also Adrien Wing’s anthology, Critical Race Feminism: A Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 6 There are numerous stereotypes that have been applied to black women; these include but are not limited to mammy, sapphire, jezebel, the matriarch , the superwoman. See Leith Mullings’ “Image, Ideology, and Women of Color,” in Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill’s Women of Color in U.S. Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 265–90, and Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991), as well as a discussion of current incarnations of these stereotypes in Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism (New York: Routledge, 2004). 7 Iconic civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X have long been used to represent the tension between proponents of nonviolence and more radical notions of activism that promoted armed self-defense. See James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1991) and Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Dreams and Nightmares: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Struggle for Black Equality in America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). 8 In chapter 6 I discuss the controversy surrounding Jodi Kantor’s book The Obamas (New York: Penguin, 2012) as an example of the persistence of the stereotype of the angry black woman and its use to dismiss strong, educated, and vocal African American women. 9 Leith Mullings’ “Image, Ideology, and Women of Color” discusses the stereotypesofjezebel ,mammy,matriarchs,andsapphire.SeealsoWahneema Lubiano’s article “Black Ladies, Welfare Queens, and State Minstrels” and Patricia Hill Collins’ discussion of the controlling images faced by African American women in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990). 10 See Nell Irvin Painter’s “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known,” Journal of American History 81, no. 2 (1994): 461–92, and Paula Giddings’ When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984; repr., New York: HarperCollins, 1996) and Ida: A Sword among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign against Lynching (New York: HarperCollins, 2008) for historical accounts of the lives and work of Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth. 11 The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850; repr., Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1997) recounts the remarkable life and work of a woman who not only fought for her own freedom but also worked tirelessly for the freedom of others. 12 Wells’ vocal challenge to “lynch law in America” made her the target of frequent death threats. Wells provided a scathing indictment of the failure of the American system of justice to protect black citizens from the horrific...