Black women


Black women are women who are of Sub-Saharan African and Afro-diasporic descent. The term black women is both a multi-faceted cultural identity and a social construct with different meanings in different places.

Black internationalism

Ideas of black internationalism have expanded since the 1920s. Blain and Gill define it as "a global political, intellectual, and artistic movement of African-descended people engaged in a collective struggle to overthrow global white supremacy in its many forms". Black women have played a major role in numerous countries.

United States

Black women in popular culture

Notable black women in US popular culture include, but are not limited to, the following:

US Politics

Black women in US political history include, but are not limited to, the following:
Black slaves, many of whom were women, were often abused by their owners and other white people. This abuse extended beyond the physical and psychological abuse directly related to how slaves were treated, and include the exploitation of black women slaves in order to advance different scientific practices and techniques. Black female slaves were sexually abused by White men and were forced to breed with their White male slave masters to bear mulatto children to maintain White supremacy, have more slaves to pick cotton and produce superior slaves in the South. Black female slaves received the same treatment in Brazil, Hispanic America and the Caribbean. However, rape of white women was prevented and feared.

[Intersectionality]

developed the theory of intersectionality, which highlighted the overlapping discrimination faced by Black women in the United States. The theory has been influential in the fields of feminism and Critical Race Theory as a methodology for interpreting the ways in which overlapping social identities relate to systems of oppression.

Increased risk for health problems

Black women are often at a higher risk to contract these diseases than white women, but they also are at a higher risk to die from them as well. According to the American Cancer Society, the death rate for all cancers for black women is 14% higher than that of white women. While the probability of being diagnosed with cancer in black women is 1 in 3, the chance of dying from cancer is 1 in 5. Cancer is not the only disease that disproportionately affects African American women. Lupus is 2-3 times more common in women of color, but more specifically 1 in every 537 black women will have lupus. Black women are also at a higher chance of being overweight thus making them open to more obesity-related diseases. There is also a racial disparity when it comes to pregnancy related deaths. While there are 12.4 deaths for every 100,000 births for white women, the statistics for black women is 40.0 deaths for every 100,000 births. In a 2007 US study of five medical complications that are common causes of maternal death and injury, black women were two to three times more likely to die than white women who had the same condition. The World Health Organization in 2014 estimated that black expectant and new mothers in the United States die at about the same rate as women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan. A 2018 study found that "The sexual and reproductive health of African American women has been compromised due to multiple experiences of racism, including discriminatory healthcare practices from slavery through the post-Civil Rights era." Another 2018 study found that darker skin tones were underrepresented in medical textbook imagery and that these ommissions "may provide one route through which bias enters medical treatment".

Famous leaders

Some of the most important artistic and political leaders in history have been black women. For instance, Queen Qalhata and Candace of Meroe are important, early African queens. In the United States, Toni Morrison was the first black woman Nobel laureate. Shirley Chisholm was an important Democratic candidate for U.S. President in the 1970s. In Africa, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf served as President of Liberia for 12 years.

Caribbean society

Jennifer Palmer argues that in the plantation world of the colonial Caribbean, women of color Were typically treated as property owned by white men. In the French islands, race and gender shape popular Assumptions about who could own property. However there were legal loopholes that sometimes opened up windows of opportunity for women of color to be landowners.

Africa

The 2003 Maputo Protocol on women's rights in Africa set the continental standard for progressive expansion of women's rights. It guarantees comprehensive rights to women including the right to take part in the political process, to social and political equality with men, improved autonomy in their reproductive health decisions, and an end to female genital mutilation.

Ghana

Women play a modest role in Ghana's two major political parties: NDC and NPP – as well as the small party CPP. The first president, Kwame Nkrumah made Ghana the first African nation to introduce a quota in 1959, reserving ten seats for women in Parliament. Ghana has recently been laggard, however, with a representation of 11% women after the election in 2012 and 13% after the election in 2016.