What happens when you are seen not heard. During the information Age black women can be seen around the world, but are voices are seldom heard. In television and movies, most of the scripts are not written by black women. Black women who appear in music videos rarely have control over what they wear, or how they appear. The consequence, black women do not have any control, therefore they have no power. In the words of Hortense Spiller, a literary critic, Black women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb(171).
After reading Evelynn M. Hammonds Toward a Geneality of Black Female Sexuality: The Problem of science, I thought of all the different archetypes that represent black women today. The Jezebel, the Mammy, and the Saphire all stereotypes derived from slavery. Along with the practice of scientific racism, i.e Sara Baartman, limiting the scope of what black women are, was one of the many methods in an attempt to dehumanize black women. Today, we have expanded the list of archetypes to include the welfare queen, the Bitch, and anything that connotes anger.
Why is this a problem. What harm do archetypes and silence cause? Individually, I know who I am and what type of individual I am. This was my original thought process before starting the women's studies major. Patricia Williams articulates the concrete reason this is an epidemic. It is an issue of a perceived appearance dictating a false reality. One page 170, she speaks on how her otherness reflects through her student's attitudes. We need to break silence so we can for the first time shout out to the world and announce who we are.
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Silence is a huge issue in the African-American community. It is as if we think that by keeping quiet, the world will forget the stereotypes that revolve around us. WE NEED TO WAKE UP because that will NEVER happen. If there is something we are offended by or are in disagreement with it is our responsibility to not just the black community but ourselves to speak up and speak out about it. If no one brings up any of the issues that concern us we can not expect any of our problems to be solved or even acknowledged. Ignorance is a disease that EVERYONE posesses in some facet of their life. The only way to irradicate this disease is to provide the medicine of knowledge. Silence, as the orginial author of this blog stated is definitly a problem!
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