Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries
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Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries
352Paperback(Revised ed.)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781582430393 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Basic Books |
| Publication date: | 12/10/1999 |
| Series: | Frontiers of Science |
| Edition description: | Revised ed. |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.75(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Lexile: | 1520L (what's this?) |
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Rituals of Blood
Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries
By Orlando Patterson Civitas Book Publisher
Copyright © 1999 Orlando Patterson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781582430393
Chapter One
BROKEN BLOODLINES
Gender Relations and the Crisis of Marriages and
Families Among Afro-Americans
Afro-American gender relations, and consequently their marital and familial relations, have always been in crisis. This crisis has changed its shape with each new environment Afro-Americans have found themselves in, although, as we will see, there have been important continuities going back to the distant past. Over the past three or four decades these problems have assumed new and alarming forms, leading many ill-informed persons to look nostalgically back to some supposedly golden period that is the stuff of myth.
This crisis is the major internal source of the wider problems of Afro-Americans. It is the main means by which the group ends up victimizing itself. For, without consistent and lasting relations between men and women, and without a durable, supportive framework within which children are brought up, a group of people is in deep trouble. Even more tragically, this internal wound is the main means by which the externally originating problems of Afro-Americans are magnified and transmitted.Two single, unskilled, and unemployed individuals receiving minimum welfare payments in any of the larger cities of the nation are in dire poverty and run the risk of homelessness. These same two individuals, living together in a mutually supportive, loving union, by pooling their resources can provide themselves with some kind of shelter; more important, they can emotionally support each other and more effectively ward off the threat of poverty.
Afro-Americans are the most unpartnered and isolated group of people in America and quite possibly in the world. Unlike any other group of Americans, most of them will go through most of their adult lives without any deep and sustained attachment to a non-kin companion. Sixty percent of Afro-American children are now being brought up without the emotional or material support of a father. This is so because the great majority of Afro-American mothers have been seduced, deceived, betrayed, and abandoned by the men to whom they gave their love and trust.
The most common response among Afro-Americans to this tragedy has been to sweep the problem under the rug with talk about not washing dirty linen in public. As the legal scholar Emma Coleman Jordan caustically observes: "The 'dirty linen' charge has special irony because it depends upon an absolute prohibition against violating the pseudo-intrafamilial expectation of private conversations about sensitive matters. But this dysfunctional pseudo-family doesn't talk about the taboo subject in private either."
From time to time, however, the issue bursts on the scene in sudden gusts of very angry talk usually stimulated by some artistic or literary event. The debates surrounding Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, Michele Wallace's book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, the movie version of Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, and, more recently, Terry Macmillan's novel Waiting to Exhale are a few examples. A growing number of Afro-American feminists have begun to find the celebration of the "black family" and especially "black motherhood" a little bogus, especially coming from Afro-American men. "Far too many black men who praise their own mothers," writes Patricia Hill Collins, "feel less accounted to the mothers of their own children." She is equally acerbic in her views on the "love and trouble" tradition of Afro-American gender relations.
A small but growing number of academic works have also documented various aspects of the problem. In a study of 256 mainly working- and lower-middle-class Afro-American students at Temple University, Noel Cazenave and Rita Smith asked respondents for their views on Michele Wallace's assertion that there was "distrust, even hatred, between black men and women." Only 34 percent of the men, and 26 percent of the women, disagreed with this statement. What is more, the majority of respondents, men and women, agreed that "black women seem to have many more opportunities than black men." And Castellano Turner and Barbara Turner, in their study of Afro-American evaluations of future marital relations, found that most Afro-American women considered "most men" less responsible, reliable, trustworthy, and happy. While most Afro-American men considered Afro-American women "trustworthy," the researchers were forced to conclude that "black females' views of relationships with black men were laced with the anticipation of disappointment." I will have much more to say on this later.
This andecdotal and limited survey evidence has recently been buttressed by some remarkable results coming from the national sample of the 1996 General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago. The survey that year probed the frequency and degree to which Americans experienced feelings of anger toward persons at work and in their families. Asked if they had felt "really angry" about something that happened at work within the past months, only 23 percent of Afro-American women answered in the affirmative, compared with 35 percent of Afro-American men, 37 percent of Euro-American women and 43 percent of Euro-American men. However, when people were asked if they had felt "really angry" with someone in their family during this period the ethnic and gender responses went in the opposite direction. Afro-American women were the sub-group with the highest percentage of persons who had gotten really angry (46.4%), in contrast with Afro-American men (28.6%), Euro-American women (38%), and Euro-American men (18%). Not only did Afro-American women get angry more often with a family member than other groups of persons but the anger lasted longer among them than others. Nearly 40 percent said that they felt angry either continuously or for several days, compared with a third of Euro-American women and 24 percent of the men of both ethnic groups. Furthermore, over two-thirds of Afro-American women said they had refused to accept the situation that had occasioned their anger, again in sharp contrast not only with Euro-American women, half of whom said they had been prepared to accept it, but with Afro-American and Euro-American men, who differed little from each other: 54 and 55 percent respectively said they were prepared to accept it and carry on.
Why is home the site of such anger for Afro-American women, in striking contrast with their relative calmness at work? The answer, according to the survey, is clearly the "love and trouble" tradition that beset intimate relationships among Afro-Americans. Asked how much they liked or disliked the person or people who made them angry or annoyed, 44 percent of Afro-American women responded that they liked the person in question "a great deal," compared with 36 percent of Euro-American women and 20 percent of Euro-American men. Interestingly, almost exactly the same percent of Afro-American men (43) claimed that they liked the person who made them angry "a great deal." So while they did not get angry as often and intensely as Afro-American women, when they did get angry it was as frequently with a loved one. These results rather strongly suggest that Afro-American men are the source of the trouble since the relative calmness of Afro-American women at work indicates that they are less prone to get annoyed. Whoever the source of the trouble, the facts are that Afro-Americans of both genders are getting angry with loved ones to a far greater degree than other people, and women are 62 percent more likely to be the ones feeling the pain.
Sadly, the survey also indicated that there was little chance of resolving the sources of conflict eliciting the experience of anger since, to an unusual degree, Afro-American men and women were likely to blame each other fully for the problem. In a follow-up question, people were asked how responsible was the person they were angry at for the problem causing their anger. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning that the other person was in no way responsible and 10 that they were "completely responsible," only 43 percent of Euro-American men and 47 percent of Euro-American women claimed that the other person was fully responsible for getting them angry. In other words, a substantial majority of Euro-Americans allowed for a range of joint levels of responsibility for the problem causing the anger even though, as might be expected, most attributed more blame to the other person. The Afro-American responses, however, were strikingly different from Euro-Americans and other ethnic groups. Fully 64 percent of men and women insisted that the other person was completely responsible for the problem leading to their anger. Interestingly, when the question was turned around and people were asked how responsible they were for the problem generating anger, two-thirds of Afro-American women insisted that they were in no way to be blamed (giving themselves a score of zero on the responsibility scale) while somewhat fewer Afro-American men claimed that they were completely blameless (46 percent scoring themselves zero). There is little hope for compromise here. The problems that lie behind all this anger and lack of compromise and their tragic consequences in terms of marital and relational disruption will be examined at some length later in this essay.
Two aspects of the gender crisis must be distinguished: the external problems, or those that Afro-American men and women face in their relations with Euro-Americans, the majority ethnic group; and the internal gender problems that arise in their relations with each other. Both men and women have had to cope over the centuries with negative ethnic stereotyping of their respective genders. The external Euro-American environment has also created peculiar obstacles and provided different opportunities for Afro-Americans based partly on their gender.
One of my main arguments is that in recent decades the external gender environment has grown somewhat better for Afro-American women while it has stagnated for Afro-American men; at the same time, the internal gender environment--that between Afro-American men and women--has grown markedly worse for Afro-American women, partly resulting from the conservatism of certain domains of Afro-American male gender attitudes but also partly the result of the very improvement in their external gender environment.
This essay is divided into nine parts. In the next section I delineate the external gender environment of Afro-Americans, focusing on the growing disparity in the educational and economic performance of men and women and its troubling demographic and social consequences. Part two identifies the origin of the problem in the socio-cultural depredations of slavery, contra the prevailing school of revisionist historians of slavery, and the third part traces its continuation and consolidation through the Jim Crow era. In the fourth part I move to a detailed statistical analysis of the problems of marriage, cohabitation and divorce based on the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS) and U.S. census data. Part five explores current Afro-American gender attitudes and ideologies in relation to those of other Americans, drawing mainly on the 1997 Harvard University School of Public Health/Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation (HWPK) survey. Next I examine the sexual practices and related intimate relations of Afro-Americans, the first such detailed analysis of Afro-American sexual behavior based on data from a national sample, the NHSLS. Part seven searches, in admittedly speculative ways, for the proximate sources of the problems previously discussed in the broader familial and socio-cultural contexts of Afro-American life, drawing freely on available anthropological, psychological, and sociological accounts. The eighth part of the essay focuses on the two major consequences of Afro-Americans' low marriage rate: their internal isolation from each other and their external isolation from other groups of Americans. I strongly question the conventional view that Afro-Americans have well-developed informal networks among themselves based on extended kin ties and close friendships in their neighborhoods by examining the most important body of data, drawn from a national sample on this subject, namely the General Social Survey on network ties conducted in 1985. I then examine what I call the external isolation of Afro-Americans by analyzing available census data on inter-ethnic marriages. The essay closes with a reprise of the main themes and arguments and a brief indication of what is required to solve the problem.
The External Gender Environment:
Aspects of the Double Burden
Afro-American women writers and leaders have long claimed that they share a double burden, being victims of both their gender and their ethnicity. This sociological trope originated in the middle of the nineteenth century with the ex-slave writer Harriet A. Jacobs when she wrote of Afro-American women in general: "Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own." In today's terms, added to the burden of racism is the "double jeopardy" of mainstream gender discrimination. All this is well taken.
My only problem with this view is the assumption that it applies exclusively to Afro-American women. It was always the case in America that "superadded" to the burden of being a male slave or a male laborer was the burden of the assault on Afro-American men's integrity and identity as men. As we will see in the next essay, racist oppressors were virulently obsessed with the maleness of the Afro-American male and brutally sought to extinguish any hint of manhood in him.
With the remarkable changes in the attitudes of Euro-Americans and the condition of Afro-Americans over recent decades, the situation has now become rather more complex. When we examine the facts carefully, we find that Afro-American men are now, by many indicators, the gender at greater risk among Afro-Americans, while by others Afro-American women clearly continue to bear the greater burden. These factors affect the lives of Afro-Americans separately and interactively in complex ways. We must attempt to sort them out prior to our examination of the history and present internal problems of gender relations between Afro-American men and women.
There can be no denying what has been called the feminization of poverty for a large minority of Afro-American women. As Figure 1.1 shows, in both individual and familial terms, women of all ethnic groups experience higher levels of poverty than men. As is well known, households headed by single women, which now constitute the single largest category among Afro-Americans, are at high risk of poverty compared with other kinds of households: 46.4 and 53.5 percent for Afro-American and Latino ethnicities, respectively. There is no doubt that there is a gender burden here, but whether an added "racial" burden can be claimed is questionable.
As I argued in The Ordeal of Integration, while "race" is obviously the decisive factor in explaining the origins of the acute problems of the Afro-American poor, it is not at all clear that it has much to do with explaining contemporary poverty levels among either men or women. Latinos were never enslaved here; the majority of them are of European ancestry; and a substantial minority descended from slaveholders--uncomfortable facts too often glossed over in multicultural rhetoric--yet, as Figure 1.1 shows, their poverty levels are higher than Afro-Americans'.
What about the majority of Afro-American women, who are not poor? In terms of equal pay for equal work and qualifications, how do they fare in the labor market when compared with men and Euro-American women? This is a complex issue. In most respects Afro-American women share with their Euro-American counterparts a persistent burden of gender prejudice. In one or two areas there is also an ethnic discrepancy. However, in most respects there is little evidence of a double burden of gender and ethnic prejudice. When current trends are projected, there is every reason to believe that Afro-American women will soon surpass Afro-American men in median income. Indeed, when we take account not just of median income but of the numbers and proportions of Afro-American women in desirable occupations, it is already the case that they have outperformed Afro-American men in absolute terms and Euro-American women in relative terms.
Figure 1.2 shows an unambiguous pattern of gender discrepancy in annual earnings for both groups of women at every educational level. This, of course, is not necessarily proof of gender prejudice; much depends on the work histories, as well as the occupational and industrial locations, of men and women. However, there is now good reason to believe that even after controlling for these factors, substantial gender discrepancies remain between the earnings of equally educated full-time working men and women.
We see also that for each educational level there is a discrepancy between the earnings of Afro-American and Euro-American women, albeit much smaller than the gender discrepancy for either group. Figure 1.3 recalculates, in terms of income ratios, the absolute figures given in Figure 1.2. Is this evidence of a double burden? Seen in static terms, the answer is "yes." But the discrepancy between the incomes of the two women's groups is largely a reflection of past ethnic prejudices in favor of Euro-American women, especially at the higher educational levels. The proportion of Euro-American women with college degrees who are now at or near their maximum earning capacity is much larger than that of Afro-American women. The impressive growth in the numbers and proportions of Afro-American women with "some college" or "bachelor's degree or more" levels of education, discussed below, is a post-1970 phenomenon. In fact, young Afro-American female college graduates now earn more than their Euro-American counterparts.
Comparing the economic returns to women of different groups is difficult because of important differences in their economic activities. Thus, Afro-American women have traditionally had higher labor-force participation rates, but higher unemployment rates, than Euro-American women; they work more hours per week but roughly the same number of hours per year. A lot depends on what measures one uses to make comparisons between the two groups. Using mean, rather than median, earnings, one can show that there is no remaining gap. Emphasizing income rather than earnings reveals persisting ethnic differences. On yet another measure, estimated lifetime earnings, the gap has nearly vanished. On the whole, it is safe to say that ethnic differences in the economic experiences of Afro-American and Euro-American women have either disappeared or are on the verge of becoming insignificant. Afro-American women continue to suffer serious gender biases in the economy, but they suffer them equally with Euro-American women. Appearances to the contrary, there is no double burden of race and gender in economic matters.
Life, however, is a great deal more than economic activity. When we compare the life-chances and actual experience of Afro-American men and women in recent years, we are forced to question the conventional wisdom that Afro-American women are somehow more destructively burdened by the system than their male counterparts. It cannot be denied that when it comes to evaluating life's burdens, vital statistics are the ultimate tests. How long we live, the rate at which we can expect to die at given years of life, and the rate of survival--all are bottom-line assessments of just how well or badly a given group is doing in relation to others. On every one of these indicators, Afro-American men are not only far behind their Euro-American counterparts but also significantly worse off than Afro-American women. In contrast, Afro-American women not only have far better life-chances than Afro-American and Euro-American men but are fast catching up with Euro-American women on most indicators, and in a few cases are doing better.
Thus, as Figure 1.4 shows, in 1994 (the most recent data available), Afro-American male life expectancy at birth was 64.9 years, which was 8.4 years less than for Euro-American men, 9 years less than for Afro-American women, and 14.7 years less than for Euro-American women. This figure is not only shocking for an advanced industrial society, it is, in fact, significantly lower than that for men of several Third World societies such as Cuba and the Afro-Caribbean states of Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad--all with populations that originated in exactly the same regions of West Africa, and with almost identical Afro-European levels of miscegenation, as Afro-Americans. Furthermore, while this vital rate has been improving over the years for all other groups in the United States, it has remained flat for Afro-American men since 1985 (see Figure 1.5).
Equally distressing are the differences in expected death rates per year. For every 1,000 live male Afro-American births in 1990, almost 20 were expected to die by 1991, compared with 16 Afro-American females, between 8 and 9 Euro-American males, and between 6 and 7 Euro-American females. At age twenty the differences are even greater; 3.8 times as many Afro-American men as Afro-American women could expect to die within the year. A major factor contributing to both the low life-expectancy rates and the high death rates is the much higher rate of death from violence and accidents among Afro-American men. Frequent public commentary has tended to focus attention on violence among youth, but as Figure 1.6 demonstrates, Afro-American men die from violent and accidental causes at disproportionately greater levels throughout all age categories. Note, in contrast, that the gap between Euro-American and Afro-American women is negligible for most age groups and virtually disappears after age sixty-five.
Among the causes of death, suicide is often singled out as especially indicative of social anomie and despair, and there has been anguished recent commentary on the growing rate among young Afro-American men. However, suicide rates, as all sociologists know from one of the discipline's founding fathers, are complex and must be treated with great caution. In nearly all Western societies, more prosperous classes have tended to experience higher suicide rates than less prosperous ones. Because they have less to lose and make fewer demands on themselves, poorer people tend to experience catastrophic feelings of failure and despair less often. Partly for this reason too, men have typically experienced much higher rates than women. Nonetheless, even after taking all these factors into account, the suicide rate for Afro-American men is unusually high. Figure 1.7 shows that in 1994 the Euro-American male rate was 4.3 times that for Euro-American females, while Afro-American men committed suicide at 6.2 times the rate at which Afro-American women did. What is more, Afro-American men are the only group for whom the rate is rising steadily. As dismal as these figures are, it is likely that the situation is actually much worse, not only because of underreporting for Afro-American youth, which according to J. T. Gibbs and A. M. Hines may be as high as 82 per 100,000, but because of the masking effect of what R. H. Seiden calls "victim precipitated" homicide, in which young Afro-American men commit suicide the "macho" way by inciting violence against themselves. The gender difference, according to specialists on the subject, stems from the much greater involvement of women with institutions in the Afro-American community, such as church organizations, other support networks, and remaining kin ties. Indeed, the suicide rate for Afro-American women is among the lowest in the nation.
Beyond these vital statistics, we find that in almost every area of educational and skills acquisition Afro-American women are far outperforming Afro-American men. It is well known that females do better than males in the primary, secondary, and, more recently, undergraduate levels of the educational system. However, the gender differences between Afro-American men and women now bear little comparison with those in other groups. Between 1977 and 1995, Afro-American women almost doubled the gender gap in bachelor's degrees conferred, from 12,300 to 23,600 (see Figure 1.8). In all other ethnic groups, women have been catching up with, and surpassing, men in the acquisition of bachelor's degrees since about the early eighties. Afro-American women had passed this milestone years earlier and simply widened the gap with the enhanced opportunities that came with the seventies.
There are many other respects in which the Afro-American gender differences in education depart from those of other ethnic groups. Thus, Afro-Americans are the only ethnic group in which women outperform men in most of the hard sciences, especially physics, math, and computer science; engineering is an exception, but Afro-American women are fast catching up. Of even greater significance for the future gender composition of the Afro-American middle class is the unusual trend in the acquisition of first professional degrees. In 1977 Afro-American men received twice as many professional degrees as women (see Figure 1.9). A decade later, women took the lead, and since then the gap has been widening substantially each year. Figure 1.10 indicates that this trend is unique among ethnic groups. With the exception of Asian Americans in the legal profession, where both genders are near parity, only among Afro-Americans do we find men substantially below parity in the fields of medicine, dentistry, law, and business.
The same trends hold for the acquisition of doctorates between 1977 and 1995. Afro-American women are at the head of a trend toward gender parity in the attainment of doctorates. Their situation is unique in two respects. First, in 1987 they became the first women to outperform the men of their group in achieving doctorates. Second, the Afro-American gender gap comes not only from women gaining more doctorates but, as Figure 1.11 shows, from men gaining fewer such advanced degrees. Between 1977 and 1987 there was a 37 percent fall in the number of Afro-American men gaining doctorates, a disastrous decline from which Afro-American men are yet to recover fully; in 1995 they still obtained 35 fewer doctorates than they did in 1977.
How do we explain all this? Why are the fortunes of Afro-American men declining so precipitously while those of Afro-American women are getting better? Why, in particular, are Afro-American women now poised to assume leadership in almost all areas of the Afro-American community and to outperform Afro-American men at middle- and upper-middle-class levels of the wider society and economy? Has the double burden been eliminated for Afro-American women?
It clearly has not, but it is perhaps time to think again, more carefully, about the nature of the burdens that each gender has had to face. Being burdened, having to work harder than others, is not in itself a necessarily bad thing, as the workaholic behavior of the nation's Fortune 500 executives attests. From the days of the Puritan founders, Americans have always prided themselves on being hardworking; people have competed with each other for the privilege of being burdened with great responsibilities and with the necessity to work long hours. Some burdens, in other words, we not only welcome but consider generative and empowering.
Without in any way underplaying the enormous problems that poor Afro-American women face, I want to suggest that the burdens of poor Afro-American men have always been oppressive, dispiriting, demoralizing, isolating, and soul killing, whereas those of women, while physically and emotionally no doubt as great, have always also been at least partly generative, empowering, and humanizing. Furthermore, as I will document later, the experience of Afro-American women during both the past and the present has nearly always entailed their incorporation into the norms, values, and work habits of the dominant culture, while the experience of Afro-American men has been until recently one of unmitigated exclusion.
Take, first, the role of mother. As Patricia Hill Collins correctly observes: "Some women view motherhood as a truly burdensome condition that stifles creativity, exploits their labor, and makes them partners in their own oppression. Others see motherhood as providing a base for self-actualization, status in the Black community, and a catalyst for social activism." One of the great tragedies of Afro-American men was that for the great majority of them, for most of their history, fatherhood was rarely a "base for self-actualization." Indeed, to the degree that slavery, and later racial discrimination in the employment sector, prevented them from meeting their material obligations as providers, and to the degree that their own inner failings and distorted masculine values (on which more later) prevented them from meeting their social and emotional obligations to their offspring, to that extent was fatherhood a site of shame and humiliation.
Second, even under slavery and Jim Crow, the Afro-American woman, in her roles as domestic, nanny, nurse, and clerk, has always had greater access to the wider, dominant Euro-American world. As Fran Sanders has written, with little exaggeration, "For two hundred years it was she who initiated the dialogue between the white world and the African American." Today, Afro-American scholars and intellectuals are inclined to speak contemptuously about the job of domestic, but it is clearly wrong to project such attitudes onto the past. In spite of its unpleasant association with slavery and the often exploitative terms of employment, what Afro-American and Euro-American domestics always hated was not the job itself but live-in domestic work. When done on a regular basis with civilized employers and a decent wage in both kind and money, the job was a modestly secure one in which the Afro-American woman, unlike her male counterpart in the fields or factories, to quote Jacqueline Jones, "wielded an informal power that directly affected the basic human services provided within the white households."
Domestic and other employment in the service sector also brought the Afro-American woman into direct contact with the most intimate areas of the dominant culture. This intimacy was sometimes deepened by another factor peculiar to women: that in America, as in most human societies, women of different statuses and ethnic groups can and often do establish close relationships, where men so separated cannot or will not. The knowledge thus acquired was valuable cultural capital, a point explicitly stated by many of the domestics interviewed by Bonnie Thornton Dill; these women "saw work as an ability rather than a burden. Work was a means for attaining [their] goals; it provided [them] with the money [they] needed to be an independent person, and it exposed [them] and [their] children to 'good' things--values and a style of life which [they] considered important."
It has been suggested that this cultural capital was selectively transmitted only to daughters and not to sons, for reasons that were complex but may have had to do with the differing realistic expectations Afro-American mothers had of their daughters and sons in light of the dominant labor market and its gender and ethnic biases. The less successful daughter could be expected to pursue a job as a domestic; the more successful daughter, to become a schoolteacher or nurse. In both cases, the cultural skills acquired from the dominant culture would be an asset. No such transmissions were considered important for lower-class boys, who had few prospects beyond manual work. Some ethnographic and psychological studies suggest that this pattern continues today among the lower classes. However, the most recent survey data I have analyzed indicate that, at least in expressed attitudes, this is no longer the case. When asked in the HWPK survey conducted in the fall of 1997 whether parents should have different expectations for boys and girls, the great majority of Afro-Americans responded that parents should have the same expectations. Men did respond positively to this question nearly twice as often as women (22 percent versus 11.8 percent), but the difference was not statistically significant in this sample. However, the question whether boys and girls should be raised differently yielded a significant difference in responses according to income group. A third of the poorest Afro-Americans thought they should be raised differently, while nearly all better off Afro-Americans thought they should be raised alike. The responses of the poorest Afro-Americans may well be a vestige of a time, not so long ago, when all Afro-American parents raised boys and girls with different sets of expectations.
The attitudes and prejudices of the dominant group have also played an important role in generating gender disparities among Afro-Americans. Euro-Americans have always been more willing to accept Afro-American women than Afro-American men. Greater fear of Afro-American men, induced by racist sexual attitudes, and greater familiarity with Afro-American women in the course of growing up made it much easier for Afro-American women to find jobs in clerical, and later in professional, Euro-American settings.
There is good evidence that these attitudes and expectations persist toward all classes of Afro-Americans. The economist Harry J. Holzer recently documented a marked preference for Afro-American women over Afro-American men among suburban and inner-city employers. This preference is most striking where noncollege jobs require cognitive-interactive skills. The difference in employment cannot be explained solely in terms of qualifications (although this is indeed a factor) because less skilled and educated Afro-American women and Latino men are persistently placed ahead of Afro-American men in urban job queues. In middle-class occupations this preference may well be interacting with affirmative action to reinforce the traditional bias in favor of Afro-American women. It is not simply that firms under pressure to meet affirmative action guidelines can achieve both gender and ethnic targets when they employ Afro-American women. Even more important, it has been found that in the professional and corporate world the intersection of "race" and gender benefits Afro-American career women, when compared not only with Afro-American men but with Euro-American women. Corporate Euro-American men are less inclined to view Afro-American women as sex objects, as women "out to get a husband," and are therefore more inclined to take them seriously as fellow professionals. The highly successful Afro-American women interviewed by sociologist Cynthia Epstein in the early 1970s almost all agreed that being female "reduced the effect of the racial taboo" against Afro-Americans in corporate positions and that the combination of being Afro-American, female, and educated created a unique social space for them, enhancing their self-confidence and motivation.
In the quarter of a century since Epstein's study, Afro-American women have expanded that social space impressively, in the process not only catching up with Euro-American women in many important areas but numerically surpassing Afro-American men in all the top occupational categories (see Figure 1.12). Among executive, administrative, and managerial workers, there are now 127 Afro-American women for every 100 Afro-American men; among professionals, 151 for every 100. By way of contrast, there are, respectively, only 64 and 85 Euro-American women for every 100 Euro-American men in these two categories of occupations.
From what has been said, it should now be clear that the claim that Afro-American women peculiarly and uniquely suffer a double burden in this society both misleads and obscures the realities of the Afro-American condition. For some Afro-American women, especially among the poor, the assertion is correct; but it is equally true that for an equally substantial minority of Afro-American men, a similar double burden can be claimed. As we have seen, the intersection of ethnicity and gender has deadly consequences for a large and growing minority of lower-class Afro-American men, reflected in the Third World levels of their vital statistics. Afro-American women, like their Euro-American counterparts, suffer serious gender discrimination. But, ironically, when gender and ethnicity interact, this sometimes works to the benefit of Afro-American women, especially those of the middle classes, as their increasing outperformance of Afro-American men in higher learning, white collar occupations, and the professions attests.
But as I suggested earlier, the very success of Afro-American women in the wider world exacerbates what is their greater gender problem--that between them and Afro-American males in all their sex roles and at all periods of the lifespan. Parts four to six will explore these internal problems at some length. However, before doing so I wish to step back in time in order to locate the crucible of the crisis during the holocaust of slavery and to excavate its historical lineaments through the neo-slavery of Jim Crow and Northern racial segregation, a period that began in 1617 and came to an end only in the middle of this century.
(Continues ...)
Continues...
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